White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

Britain Sets Sail for the Past — Old Glories and New Realities

April 5, 2019 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Confused about Brexit? Then let me tell you about my father. He was born when the British Empire was still in bloom and being British was to inherit a divine state of grace. It was an exceptionalism. You carried the long and varied history of Britain with you. It was your honor and your obligation.

My father was born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and only visited Britain briefly. But he was quintessentially British and, more than that, English.

He was neither well-lettered nor well-traveled; he earned his living with his hands as a mechanic. But his commitment to “King and Country” was absolute. He believed in Britain as the source of all good things, from justice to innovation.

That’s why when war broke out in 1939, he volunteered immediately for the Rhodesian regiment that was forming. He was rejected because he couldn’t fully straighten his left arm, which he had broken as a child.

No matter. He sold all the family’s possessions and with my mother, my 3-year-old brother and me, just months old, we took a six-day train journey with very little money to the South African port of Durban. He figured that The Royal South African Navy would be less interested in medical status than the infantry. He was right and he went to sea. Hugely important to him: he could serve.

In London in 1962, I worked for Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian press lord who had been a big part of the war effort, a close friend of Churchill, and a man violently opposed to Britain joining the precursor to the European Union, the Common Market. My job was to help the effort to keep Britain out with the help of the influential Beaverbrook press — think Rupert Murdoch media — and to mobilize support against anything to do with the nascent European project.

The men and women I met were socially and intellectually far more accomplished than my father, but they had the same flame, the same basic belief in British exceptionalism. They believed in honor, duty, justice, but also that Britain, especially England, had an exceptional role in history: It was chosen. It’s a belief so deep that it’s primal, coming from a far place in the psyche.

The overt arguments we assembled were economic: Beaverbrook said, and I believed, the British farmer would be hurt, British trade would suffer and the precious empire — now in its new non-imperial guise as the Commonwealth — would be imperiled. Beaverbrook was wrong and, of course, I was wrong, and so were the Britain-first people we spoke for and sometimes recruited.

When Britain finally joined Europe in 1973, the farmers, and the economy in general were to bloom. Britain became Europe’s financial hub as well as the point of entry into Europe for global companies. Its own exports to Europe boomed: At one time, and perhaps still, half the pizza shells in Italy were made in Britain.

Now that economic order is to be disrupted, damaged or destroyed. Britain is going back to a glorious place that only existed in myth: the pre-European days when, without glory, it was still recovering from loss of empire and World War II.

When I try to imagine why this is happening, I find the arguments about “sovereignty, freedom and faceless bureaucrats in Brussels” even more empty than Beaverbrook’s fictions that I once peddled. I hear instead the brave music of a distant drum, the echoes of past victories, inventions and achievements, “Rule Britannia” in a minor key.

Winston Churchill said of the Seven Years War, “mankind was not to be spared the rigors of the human pilgrimage.” Neither, alas, it seems, is Britain.

As to my father, he lived many years in the independent African country Botswana teaching his trade and harboring in his home newborn African babies, who were fatherless and whose mothers had to work. He, unlike his sentimental compatriots, realized that times had changed, and that the Britishness of yesteryear was, well, of a time gone by and best left to BBC costume dramas like “Downton Abbey.”

Email, RSS Follow
Email

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
Britain’s Exit Could Rejuvenate the European Union

Britain’s Exit Could Rejuvenate the European Union

Llewellyn King

PARIS — There are those who believe when Britain finally shakes off its European bondage it will prosper as never before. This prosperity will be so compelling that the remaining 27 countries that comprise the European Union will follow suit in pursuit of riches. The end of European integration. This is a view easier to […]

Does the Queen Have a Fondness for Trump?

Does the Queen Have a Fondness for Trump?

Llewellyn King

LONDON — I have a secret. I can’t verify it, but I can share it. It’s this: I think Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II likes President Donald Trump. Honestly, I’ve been studying video of them together and despite what the press here thinks, I believe she likes him. She’s amused by him. Poor woman, she […]

The Energy Executive and the Homeless: Sleeping on Concrete

The Energy Executive and the Homeless: Sleeping on Concrete

Llewellyn King

The British call it sleeping rough. We call it for what it is: homelessness. It starts the day when all the support systems — fragile as they often are — fail. When there is no home to go to; no bed to sleep in, no meal to eat, no toilet to use, no place to […]

Santa’s Gift to the Democrats — Will They Break It While Opening It?

Santa’s Gift to the Democrats — Will They Break It While Opening It?

Llewellyn King

The Democrats have no need to fret about what they’ll get for Christmas this year. Their worry shouldn’t be the gift, but rather how they choose to open it. The gift is global warming. Don’t call it climate change; that fuzzies the issue. Call it for what it is: global warming. It isn’t change but […]

Copyright © 2019 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in