The Globe Is Our Sphere

Those funny "Anglosphere" people are at it again. Yet not only does every city, town and village now bear some degree of witness to Britain's ties to every inhabited territory on the planet, but the countries of the EU have more recent formal connections to Britain than those of the Commonwealth have.

Most of the victims of the Windrush scandal came from Commonwealth Realms, and most or all of those victims came from Commonwealth countries. India and Pakistan were both Dominions when they first went to war over Kashmir. And no fewer than six Commonwealth Realms invaded the Commonwealth Realm of Grenada in 1983. Under American leadership. Britain had not been informed.

Of course those are not the countries that are meant. But already one in 20 people in Australia is ethnically Chinese, and China buys one third of Australia's exports. Similar things may now be said about Canada and New Zealand. 1950s fantasists are precisely that. And that is before we start on their hallucinations about the United States.

Speaking of China, though, they have at least decided to confer Honorary White status on a section of the population of Hong Kong. That recalls its conferral on Japanese, Taiwanese and South Koreans by apartheid South Africa. But it blows out of the water any definition of the Anglosphere either as speaking English to any greater extent than the world does, or as ever having been in any way free.

Still, the Founding Fathers were not wrong about everything. Just as Brexit is the opportunity to adopt something like the American School as expanded by the American System, to the enormous benefit of the areas that cast the decisive votes for Brexit, so Global Britain must have "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none," since, "It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world."

Such is already the composition of the population of every part of this country, that any such entanglement would be a denial, not only of national sovereignty, but also of equal citizenship.