Being British doesn’t automatically make us Great

There is a great deal to be proud of in being British. We invented trains and television and cheddar cheese. We’re a nice, moderate democratic country. We have a culture of looking after our own through free healthcare, education and public services (and despite those services being eroded by our current government, that culture remains strong).

But we aren’t inherently good. We’re also the nation of Nick Griffin, AA Gill and Simon Cowell. A great deal of the wealth our nation relies on to go its good works today was built through enforced imperialism and the slave trade. The front pages of almost every national newspaper this morning is not just glorying in the defeat of Gaddafi – undoubtedly a good thing for the people of Libya – but in the vivid visual confirmation of his death. We’re sometimes a nation who will all too easily return to our instincts of bear baiting and gallows crowds.

I love Britain. I am a proud Brit, but I believe that patriotism is not accepting my country right or wrong. I believe that patriotism is about a desire to continue to improve the lot of those who live and work in Britain. I don’t believe that you can be a patriot and not criticise your country.

I found Mark Rowney’s piece yesterday completely bizarre. The Labour right often accuse the left of naivety and sometimes they are right to do so. Sometimes the left do become unworldly in their demands and detached from the reality of the real world. But as Mark here has ably demonstrated, that’s not a characteristic reserved for the left.

Mark has shown a sweet – if alarming – naivety in his belief in the virtue of oil companies he describes as British, though on very scant evidence. Exxon is headquartered in the US, Shell in the Netherlands (though is registered in the UK). BP is the only company registered and headquartered here. These are international corporations with interests in Britain but whose profile and culture is no more British than that of any international corporation.

I’m not anti-business. I’m not against us exporting our expertise and knowledge and selling it for a profit to those who what it. Unlike Mark, I understand the nature of capitalism as an amoral force, neither a force for good nor ill in and of itself, but for profit. It is how capitalism is managed that has led to both good and ill.

In the UK, while we have measures to protect ourselves from some of the worst effects of capitalism – such as consumer protection laws, health and safety laws and environmental protection laws – these are not complete nor are they uncontested British values. It is also a very recent development that we have returned to a much delayed and still stuttering conversation about just how we should attempt to manage capitalism itself for the good of the many. Again, doing so is not (yet I hope) an intrinsic British value.

Certainly it has not been the case that any of the three firms named in Mark’s piece are exporting these values abroad. In March this year, the UK Government ruled that BP – the most British of these companies – is violating human rights over the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline. Then of course there’s the little matter of that oil spill. In January of this year, the US government – while taking its own share of the blame for under-regulating, blamed BP and its partners for making a series of cost-cutting decisions and the lack of a system to ensure well safety. Hardly a great example of exporting those hard values of health and safety and environmental protection.

Examples of abuses by these three companies are multitude. A quick Google will find you examples both recent and stretching back decades. When challenged with some of this evidence on Twitter Mark’s response was bizarre to say the least. The belief that because Amnesty International have reported on Shell, they are therefore “keeping them in check” takes the Observer effect and stretches it in such an easily falsifiable way, I feel I must be wrong in interpreting this to be Mark believing this is a positive for Shell.

If Mark wanted to argue that UK Plc. was feeling severely beleaguered and – however distasteful – should take the opportunity that a new Libya opens up to invest in Libyan oil for the good of our economy, that would be one thing. It wouldn’t necessarily be the right thing to support in terms of the best interests of the Libyan people, it wouldn’t necessarily be an argument I would agree with – as I haven’t seen a great deal of evidence of trickle-down economics succeeding to boost the wealth of nations, as opposed to the wealth of the few who already have a great deal. But it would be an argument that stood up to its own internal logic.

But to argue against overwhelming evidence to the contrary that a group of non-British companies should go into Libya simply to instill hard values they fight here and ignore, override and corrupt elsewhere is just plain old-fashioned daft.