Travelogue - further

Travelogue
This is such a tangled and long-lasting story that I didn’t want to put it in the book. The story is that the obscurity and uncertainty of decolonisation contributed to the distrust of public officials which fuelled the rise of UKIP and Reform UK after 2009. Decolonisation was never popular and was never sold to the electorate as something which worked to their benefit. They never said yes and actually they were never consulted. The right-wing populist vote in 2016, or 2026, is continuous with the bloc of opinion which didn’t accept that the end of empire was the right policy in 1945-70. That bloc did not get the opportunity to vote against decolonisation and so was not counted or addressed.
It may be that the empire did not benefit most people in the metropole. It benefited the rich, other classes fought and died in wars without ceasing to be poor. Settlers did benefit, making new lives in the USA, Canada, or Australia. The final phase left a resentment that government didn’t fight to hang on to the colonies and didn’t preserve them as possible places where a white person could migrate to. The belief that the governors favour coloured people clung on to influence a belief that white people don’t get fair access to welfare services. There are no actual examples of this, but the modern discourse about removing racism sounds like an attempt to squeeze out white people. People believed the propaganda in favour of Empire.
I thought to explain to myself why decolonisation happened, via a book on policy 1945-70. The impression I got was of a chess game being played at high speed over 20 years, and that a commentary on the calculations which one player went through was just too complicated to set out. The situation kept changing and the goals had to be updated. This was never explained to the electorate and perhaps it couldn’t be. People don’t know why decolonisation happened because it was never explained, or not in a convincing way. But did this leave abiding distrust of the educated class? People noticed the failure to explain. A minority interpreted decolonisation as a sell-out and passed the feeling on to their children.
In almost every year, from 1945 to 1970, service personnel were fighting and dying to defend colonies. And at the end every territory was given up. One question is why the semi-legal possession of overseas territories was not given up at the start, for example when India and Pakistan were decolonised. The public were given clear messages about how vital it was to defend this territory or that, and they believed the messages. The political discourse, to the soldiers and their families, looked dishonest in retrospect. In fact, the whole process looks short on honesty. Telling the colonised in Malaysia or Rhodesia that policy was framed in their interests had a leakage effect whereby the white electorate in Britain got the impression that the government had no wish to help them. Telling the electorate that the empire favoured them would have a blow-back when 5 years later you told them that decolonising was in their interest. The communication with the public was of low quality.
For the government to consider the interests of the oppressed, in the colonies, represented a restriction of their loyalty to the electorate in the metropole. This was hardly a big problem, because the oppressed were, genuinely, oppressed. The empire did not exist to help the natives. But the population in the home islands could decide that their government was not fully loyal to them.
The distrust of Reform /UKIP voters goes all the way back to the era of decolonisation. Politicians did change their minds every year. The Winds of Change speech in 1963 confused the voters. It certainly wasn’t an idea that won votes. And it didn’t give a reason for retaining all the colonies which it didn’t affect. The electorate didn’t take the decisions. It was cooked up between the ministers and the officials. There was a democratic deficit.
There was a long-standing convention that the electorate were not consulted about foreign policy. It was felt that the relationships were too complicated and that policy needed long-term consistency which would be wrecked by the day to day hysteria of public opinion. This convention was not democratic at all, but it was in force in quite a similar way in other countries. Having an agreement with other governments, which you adhere to, limits the power of democracy – it limits what the voter can ask for. Our government is like other governments in observing contract law with regard to contracts – it is subject to the law (and not just to the voter). The policy making process was incredibly complex. It did not achieve any goals which the government actually saw as desirable at the beginning. Better targets were constantly being thrown out as unattainable. People outside the rooms where policy ideas were exchanged were automatically tuned out as having nothing to add. There was a strong, even effective, inside, but there was no outside. It was not a democratic process. The outcome gave democracy to many new countries. It was never popular in the metropole.
This claim relies on an idea of things which politicians didn’t say. More research might excavate moments where they did say what was necessary and got ignored. It is hard to accept that votes in 2026 might be affected by events in the 1950s. But we are dealing with very unmodernised sectors of political attitudes and with a depressive ground which people regress to when hope and ideals fail. And some ideas are very old – racism wasn’t suddenly invented and people are not suddenly converted to it. It is old and comes back like an infection lurking in the ground. Full employment sucks the vitality out of it but doesn’t really kill it.
The word “modernised” is worth a breakdown. At the most basic level, it means a split between different parts of public opinion. The most “advanced” sector is obviously the educated. They take in the ambitious, data-filled, newspapers, they read books, they are more exposed to new ideas – to the modernisation process. But it does not follow that every voter, every sector of opinion, will follow the same path. At this point we can redefine “modernised” as “liberal”. The change process is patchy and under-engineered – the state of affairs in 2026 can include a bloc which still rejects the project of decolonisation. Those people, as people, do not see themselves as unmodernised – instead they regard themselves as the undeceived, the ones who do not believe the propaganda of the elite, and who have brilliantly understood the real nature of the elite. They see themselves as the less deceived – to take in larger amounts of printed information turns you into one of the thoroughly deceived. You swallow it all.

* This does not fit into my book partly because I am not writing primarily about politics. Also, because its statement is diffused over too long a period, and the idea of continuity is rather under stress. I think the theme raises ideas about the reason why poets wrote so little about the empire and decolonisation. They may simply have felt they didn’t have the specialised knowledge needed to form an opinion.

* I have finished the Travelogue book but in this phase I can always change some of it.
( James Fountain suggested Eliot as a right-wing poet I don’t talk about)
(AD) Eliot was monarchist and traditionalist, pretty far Right. but his poetry reflects the questions he was asking, only. You can’t analyse it to find out what he thought about decolonising India, or Guyana, or whatever. Those questions never arise. He was mainly a religious poet.
There is a second level where you take his magazine the Criterion and analyse the whole mass of material to look for attitudes. I think it would show someone who was against the rise of socialism and even the rise of democracy. But it's not his own words.... too indirect, too frustrating. I was trying to find a copy, to read what Michael Roberts wrote for Criterion. That arose because Roberts supposedly promoted communism in poetry, Auden and his pals. But that is incompatible with him being chief poetry critic for the Criterion at the same time, and editing TE Hulme, who was pretty far Right. I didn't spend that crucial day ferreting through that magazine, but I don't think Roberts has a left-wing status and I don’t think the modernism he canonised has either.
(Simon Jenner says) What I think I hear is a kind of “hear no evil” tone deafness about empire. The poets’ imaginary was mostly shrunk to the UK, unless like Kipling you were born out there and couldn’t ignore it.]] (AD) Yes, that is what I found. I was pointing a camera at nothing happening. I had to adjust to that. The poets don’t register history happening but you can write about travel poetry and a sort of mythology of incomprehension.

War movies. There were 433 war films made in Britain in the 1950s and some critics have dismissed all of them Including such total write-offs, people disagree a lot about 50s war films. What guides the disagreements is an ideal – people have an ideal about British life in groups and get vexed because the films don’t reproduce it, or not completely. The interest is that these ideals are terribly interesting and the films release them into consciousness. The films don’t need to be especially good, and the acting does not have to be exceptional, for the ideals to emerge. Even if we only perceive them because they are appearing with blemishes and flaws.
I have been watching 50s war films recently and I think the debates about them are relevant to poetry, in that war poetry kept away from the grand statements about British ideals and so we don’t have anything to apologise for 80 years later. Of course, that is also why poetry of that war is not remembered in a big way. People avoided writing ambitious poems. So – big war, small poems. It would be more stimulating if the poems aroused arguments about ideals – those ideals certainly exist and arguing about them is how you get involved in politics. What my book is about is partly how poetry marginalised itself.
Robert Murphy says that the peak year for war films, based on lists of “Top 30” box office hits, was 1958. And 1954 was a low point for war films. This is an interesting pattern. The whole pattern is unstable, people got satiated. That is partly why the memory of the genre is so unenthusiastic. But it was one of the big areas of artistic achievement for Britain in the 1950s. Other genres of art were not so adapted to the times.

In her book, “David Jones Mythmaker”, Elizabeth Ward at a certain point, page 220, proves that Jones was criticising both the Empire and the German Reich, and dismisses the first arm on the grounds that our system was better than the Reich. She actually uses the term “Western democratic systems”, but at the date in question several of them were imperialist States– including Britain. I accept that the Empire did not undertake genocide (although remembering Mike Davis’ “Late Victorian Holocausts”) but I am keen to accept Jones’ critique of the undertaking. It did not protect the rights of subject population groups – it sponsored large-scale land grabs which produced a new class of the poor. I accept that Britain was, by 1940, a democracy, but not that all its dependent territories had any form of democracy. So as a “system” it was not democratic. There is no Nuremberg assize for trying the misdeeds of imperial overlords and plunderers, but that is what I have in mind in my book. I am not staging that trial, and I don’t have a court at my disposal, but the trial is what my actual dispositions are patterned in relation to.
Richard Overy, in his recent and magisterial book on the Second World War, says that the cause of that war was the wish of three rising powers– Germany, Italy, and Japan – to imitate and take the place of three older empires, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. This clearly puts Britain in the same category as the 3rd Reich. The Reich wanted to clear the good land of the Ukraine and Western Russia in order to colonise it. Britain had cleared the 13 Colonies and Australia in order to have access to the good land and settle it as if empty. We hardly have to guess where Hitler got his ideas of geography and "land clearance” from. So, I don’t buy Ward’s rebuttal of Jones’ critique of Empire. That stands although I admire “David Jones Mythmaker” greatly. She accepts that Jones was part of a milieu and that he shared its opinions. She goes on to establish what those opinions were. A lot of other Jones scholarship is simply exculpatory. To put it simply, a political Catholic saw the problems of the 1930s as the result of misuse of power by the Protestants and the Jews.
I take it from Gary Love’s article (“‘Real Toryism’ or Christian democracy? The political thought of Douglas Jerrold and Charles Petrie at the New English Review, 1945–50”) that the group in question became much less antisemitic once Hitler had made the attitude undesirable. A Catholic circle sited outside the Conservative Party and sympathetic to Fascism moved steadily towards the Con Party once appeasement had failed. The necessity of war made them patriotic again. And there was a democratic current of great strength in the 1940s which affected even the Far Right. So, Jones’ comment of April 1939 may not reflect where he stood in 1945. His essay “Art and Democracy” may be an attempt to overcome his aversion towards the latter – a wish shared by his editor, Bernard Wall, and the readers of the magazine where it was first published.

The writers on political history I have consulted are admirable in many ways, but they don’t seem interested in poets. That certainly leaves an opening where I can write something necessary. And poetry became unimportant – but historians seem to have forgotten about a period where it was important, admittedly by echoing what was in the newspapers and also national myth.
We know that Jones was very interested in Jackson Knight’s book The Cumaean Gates (1936), which is about the theme of labyrinths (subtitle, “Reference of the Sixth Aeneid to Initiation Pattern”). Knight devotes a chapter to the labyrinth, actually a sort of puzzle with forbidden steps and one right path, found by John Layard on Malekula (in the New Hebrides). The passage I quoted from ‘The narrows’ mentions a labyrinth. It is where his "cosmocrats" (i.e. imperialists) are lost. The Kensington Mass says "Down the meander and crooked labyrinth of time and maze/ of history or historia". It would be right up my street, in a book on poetry and the Third World, to link Malekula to a poem by Jones. The connection doesn’t work at all, sadly. Jones refers to a crooked labyrinth twice, but the sense is that “the complications of world affairs in the late Thirties (or 1940s) are more than politicians can manage”. A link to initiation rites, of which the labyrinth is a feature, is just not there. Jackson Knight makes that connection between Third World rituals and Roman antiquity, it’s very interesting, but that link did not affect Jones and he did not develop an interest in the non-European world. Knight mentions W H Perry and was obviously stimulated by that “hyperdiffusionist” school represented by Perry and Elliot Smith. This was one way in which intellectuals, between the wars, acquired some knowledge of Third World cultures, and in which those cultures were seen as parts of one big human pattern. I’m sure this was benign. I just don’t see any trace of Jones following those paths.
It's interesting that Jackson Knight specifies in the Notes that he contacted Layard directly and got a lot of information from him by word of mouth or in letters. This explains why Cumaean Gates came out in 1936 and has information which Layard published in 1942. However, Layard also published at least one article in the learned periodical Man which Knight does not cite. I see that Layard gave a talk about Malekula at the 1937 Eranos gathering in Ascona. Jackson Knight reproduces a maze pattern from an Etruscan vase of circa 600 BC and says that the same pattern is found incised on a megalith at Bryn Celli Ddu in Anglesey, so possibly around 3000 BC (says wikipedia). This is fascinating, and the whole comparative approach is, but I find it hard to agree that the two instances are part of the same pattern of ideas, or illustrate the same myth. He says that the way into the megalith, if you enter, is a spiral maze.