Why the Right Is Panicking About “Decolonisation”

The latest idea to send right-wing commentators into a frothing panic is “decolonisation”. Apparently, it represents an existential threat to Western civilisation — an effort to censor traditional Western ideas and replace them with pernicious liberalism and “woke”.

This is, of course, nonsense.

Empire Didn’t Need Explaining

My grandparents were moderate supporters of the British Empire. They were proud of parts of it, broadly accepted it as the way the world worked, and were generally content to see it brought to an end after the Second World War.

But they never sat around debating why Empire was morally justified. No one handed them pamphlets explaining why it was acceptable to invade other countries and take their resources. No one invited them to lectures defending imperialism as an ethical system.

They didn’t need to. The assumptions of Empire — including beliefs about racial hierarchy and civilisational superiority — were simply everywhere.

How Ideology Becomes Invisible

Imperial ideas were soaked into:

• popular literature
• music hall and theatre
• classical music
• children’s stories and adventure novels

They were ambient. Unremarkable. Accepted as “how things were”.

That is how ideology works when it is dominant: it becomes invisible. It stops sounding like politics and starts sounding like common sense.

Some of those assumptions have faded over time. Others have lingered, continuing to shape British society and to limit the lives and opportunities of some Britons.

And at a moment when there is a concerted attempt to persuade voters to support ethnic cleansing under the euphemism of “remigration”, it matters more than ever to surface those inherited ideas and examine them openly.

Decolonisation Is Not “Cancellation”

This is where the right’s argument collapses.

Decolonisation does not mean “cancelling” culture. It means recognising context and consequence.

It means, for example, acknowledging that while Sax Rohmer helped popularise the modern detective novel, his Fu Manchu stories were openly racist — and asking how those racialised ideas still echo through British popular culture.

That is analysis, not erasure.

It is no different from how historians, literary scholars, and cultural critics have worked for decades.

Empire: Economics and Ideology

For a more formal framing, Hannah Arendt argued that every empire has two core components:

1. Unequal economic relations, in which one society systematically exploits another
2. An imperial ideology, which justifies that exploitation and motivates those at the frontier of empire to keep expanding

The economic structure of empire is remarkably consistent across history. The ideological justification, however, changes with time and place.

Hence:

• Pax Britannica
• Padroado Real
• The White Man’s Burden

Different stories, same function.

Why This Terrifies the Right

Understanding how imperial ideology lingers in modern Britain should not be frightening. It is a standard academic exercise, no more radical than how historians have examined religion, class, or nationalism.

And yet it inspires panic — the fear that British culture or civilisation is being “downgraded” or discarded to make room for diversity, pluralism, or other supposedly suspect ideas.

What is striking is that those most alarmed are often the least engaged with British culture in any serious sense — people whose idea of civilisation rarely extends beyond two world wars and one World Cup.

When civilisation feels that fragile, the problem is not decolonisation.

It is the shallowness of what is being defended.

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