Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [127]
flags, anthems and talk of national destiny. The war had touched every family in the land, and the minority who took an interest in international matters hung their hopes on different ideas of internationalism, in co-operative organizations like the League of Nations. The milk-and-water ideas of a Commonwealth might have better suited the mood of the times, but for the fact that the empire plainly still existed. Increasingly, it was the anti-imperialists who were the romantic figures. In September 1931, when the leader of the Indian independence movement, Mohandas Gandhi, took himself to Lancashire to see the effects of the boycott he had led of British-made cotton goods, even the mill-workers who had lost their jobs because of his actions turned out to cheer him. Of course he was quite as wily as any other politician. But given a choice between the ascetic campaigner in homespun cotton dhoti and Lord Willingdon, the much ornamented British Viceroy at the time (who ordered Gandhi’s arrest after his return to India), it was no contest.* Empire Day still continued to roll around every year and the assiduous head teacher could borrow films and slideshows and gather pupils around a radio to listen to improving broadcasts about what was being done in their name. The children’s reward was a half-day holiday. The BBC dutifully loyally churned out talks about the empire (and every Christmas hired actors like Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud to present more programmes slavishly celebrating it).† But the noisier the loudspeakers of officialdom, the more reverberant the empty echo. In the summer of 1938 a stuttering King George VI opened another Empire Exhibition, this time at Bellahouston Park in Glasgow. Pavilions of engineering and industry appeared again, and imperial produce was proudly displayed. But the weather was worse than usual and an Empire Exhibition Trophy football competition and much promotion of west Scotland manufacturing signally failed to catch the imagination. The official show was also matched by a Workers’ Exhibition in the inner city, which set out to undermine the entire imperial project. The Empire Exhibition might display the products of empire, said one of the organizers, but ‘at the Workers’ Exhibition you will see what it has cost in human blood and sweat and exploitation to turn out these products’. The empire was a capitalist racket designed to exploit workers across the world, and the only beneficiaries were to be found among the board members and shareholders of private enterprise.
The protest exhibition attracted only a fraction of the visitors drawn to the official show. But it attested to the growing current of opinion which was not merely indifferent to empire but actively hostile to it. Imperial expansion had been the product of an age before proper democracy. It could not survive universal suffrage and the development of class politics. Unless they were willing to resort to racism (and mostly they were not) political leaders on the left could not reconcile possession of an empire with claims to represent ordinary people: where was the difference between the rights of workers at home and the rights of workers abroad? Anyway, the parties they led and the people they represented were more concerned with improving living and working conditions at home than with duties abroad. Empire-building belonged to history: they were concerned with the future.
Attempts to re-engage the public with the imperial project through events like Empire Day lingered, but proved no rival for football, the seaside or a day at the races. The next big exhibition in the imperial capital, the 1951 Festival of Britain, would be a much more distinctly chauvinistic production, the country’s present and former overseas possessions getting a look-in only through exciting exhibits like ‘minerals from the Commonwealth’.*
It was the Second World War which really sank the empire. As in the First War, a conflict with strictly European origins drew in races from all over the globe – Australian pilots flew in the Battle of Britain,