If we pay reparations, they’ll only come back for more

‘Danegeld’. Such an ugly word, don’t you think? So, what should we call it instead? Reparations, or Project Spire perhaps? A reckoning with the past? Grown-up politics for a grown-up nation? Or, as Charles Ryder’s father might have said over the breakfast table, let’s just say it’s the right thing to do, and leave it at that.

Only, it has been the wrong thing to do since the lamentable Aethelred the Unready in the ninth century paid marauding Danes to go away – only to see them pocket his money and come back for more. And it was that lesson which the inimitable Rudyard Kipling drew for the modern age in his poem ‘Danegeld’, written a century ago, at another time of profound national unease. Then, we were anxious about the ebb tide of empire, with the United States, Germany, France, Italy and Russia coming up fast on the rails, and seemingly endless trouble in Ireland, South Africa, Egypt and India. We were also in the middle of immense social and political change in Britain itself. And many – like Kipling – thought our governing class was simply not up to the task any more, either at home or abroad.

And here we are again. Aethelred’s problem was not that he was unready. The epithet applied to him – Unraed in Old English – meant ‘ill counsel’. He was catastrophically failed by counsellors whom the chroniclers regarded as weak, craven, malign and foolish. And, quite frankly, he was just as bad as they were. Plus ça change.

I have just written a new paper for Policy Exchange – ‘Danegeld and Danegeldism’ – which identifies the same syndrome at work in contemporary Britain. I take seven separate policy areas – the Chagos Islands, reparations, overseas aid, Europe, Ireland, Iran and Islamism – and examine the multiple ways in which successive governments have avoided difficult decisions, appeased their opponents, handed over favours and ultimately tried to pay for the issue to go away. It never does, of course. Those on the other side, like the Vikings, simply come back for more and more. In some cases, as with Ireland or the Chagos, our political leaders have abased themselves spectacularly in public – encouraging prosecutions of British soldiers for their actions on behalf of the Crown in vicious conflicts often decades ago or promising more and more monetary bait for a Mauritian government which, like that of the Republic of Ireland, is institutionally incapable of reciprocating. In other cases, like the Burnham government’s attempt to rejoin the EU by stealth and – as in the 1960s – from a position of economic weakness from which they hope Europe will rescue them (as it failed to do in the 1970s), they seem to believe that people just won’t notice.

And over reparations, which have returned with a bang to the headlines because of the extraordinarily inept behaviour of the Prime Minister and his Foreign Secretary (not to mention the weaselly sanctimony of the leaders of the Church of England, dissected in a previous Policy Exchange report, ‘The Case Against Reparations’) we simply act like a giant blancmange in the face of a mercenary and ahistorical campaign to squeeze us dry.

Why do we behave like this?

Why do we behave like this? It is true that there are times when prudence dictates concessions. I identify many such cases in my paper. Not going to war with the United States in the early 1860s was an excellent example. Catholic emancipation in 1829, support for the seminary at Maynooth and later in the nineteenth century other measures which recognised the force and legitimacy of Irish nationalism were also sensible. So was the Good Friday Agreement. But letting PIRA and Sinn Fein then dictate the terms of trade was not. A better relationship with the EU would certainly be desirable. But capitulating to the terms Brussels imposes in order not to have difficult conversations at dinner parties is not.

The problem is essentially a failure of nerve and the declinist mindset that has gripped large parts of our political class since 1945 – and deepened over time. The way the British state has deliberately sought to distance itself from difficult policy choices since 1997 has worsened matters. And the implicit belief of many of our leaders that law not only precedes politics but dictates its outcomes – aided and abetted by activist lawyers and judges – has disabled the central function of government, which is to consult the national interest at all times, and obscured the centrality in the British system of parliamentary sovereignty. The task for the next government will be to make sure that this – not that of national pride and self-assertion – is the next tide that ebbs.