WHAT SHOULD THEY KNOW OF ENGLAND?

John Simpson laments the decline of

British diplomacy — and influence — in our former Empire, and in the wider world

KIPLINGISH THOUGHTS crowded in as our bus heaved its way over the Rothang Pass, 14,000 feet up in the western Himalayas near India's border with Tibet. This had been Kim's route as he trudged through the Hills with his Tibetan lama.

Above them, still enormously above them, earth towered away towards the snowline, where from east to west across hundreds of miles, ruled as with a ruler, the last of the bold birches stopped. Above that, in scarps and blocks upheaved, the rocks strove to fight their heads above the white smother.

Nothing of importance had changed in the 92 Years since Kipling wrote that.

I climbed out of the bus and stretched. Even irt August the nearby glacier chilled the air. A light rain drenched the prayer-flags which hung

by a notice warning that the poaching of butter- flies and other insects is

strictly forbidden'. MY Companions and I were to spend that night in a Forestry Commission rest-house at Udaipore, built originally for the comfort of passing British officialdom; and from there we would head into the Hills prop-

er, .our camping gear carried on ponies, with

Smiling hillmen to put up our tents, bring us our bed-tea at 6.30 each morning, and cook our meals. A group of truck-drivers sat warming themselves with glasses of chang and barley beer. Someone tried to light a fire, which crackled in the rain and flared out in the sudden gusts of wind. I pulled out the map to see where we were and noticed, as

always, how it was sprinkled with British names: Dunbar, Clement, Corbett, Lans- downe, Dalhousie. In the Hills, as much as

anywhere in India, the echo of the British Past remains; this, after all, is a country whose civil aircraft still bear the registra- tion letters VT, standing for `Viceroy's Ter- ritories'.

Indians may not celebrate the British link, but they certainly do not try to hide it. It is as much a part of their history as the Moghul Empire or Indira Gandhi. After independence, the new government decid- ed to corral the statues of British monarchs and viceroys which were scattered across India into a small and desolate park on the edge of Delhi, at the site where George V and Queen Mary held their great durbar of 1911. A number of Indian cities refused to comply, and so their Queen Victorias still stand in the city streets where they always have; the decent plinths made ready for them at the durbar park remain unoccu- pied. It wasn't that Madras and the rest were particularly nostalgic for the British past; merely that the past belonged to them and they saw no reason to forget it. This is not the case in Britain. We are sometimes embarrassed by our imperial history and sometimes rather flattered by it, but we seem unable to treat it naturally. It mocks our persistently low self-image with its scope and grandeur, yet it provides our television directors and publishing companies with plenty of entertaining cos- tume drama. Either way, it belongs to a world from which we have effectively divorced ourselves. The British Empire reached its greatest compass in 1933, with- in the lifetime of a sizable proportion of the British population, and the last Empress of India still lives at Clarence House. But history moves at a fast lick nowadays, and our pomp of only the day before yesterday is, as Kipling half guessed it would be, one with Nin- eveh and Tyre.

Accordingly, we are all Little Englanders now, and have been since the days of Harold Macmillan. The prime ministers of the Sixties and Seventies were mostly concerned with withdrawing from the world. In the Eight- ies we settled on a new identity: reluctantly European, enthusiasti- cally pro-American. There was, it seemed, to be no other option for us beyond those two; and the countries where our own people had settled around the world, and the coun- dence to, were effectively forgotten. For Mrs Thatcher, the Commonwealth was nothing more than a nuisance, alternatively whingeing and yapping at her heels. Like the ancient Gladstone at the time of the 1897 Jubilee, Mrs Thatcher 'preferred to keep as far away as possible from all that sort of thing'. For perhaps the first time in more than a century it became possible for a High Tory to be a Little Englander at the same time.

In one of Kipling's worst poems, The English Flag, he presents an anti-Little Englander question which is as pertinent now as it was then: 'And what should they know of England, who only England know?' Nowadays, it seems, we wish to know nothing of ourselves beyond our European and Atlantic identities. There is a powerful body of opinion within the For- eign Office which argues that we should concentrate our main diplomatic effort in Brussels, Paris, Bonn and Washington, since these are the only places which really matter to us, and downgrade the rest. The tight controls which the Treasury exerts on ministerial spending have encouraged this thinking. The desire to consolidate our European and Atlantic identity and the desire to save cash have come together to reinforce the move away from our old his- torical scope.

It is, for instance, quite clear from a dry statement by the Foreign Office News Department that we are in full retreat from Kabul: 'We have no plans at present to reopen the embassy there.' Afghanistan is a country where Britain has played an impor- tant part — often a dominant part — for 150 years. When the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev invaded it in 1979, the then Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, was the first western politician to tour Afghanistan's neighbours and assure them of Britain's lasting concern and support. 'We have historically had a role in this part of the world,' he said, 'and we cannot for- get this now.'

In the years which followed, SAS teams went to Afghanistan to train the mujahed- din and there were secret supplies of British weapons via Pakistan. Yet now that the mujaheddin have taken power and Britain might expect to have an important voice in Afghanistan, the Foreign Office has no plans to put in even a one-man embassy. The splendid proconsular build- ings where we established our political base in Kabul, and which have been lovingly maintained by a courageous group of ex- Gurkhas throughout the worst of the civil war in Afghanistan, will remain empty in order to save money. No one, it seems, questions whether the cost of one of our 40 diplomatic posts in Paris or our 80 in Washington might better be diverted to a country which Mrs Thatcher's foreign sec- retary once said Britain would not forget.

The fact is we may think it won't be noticed if we tiptoe away from the old places, but it will be. Those who know only England forget the importance which, often quite wrongly, is placed upon us and our actions in countries where we have tra- ditionally played a part. This does not apply merely to the quarter of the globe we once governed. Our imperial past has left behind it a penumbra even in places which it did not touch directly. And so in coun- tries as different from each other as Iran and Argentina, into whose politics and economies the British intervened roughly and profitably until after the second world war, you encounter an identical fixation which is just as strong today as it was 30 years ago: that Britain is a subtle manipula- tor which, though it is weaker than it once was, nowadays continues to intervene in their affairs through its pervasive influence on the much less subtle United States.

In Iraq and Syria (both of them countries where the Foreign Office does not current- ly have to go to the expense of maintaining an ambassador), in Turkey, in many of the new states of Central Asia, in Africa and Latin America, British diplomats carry all sorts of extra baggage with them that other western countries do not. We may be in the process of forgetting our imperial past, but others remember it very well. You can stand in Valparaiso on the street which most people still call 'English Terrace', where as late as the 1930s the British mer- chants continued to build their houses and run the port's business. You can stand at one of Saddam Hussein's most frightful monuments and watch the Iraqi army cele- brating its equivalent of Remembrance Sunday in British-style uniforms and with impeccable British drill; and sometimes a band will play 'Scotland the Brave' on bag- pipes adorned with the Royal Stewart tar-

tan. I have heard the same tune played on similarly decorated bagpipes by Colombian sailors in Bogota (a British naval officer, inevitably, played a part in their liberation from Spain), and by Pakistani soldiers in the Khyber Pass. For three decades and more, Britain has tended to see itself through American eyes: as a small and increasingly insignificant place with a weak economy. But the United States is a country where size and success matter a great deal, and less tangible things do not. If we had chosen to see ourselves through the eyes of countries of a more comparable size and a more comparable history — France, Italy and Germany, for instance — or through those of significant countries in the old Third World, our self- image might have turned out a little better, and we would have got the scale of our position more accurately. As it is, we seem to have conformed increasingly to the American view of ourselves.

It is true, of course, that our economic position is as disappointing as ever, and the hope of the 1980s, that we might at least break out of our old debilitating cycle of failure, has come to nothing. Yet as we have seen with Germany and Japan, it is not enough merely to be rich in order to be powerful. International influence depends on a country's range and scope, and Ger- many and Japan are restricted in both. It is reach as well as weight which counts, and our interests in so many different parts of the world provide us with a considerable potential advantage, both in terms of politi- cal influence and of trade.

The Major Government, with Douglas Hurd as Foreign Secretary, has already shown signs of wanting to run a vigorous foreign policy which is more independent of the United States than the 'me too-ism of the Thatcher years. The scope will cer- tainly be there. The accelerating decline In American power can only continue, and it seems fair to assume that as the Maastricht process fades there will be a political weak- ening of the European Community itself. In these circumstances the old assumptions about Britain's position in the world will need some swift rethinking. We may even have to consider whether the Treasury should be allowed to weaken the Foreign Office by restricting its spending to the pre- sent extent.

The break-up of the Soviet Union means that every western government is obliged to spend more on opening embassies in places where few of them would previously have had any representation at all. Britain s presence in the new countries which have formed will be sketchy: we have embassies in the three Baltic republics and the Ukraine, but in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Kazakhstan there will simPlY be an ambassador who travels out from Moscow. In Kazakhstan in particular this is a waste of an opportunity: Mrs Thatcher put in a good deal of work on the influen- tial President Nazarbayev in the past, but

now we are trying to set up a joint mission there with the Germans. It is not as though a British embassy has to be a grandiose affair; the Italians have specialised in help- ing their very considerable export drive in the Third World by putting in a single hard-working man and letting him get on with it. In Kabul, the Italian ambassador has put his son on the diplomatic list to make the representation seem more impressive; the son is eight years old.

Britain has many powerful advantages in its dealings with the outside world, but in recent years we have not made the most of them. The English language is the greatest of these, and the offer of places at British schools and universities for the next gener- ation of a country's leaders has an attrac- tion which other Europeans cannot match. The Thatcher government cut back heavily here. The British Council, which has achieved a great deal in the past by careful use of its reading-rooms and libraries, and the skilful wielding of scholarships and bur- saries, has had a thin time of it. So has the BBC World Service, whose cost per hour per 1,000 listeners is smaller than that of any other western broadcaster. 'It's as though the Government doesn't like the word "British",' a British Council man once said to me plaintively. Recently, however, things have become distinctly easier. The Foreign Office man- aged to protect both the British Council and the external services of the BBC dur- ing the Thatcher years, and this year's esti- mated spending on both is up by half on that of four years ago. These are not large sums in terms of the advantage which accrues to Britain as a result of their activi- ties: an estimated turnover of £408 million this year for the British Council, £166 mil- lion for the radio and monitoring sides of the BBC World Service.

As an employee of the BBC, I have a vested interest in writing favourably about It., but two things seem beyond dispute: first, it is important to Britain's national Interest that its main broadcasting organi- sation should be available on the television and radio sets of ordinary people over increasingly large parts of the world; and, second, after less than a year the BBC W.orld Television Service is beginning to Wipe the floor with its American competi- tor, CNN, in Asia and is forcing every gov- Frnment-controlled television organisation in the region to improve its output in self- defence. There was, however, no support from the British Government in the setting uP of this service, and the programmes and hourly news bulletins of BBC Asia sit uneasily among some fairly dreadful Far Eastern advertising. At the end of our trek, we came down from the Hills, and sat and watched the BBC in Delhi to reaccustom ourselves to the world. The news was full of events at the UN Security Council, where British diplomacy (based in part on the network of Political relationships built up by our histo-

ry) has been more successful than for decades past. 'In recent years,' said Dou- glas Hurd in a newspaper article at the start of the year, 'Britain has punched above her weight in the world. We intend to keep it that way.' In the Gulf, as else- where, this has turned out to be true. Since the collapse of communism, Britain has indeed played a more important part in world affairs, largely through the medium of our seat on the Security Council. For nations as for individuals, political power is a matter of using connections.

Yet some of our potential connections have been sadly neglected, the Common- wealth in particular. If Mrs Thatcher saw the Commonwealth as a simple nuisance, John Major appears to regard it as an unin- teresting appendage to our European inter- ests. The only time it is mentioned in the British press is when it holds its biennial conference. It seems that our instinctive response to the countries we once gov- erned is either to lecture them, to patronise them, or to ignore them. A British govern- ment which chose to clear away the under- growth which has choked our relationship with the countries of the Commonwealth over the last 30 years — ever since the Rhodesian dispute of the early Sixties — would reap considerable benefits both politically and in terms of trade. As time goes past, however, the effort required becomes greater, and the interest fades more and more.

Led by the splendid Nigel Hankyn, who has lived in Delhi since 1947 and is an incomparable guide, we wandered round the parts of Old Delhi which few western diplomats bother to visit. 'You'll want to see this,' he said, and our elderly Ambas- sador taxi (based on the Morris Oxford) swerved obediently into the side of the road beside a red-brick Victorian gateway marked 'Nicholson Cemetery'. The watch- man, lounging on a charpoy inside, raised a feeble arm in greeting before sinking back into sleep. A vast expanse of undergrowth like a sub-jungle lay in front of us, with an occasional cross or pyramid showing above the bushes. A kite as big as a boxer dog sat on a tree and watched us sceptically. This was where the British buried their dead in the century before independence; now the unchecked weeds curl luxuriantly around 'Let's be beastly to the Germans. . the last remains of men and women who died of fluxes and fevers (and very occa- sionally old age) in the service of the Queen Empress. The British High Com- mission apparently pays someone to look after the place, but only the grave of John Nicholson, who died at the moment of recapturing Delhi in 1857, is kept clear. The rest, like our national memory of our- selves in the world, is being allowed to van- ish year by year from our sight. 'In affectionate memory of Amelia Anne Jenk- ins . . . I read on a flaking sandstone slap under my feet, but it Was Kipling I thought of again: 'And what should they know of England, who only England know?'

John Simpson is a contributing editor of The Spectator and foreign affairs editor of the BBC.