I wish we could simply ignore everything Jeremy Corbyn says and does.
At this stage, Corbyn should be a has-been (as well as a never-should-have-been). He stepped down as Leader of the Opposition four and a half years ago, and while he will probably still be the MP for Islington North in 2049 at the age of 100, he is now technically just a backbencher.
Except, Corbyn will never really be ‘just a backbencher’ again. He can, among other things, reasonably be described as a social media influencer in his own right. He has 2.6 million followers on Twitter, which is more than the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the current Leader of the Opposition taken together. Most of these followers are adoring fans, who lap up every word he says. For that reason alone, Corbyn is not going to go away, and what he says still matters.
Corbyn’s current hobbyhorse is the issue of reparations, which, he believes, Britain owes to some of its former colonies. He claims:
Decades of colonialism have created a profoundly unequal world that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of the global few. […] Britain’s foundations were built off the backs of others – of generations of enslaved and colonial subjects.
He is wrong about that, but he is accidentally right when he says that arguments about reparations are not just, or even primarily, about the past. They are very much about the present, and the future. Earlier this year, I published a short book on the economic effects of empire, entitled Imperial Measurement: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Western Colonialism. Some of my critics claimed that I was ‘weaponising’ the past in order to fuel a culture war in the present. They got it exactly the wrong way around. Until a few years ago, the economics of empire was a subject that only a few history nerds would have been interested in. It then became a culture war issue in 2020 because the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and their fellow travellers turned it into one.
The toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol was just the beginning. In the subsequent weeks and months, dozens of local governments – Sadiq Khan’s London at the forefront, needless to say – announced their intention to review ‘problematic’ statues, monuments and names of streets, squares and buildings. This, of course, sent a strong signal to BLM: shout loud enough, and you’ll get whatever you want (provided, of course, that you have sufficiently fashionable opinions).
Some BLM critics misunderstood the movement’s motives, claiming that BLM were trying to ‘erase’ Britain’s past. They were doing no such thing. What they were doing instead was to force a specific interpretation of Britain’s past on everyone else. In that interpretation, slavery and colonial exploitation were not simply lamentable, dark chapters in history. They were, instead, the very foundation of the wealth of the Western world, and of Britain in particular. It is an Original Sin story of Western capitalism, according to which we still benefit from those ill-gotten gains today.
The idea has been knocking about for quite some time. It was first formulated by Eric Williams in his book Capitalism and Slavery in 1944, and in the 1960s, a more extreme version of it was picked up by the Maoist student movements that dominated Western universities in those days. There were still echoes of it in the anti-globalisation movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, but it then went a bit dormant. In 2020, it came back with a vengeance, and given that Britain’s BLM-mania was essentially just a continuation of the Corbyn movement by other means, it makes perfect sense that the actual Corbyn is also on board with it.
It is, as I show in Imperial Measurement, also profoundly wrong. The empire was never economically important enough for the British economy to support such a strong claim. We don’t have exact figures, but exports to the colonies cannot have accounted for much more than 3% of Britain’s GDP, and imports from the colonies cannot have accounted for more than 4%. Even those figures cannot be fully attributed to the Empire, though, because at least some of that trade – around half of it, according to some estimates – would have happened anyway, Empire or no Empire.
So the benefits of Empire, while not trivial, were never colossal. The costs of Empire, on the other hand, were very substantial indeed. By the standards of the time, Britain was a high-tax nation, in large part because of the additional military and administrative expenditure associated with the conquest and maintenance of a sprawling empire. All in all, it is just about possible that the empire made a minor contribution to Britain’s economic development. But that contribution may well have been zero, or even negative.
Why does any of this matter today?
Because it has huge implications for how we think about economic policy today. If you believe in a Corbynite origin story of the Western world’s wealth, you will see nothing worth appreciating, preserving or building upon in the economic model which made all that wealth possible. A Corbynite understanding of the West’s past leads you straight to Corbynomics in the present. Is it any surprise that one in three British millennials agree with the statement that communism is “the ideal economic system”?
Too many people are still too easily seduced by the tunes of the pied piper of Islington North. We need to expose them to the less catchy tune of actual economic history, even if they don’t want to hear it.
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