Description
In July 2020, in the context of a reinvigorated Black Lives Mater movement and the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston, BBC Radio 4 broadcast an episode of Moral Maze that debated ‘the morality of the British Empire’. Deploying Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualisation of intellectuals and ‘common-sense’, I argue that this episode of Moral Maze functions as an exemplary site that illuminates how the cultural establishment could digest, interpret and domesticise counterhegemonic narratives over the British Empire. Through a textual analysis of the programme, I demonstrate how the legacies of the British Empire are: 1: Reduced to a dinner table debate. 2. Packaged in a balance-sheet format that weighs up the ‘good and ‘bad’ aspect of empire. 3. Framed as temporally remote from contemporary society 4. Presented to be so ‘complicated’ as to evade strong condemnation. I suggest that such framings are pervasive within government and establishment representations of the British Empire in the current British ‘culture war’. Moreover, these representations function to tranquilise counternarratives and reproduce conservative ‘common-sense’ notions of both the past and the present. In the conclusion, I consider the frailties of such ‘common sense’ approaches to empire and how they may be overturned.
