THE EMPIRE’S NEW CLOTHES

What does the Commonwealth mean to you? This is the question asked of author Philip Murphy which forms the heading of his first chapter in The Empire’s New Clothes: The Myth of the Commonwealth. The fact that the newly appointed (in 2014) director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies was

unable to answer with anything more than, “Well, it doesn’t do very much, but then it doesn’t cost very much” speaks volumes. In Murphy’s own words, his response was “spectacularly feeble” (p. 2).

I suspect that many people would be hard-pressed to answer such a question with anything more than a shrug of the shoulders. The Commonwealth Games, perhaps; or… hmm, that’s it. Murphy ‘examines the gulf between the Commonwealth’s lofty rhetoric and its actual achievements’ in the ‘hope’ that this ‘will provide readers with some amusement’ (p. xii). That such a gulf exists is given away by the book’s sub-title: The Myth of the Commonwealth.

Fast forward to page 225 and Murphy’s Conclusion, “Shattering the Myth”, in which he illustrates how the Commonwealth was used by Leavers during the Brexit campaign as some sort of ‘special asset to Britain’ even though, in his opinion, post-Brexit British trade with Commonwealth countries is ‘unlikely’ to be enhanced. (p. 228) The organisation is regarded ‘by many as merely a relic of British imperialism’ (p. 15), a view shared, apparently, by ‘many members of India’s policy-making elite’ (p. 226).The fact that right- wing Brexiters felt able to push the Commonwealth to the extent that a branch was opened in Mississippi with a view to getting the US to join as an ‘associate member’ (p. 230) during Donald Trump’s tenure of the White House, suggests that the ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’ were ‘implicitly rehabilitating the racialized, early-twentieth-century notion of the Commonwealth as a cosy and exclusive Anglos-Saxon club’ (p. 231).