Anglosphere Armistice

I was going to do this tomorrow, but since it has come up.

Notice how, while some people would like the United Kingdom to boycott the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Sri Lanka, no one cares awfully much whether or not we turn up.

It matters that Canada is not going. It matters that India is not going. But it matters hardly at all whether or not Britain is going. To the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

The ties between Liam Fox and the Sri Lankan regime require the most urgent investigation. He dares to suggest that The Guardian be prosecuted over its intelligence revelations. Yet he was Secretary of State for Defence while having those links, and his others.

We should treat all of the rising powers of Asia with the same unbelligerent  unsentimentality. Whether or not a particular country used to be in the British Empire, in any case not a prerequisite for membership of the Commonwealth, is neither here nor there.

The same will be true, and already is to an ever-increasing extent, of the rising powers of Africa. The rising powers of Latin America never were in the British Empire in any formal sense, although there is a long history of heavy British influence there. But, again, unbelligerent  unsentimentality is in order.

As it is towards the United States. There is no "Anglosphere". Australia, for example, is culturally and politically more like America, and not at all like Britain, having been set up by people who could not possibly have moved far enough away from this country.

A homeland for the Southern English working class, where it could be as brash as it liked and did not even have to modify its accent in order to rule at every social and political level. It was soon joined by a heavy Irish Republican element. Between them, they defined what it was and is to be Australian. But even they,  together, have now been a minority of the population for decades.

Canada did not declare war in September 1939, her first ever such declaration independently of Britain, until a full seven days after the United Kingdom had done so. Even before that, the rate of volunteers in the First World War, which very much made Canada as a self-conscious nation, had been exactly the same among those English-speaking Canadians who had been born in Canada rather than in the United Kingdom as it had been among French Canadians.

That does give some context to the increasing ubiquity of the poppy in the Irish Republic, and to Enda Kenny's wreath-laying in Enniskillen on Sunday, and to Máirtín Ó Muilleoir's presence at today's Armistice Day event in Belfast. They represent people whose record in each and both of the World Wars was at least comparable to anyone else's.

The Commonwealth, of which the Irish Republic ought to be part and doubtless soon will be, is a social and cultural institution. It has not been a military alliance in the post-War period, and the basis on which it was one during and before the War is unrecognisable from its character during almost, if almost, the whole of the period since 1945.

Two of its members went to war with each other as early as 1947, when, in King George VI, they both had the same Head of State. Six of its members, five of them headed by the Queen, invaded another one, also headed by the Queen, under American command in 1983.

The Commonwealth never was much of a trading bloc; there were always huge exceptions to things like Commonwealth Preference, with Australia always particularly protectionist. Any aspiration in that direction ended with British accession to the European Communities. 40 years ago. By and under the Conservatives.

And it has not stood still in the intervening period. Those who used to want the United Kingdom to withdraw from it, but who now see it as some kind of alternative to the EU, are living in the most extraordinary fantasy world, in which India, or Canada, or Australia, or any of a host of other countries might be even vaguely interested in such an arrangement.

Those countries which retain the same monarch as we have (there are other monarchs in the Commonwealth, as there always have been), do so for their own reasons, which have no bearing on us. After all, how are we affected by that decision of theirs? How were we affected when any previous Commonwealth Realm became a republic in the conventional sense? For example, Sri Lanka?

Nor is it true that those mattered hardly, if at all, to us, whereas Canada, Australia and New Zealand have essentially British cultures. Does Lynton Crosby manifest an essentially British culture? Not according to UKIP, for a start.

Australians, New Zealanders and white South Africans are also the biggest stayers-behind in this country once their visas have run out. Yet Lynton Crosby sent no un-British vans screaming "Go Home" into their centres of population in London, and they have them.

Enjoy the Commonwealth Games. Enjoy all manifestations of the Commonwealth as a social and cultural club. That is what it is. That is pretty much all that it has ever been. And that, with which there is nothing wrong and a great deal right, is all that it is ever going to be.