"Why David Dimbleby may well be the fourth horseman of the apocalypse" and other stories

The Question Time audience is never the most discerning at the best of times. An uneasy alliance of self-appointed ‘pillars of the community’, embarrassingly smug students and ladies of a certain age with a Dimbleby-tinged burning in their loins, their contributions are rarely coherent, let alone rational. Whoops and frantic clapping often follow the panellists’ cheapest party point-scoring, while the occasional snippet of wisdom that does manage to emerge through the tide of banality is generally greeted by confused silence and wary stares.

Yesterday’s edition was no different in this respect to any other week's. The great and the good of Bath had dutifully turned out to bestow their habitually erroneous blessing/curse on the participants and all was as well. The minister, as ever, was booed like a pantomime wicked step-mother, the ex-bishop tolerated as an drunk elderly relative at Christmas, and Dimbleby’s intermittent quips lapped up. But then the question of whether the British government should apologise for its role in the slave trade was asked, and the mood turned.

‘Why should we turn into a nation of apologists?’ stormed the Tory panellist. ‘You can’t apologise to the dead – why can’t everyone just get over it!’ replied the audience, rapturously signalling their agreement. The honourable leader of UKIP expressed his disgust that the 200th anniversary of Parliament’s abolishment of legislation allowing the trade of slaves was somehow being turned into a thing of shame, rather than the ‘wondrous’ moment in our history that it truly was. An apology would be meaningless, a woman raged - it’s nothing to do with us, what is everyone’s problem? The one person on the panel who argued otherwise, suggesting that if descendents of the enslaved want an apology then it’s probably the least that the descendents of the slavers owe them, was shouted down by the baying crowd and henceforth ignored.

The overtly celebratory nature of this outright rejection of national responsibility was shocking, and not a little disgusting. It demonstrated a singular lack of recognition of the manner in which history is not only linked to today’s world but actually created it. Not one member of the audience seemed to realise that today’s division of world riches, evident not only on a global scale but even when looking at the varying levels of wealth in a city at the centre of the slave market like Bristol, is in large part contingent on the horrendous events of 200 years ago. For the crowd last night, and no doubt much of the country, history begins afresh every day. What happened yesterday is irrelevant - a particular event is by no means a culmination of preceding ones but a separate act, standing free of context and to be judged solely within its own narrow limits.

It is this dismissal of history which allows the government to consistently deny that their neo-colonial pre-emptive war is in any way responsible for anti-Western feeling, because it occurred after September 11th. For those who accept that the world began anew on that fateful day, anything that took place previously is a cumbersome irrelevance. The first Gulf War, the murderous Iraqi sanctions and accompanying bombings, the cultural genocide of the Palestinians, the invasion of Afghanistan and the overthrowal of the elected Iranian government in the 1970s to highlight just a few episodes…all are consigned to the dustbin of a by-gone age, as applicable today as a horse and carriage on the motorway.

It is this dismissal of history which allows the anti-immigration brigade to trumpet the glories of an empire that won its ill-gotten gains through a thoroughly fictitious position as the ‘mother nation’ while, in the same breath, viciously denounce anyone who might dare to believe the hype and attempt to share in the glory by moving to the ‘mother’s’ bosom. Immigration is the inevitable fruit of empire and may well be its only saving grace, but to the screaming tabloid or three lion-tattooed cretin the very concept that there might be a link is simply anathemous.


And, finally, it is this dismissal of history which perpetuates the pattern of violence begetting violence that has dominated human society since the emergence of such a thing. Until people begin to recognise that the world in which they live did not arrive fully formed, but is just another step in a line of development that stretches back to the beginning of time, reaction will follow reaction ceaselessly, destroying all in its wake. The blurring of the line between symptom and cause is nothing but a complicit washing of the hands that insists that today is bound by today alone, just as yesterday was bound only by itself. It is a deliberate cultural blindness that leads only to disaster, a disaster of which the idiocy and nastiness of a baying Question Time audience is but a weak reflection.