Commonwealth

One of the most toxic pieces of nonsense peddled by Meghan Markle in her Netflix whinge last year was that the Commonwealth is really little more than a rebranding of the British Empire. Kind of like United Fruit going around blithely 'uninformed' under the badge of Chiquita or Hugo Boss making subliminal Nazi uniforms in the disingenuous form of contemporary fashion.

Oddly enough, in the same series she described herself as a gift to that very institution that the British people and their nasty mouthpieces of vile hackery (i.e not the Commonwealth itself) chose to spurn.

On Coronation Day David Olusoga, fresh from his stint as ‘expert’ support for the Sussexes, turned up on the BBC in more conciliatory mode. He observed that in spite of all the efforts of historians like himself to write off the Commonwealth, it appears to continue to thrive anyway. (Indeed, several countries that were never part of the British Empire have recently successfully petitioned to join.)

One of the many things that the Duchess of Sussex failed to grasp about the milieu into which she had married, is that the fundamental proposition of the Commonwealth is not racial diversity, but human and cultural diversity in general.

This is what in fact distinguishes it rather sharply from any kind of empire (OK, maybe not the Austro-Hungarian) which are generally grounded in the imposition of a level of uniformity in both administrative practice and underlying core values.

In this respect, the Commonwealth has evolved into a kind of anti-empire, presenting a contrast to the larger power blocks around the world today, such as the US, China and Russia.

Or indeed to the dogmas of ‘woke’ which inherently tell us that there is only one way to think, only one way that ‘progress’ can go, even as they contradict themselves with platitudes about diversity, which on closer examination are never as tolerant, inclusive and non-hierarchical in intent as they might otherwise appear.

There is an important historical lesson to be learned by all here. If there is something in the collective world that we don’t like, taking a doctrinaire stance at a distant and opposite point may not be all that desirable.

After all, at ground level both poles are pretty similar in terms of unpleasant iciness. Refashioning the institutions and the symbolism that already exist to better fit our world and its current aspirations is the smarter play.