'This is not Crown Land'

Kate and William's Caribbean Charm Offensive and the Post-Brexit Culture Wars

Pity the heir to the British throne and his bride.  Off they jet to the Caribbean for an eight-day ‘charm offensive' to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.  They do what young (ish) ‘modern’ royals are expected to do on such occasions. They go on walkabouts and attend VIP dinners. They dance with the locals to demonstrate their ‘authenticity’ and ‘naturalness’.

They shake hands and cuddle babies. Kate wears a series of glamorous dresses, one of which reduces People magazine to something close to ecstasy (‘Kate wore a shimmering turquoise bespoke silk duchess satin gown with hand-tied bows at the shoulder from British designer Phillipa Lepley that paid tribute to her host country's flag — and gave her the ultimate Cinderella moment.’)

This is the stuff of charm offensives. While Kate cosplays Cinderella, Wills plays football.  They drop in at Trenchtown to praise Bob Marley. They beat bongo drums and sway to the tropical rhythms.

Most of all they smile - a lot - because this is what modern royals must do, knowing that photographers will be there to record their every facial tic.  But on this particular tour, fortune doesn’t smile on the royal couple, whose visit is accompanied by an eyewatering series of public relations mishaps.

First stop is Belize. Here they cancel a helicopter visit to Indian Creek village because of protests from Q’eqehi Mayan land rights campaigners in dispute with the conservation charity Flora and Fauna International, of which William is a patron.

No self-respecting heir to the throne wants to be greeted by sights like this, so you can’t blame the couple for not showing up:

In Jamaica, they have to show up. But before the royals even arrive on the island, an alliance of individuals and organisations called the Advocates Network writes an open letter calling for an apology for slavery and reparations, informing the royal couple:

We see no reason to celebrate 70 years of the ascension of your grandmother to the British throne because her leadership, and that of her predecessors, have perpetuated the greatest human rights tragedy in the history of humankind…You, who may one day lead the British Monarchy, are direct beneficiaries of the wealth accumulated by the royal family over centuries, including that stemming from the trafficking and enslavement of Africans.

That isn’t a debate that any royal visitor wants to have, no matter how modern they think they are. On touching down in Kingston, the royal couple are greeted by 350 campaigners echoing the same calls. At an audience with the Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness, the visitors are told more diplomatically but no less emphatically:

There are issues here, which are, as you would know, unresolved. But your presence gives an opportunity for those issues to be placed in context, put front and center, and to be addressed. And we’re moving. And we intend to attain, in short order, our development goals and fulfil our true ambitions and destiny as an independent, developed, prosperous country.

Further protests follow in Jamaica and in the Bahamas. During a dinner at the governor-general’s residence in Jamaica, William tries to respond to the mood by echoing his father’s ‘profound sorrow’ for the slave trade and declaring that ‘Slavery was abhorrent. It should never have happened.’

If we look back on history, we can all find things that ‘should never have happened’, but wishful thinking doesn’t help us understand our involvement in our own difficult histories and their legacies, and William’s observation did not receive a positive reception.

These troubled waters weren’t the whole story. The couple were also greeted by enthusiastic and friendly crowds. But the visit was dogged by some very ill-judged photo ops. Whose idea was it for the couple to parade in Jamaica in the same Land Rover that the Queen used in 1964? Or shake hands with children through a wire fence during a football game?

Royal visits to the Caribbean aren’t supposed to go like this. As a child growing up in Jamaica, I witnessed two of them as a spectator – the Queen Mother’s visit in 1964, and the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in 1966.

There were no protests during these visits that I can recall, and certainly no headlines like the ones that followed Kate and William’s tour this month. The world’s press almost universally dubbed the visit a ‘disaster’ and accused the royal couple of being ‘tone deaf’. 

On the Jezebel website, William was dubbed ‘dirt bag of the week’ - not an accolade that many princes strive for - as a result of a royal visit that ‘stunk of colonialism.’

The Indian Express described the visit as a ‘much-needed reality check’, in which the ‘ tone-deaf royals…seem to believe they are still in the first season of The Crown. But 2022 isn’t 1937.’

Ouch. And it isn’t even 1964 or 1966 either. The Cambridges arrived in the Caribbean at a pivotal moment in the region’s history, in which republicanism is acquiring a seemingly unstoppable momentum. Today, ‘royal visits’ are no longer greeted by rejoicing crowds, while the relationship between the British Crown and the Commonwealth is no longer what it was in the empire’s salad days. 

Empire 2.0

In the last few years, racism, colonialism, racial justice, and the legacies of empire have acquired a new political salience. This the era of Black Lives Matter, of the Windrush deportations and the ‘hostile environment’, in which you might expect royal visitors to at least have anticipated some friction and worked out a strategy for dealing with it.

To some extent, they did anticipate it, which is probably why a deportation flight to Jamaica was reportedly postponed until the visit was over.  But there doesn’t appear to have been any agreed strategy beyond the dresses and the smiles on how to respond to the protests they received.

The tone deafness that Kate and Wills displayed in the Caribbean isn’t unique to them. In 2018 Whitehall civil servants described the ‘Global Britain’ aspirations of Theresa May’s government as ‘Empire 2.0.’ This term may have been used as a joke, but the idea – the assumption – amongst Brexiters that Global Britain could carve out a new post-European future in the Commonwealth was absolutely serious. 

Numerous Brexiters, including Boris Johnson himself, have made the argument that the UK could pivot towards the Commonwealth to compensate for its loss of trade and labour from the European Union.

Such predictions have not been realised, and they are very unlikely to be realised.  So far, trade agreements with Commonwealth countries have been more beneficial to other countries than they have to the UK, and there is no evidence to suggest that any amount of widening trade with the Commonwealth could compensate for the reduction in trade access to the EU. 

This doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to forge mutually beneficial relationships with Commonwealth countries. The Commonwealth was created, in theory, to achieve exactly that, albeit under the tutelage of the British Crown. 

But trade is also related to politics and culture; we will never be able to forge relationships of genuine equality with our Commonwealth partners if we continue to regard the Commonwealth merely as a British sphere of influence, while refusing to acknowledge the darker episodes in our imperial past, and the impact of these episodes on the former colonies with which we now seek to partner.

Such an acknowledgement does not require collective self-flagellation. It makes no more sense to depict our history as a history of evil, any more than it makes sense to describe it as a history of goodness and benevolence.

But it does require a genuine recognition of the evil that did take place in the name of empire, and an understanding of the impact of our colonial past on the peoples and countries that were on the receiving end of it.

This recognition is unlikely to happen in a post-Brexit Global Britain fixated on a particular idea of national ‘greatness’ rooted in the British empire, or more precisely, in the way the empire is remembered and misremembered.

Such amnesia is not entirely new. When I was at school we were not taught much imperial history, and what we were taught generally painted a picture of the ‘accidental empire’ as an essentially benign project, which brought railways, cricket and good governance to the unruly natives, before politely handing them the reins of self-rule.

In this narrative, we learned more about Britain’s role in the abolition of slavery than its role in institutionalising the Atlantic slave trade in the first place. There was no room for the colonisation of Ireland; for the Balfour declaration or the partition of India; for Mike Davies’s ‘late Victorian Holocaust’ famines; for the merciless suppression of the Indian Mutiny; for the shocking violence of the Mau Mau emergency; for the savage punishments that inevitably followed slave rebellions in the West Indies.

These crimes can’t be ‘balanced’, any more than the Holocaust can be balanced by the fact that Hitler built autobahns and gave German workers good holidays. They cannot be sanitised or marginalised by ‘whataboutery’, or by defensive and facile arguments that accuse critical historians and campaigners of ‘doing down Britain’ or ‘erasing our history.’

Today these instincts have become a pathological reflex for the Tory party and the nationalist right.

We have now reached the point when any attempt to critique the imperial past is dismissed as ‘wokery’ or intellectual treason; when even the National Trust is accused of ‘erasing history’ because it pointed out the links between colonial slavery and our country houses; when the wretched ghoul Dan Wootton can blame Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah Winfrey for supposedly poisoning the public image of the royal family in the Caribbean.

This is the ground that Brexiters want to fight on - forever.  It’s also the national (ist) story that the Tory government want to tell.

The result is a paradox. On the one hand Brexit politicians cling on to an essentially delusional image of the Commonwealth as a British sphere of influence and a new vehicle to re-establish Britain’s lost imperial ‘greatness’. At the same time they have staked their political future on a reactionary culture war that makes it impossible for ‘Global Britain’ to recalibrate its relationship with its former colonies, and develop a new and more honest understanding of its own history.

In these circumstances you can’t be surprised that Kate and Wills didn’t go down a storm in the Caribbean.  Meghan and Harry might have done it better, but no amount of personal charm can change the fact that the UK is no longer a country that its former colonies want to look up to.

These countries want genuine independence and the recognition of past injustice, and we should share these aspirations, because we also need to exorcise the ghosts of empire that still haunt us even when we don’t even realise it.

We need our own imperial reckoning. And until we achieve it we will continue to pursue a fantasy of national grandeur that no longer has any possibility of realisation in the twenty-first century, and we will continue to go backwards even as we seek to convince ourselves that are rowing forwards.