Britain's imperial echoes have led it to a ruinous decade of wars

By Dilip -

What do Britons "want" in the coming year? An ambassador to Washington was once asked the question on radio and replied, "That's very kind of you, a box of candied fruits would do." Such humble responses are now out of date. As the season of goodwill slithers into that of New Year's resolution, the urge to tell the world how to behave seems uncontrollable.
We can suppress a yawn at David Cameron's sermon on Christian values and Ed Miliband claiming the Helmand army is making Britain "secure, peaceful and happy". More troubling is the foreign secretary,William Hague's, declaration on Facebook of a Christmas ambition to increase "international pressure on Syria … push Burma in the right direction … improve the situation in Somalia … and protect women's rights in the Middle East" among other uplifting goals.
The phraseology may seem in place beneath portraits of Pitt and Palmerston, but how must it play with its intended recipients? Imagine the Indian foreign minister sending Britons a Christmas message deploring their addiction to knife crime, or Japan's expressing his dismay at Britain's broken homes, or Pakistan's decrying Ulster sectarianism as "unacceptable". I am sure Hague would tell them to mind their own business.
Britain's assumption of an ancestral role in passing judgment on Kipling's "lesser tribes without the law" seems genetically embedded. Hague might as well have been quoting from The White Man's Burden..


None of the areas of Hague's concern had anything to do with Britain, let alone being within Britain's sovereign domain, nor have they been for over half a century. The power has gone. The legitimacy has departed. Only the language of implied command echoes through the Foreign Office's post-imperial dusk

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