Happy Commonwealth Day

The only purpose of the Commonwealth is to hold the Commonwealth Games. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. But there is nothing more to it than that, either. 

You do not ever have to have been part of the British Empire in order to be in it. You do not in principle have to be in it in order to have the Queen as Head of State. 

Wars between its members, even with the Queen as Head of State on both sides, are far from unheard of. It has never been a single trading bloc. 

As for "the Anglosphere", let's not even get started. Purportedly Tory Anglospherists should consider very carefully that by far the hardest place to sell the idea would be Canada. 

The culturally Anglophile Indian elite of the immediate pro-independence decades was never representative, and it is now a thing of the past. For all its love of Wodehouse, it largely supported the Soviet Union in matters of international politics, anyway. 

But then, the equally unrepresentative Anglophile elite that used to exist in the United States was also far from pro-British, even though, unlike much of its general population, it had ancestral ties to this country.

Similarly, consider well over a hundred years' worth of anti-British protectionist politicians on the monarchist Australian Right (legendarily the hardest people with whom British Ministers ever have to negotiate) at least as much as on the Left. 

Or consider the Canadians, who banned the acceptance of British peerages and honours in 1919, who enforced that against Conrad Black in 2001 and thus required him to relinquish his native Canadian citizenship, and who waited a full week after Britain had done so before declaring war on Germany in 1939.

The New Right used to despise the Commonwealth. Powellites had principled objections, while Thatcherites regarded it as a nest of those who failed to show due deference to the Great She-Elephant. One shudders to think what Powell would have made of "the Anglosphere". 

Powell's, actually quite nuanced, opposition to immigration was wholly incompatible with his economic views. But they were wholly in keeping with his anti-Commonwealth ones.

The only purpose of the Commonwealth is to hold the Commonwealth Games. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. But there is nothing more to it than that, either.