by Nigel Westmaas, Associate Professor of Africana Studies

Dear

Spectator

Editorial Board,

The announcement by the college that former British Prime Minister David

Cameron has been chosen as the next Sacerdote “Great Names” speaker on campus was carried in full by the

Spectator

newspaper. In the lengthy release on Cameron, the first section provides a general background to Cameron’s roles as businessman, MP, senior government official, and eventually Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. So far so good.

Then the release proceeds to gush that Cameron’s leadership transformed the UK economy and this “created the stability Cameron needed to cut taxes, introduce a national living wage, transform education, reform welfare, protect the National Health Service, and increase pensions.” The statement goes on to detail some of Cameron’s foreign policy “challenges” and successes.

It is not unanticipated that in selling a “Great Names” speaker, the College

would offer a glowing account of the individual in question. What however requires contestation is the uncritical, context-free descriptions of Cameron’s “successes”.

This is typical of Western conceit over development policies, where uncritical

descriptions are replayed over and over like mantras whose repetition converts them to truths. Yet even a surface examination of some of these “successes” would reveal that they have been contested in the UK and have affected millions in less than the dazzling terms of the College’s pronouncements on the former PM. No doubt some of his accomplishments may have been positive to sections of British society but the “normalization” of neoliberal actions like “cutting taxes” and austerity measures requires a rebuttal.

Firstly, it should be noted for instance, that austerity measures under Cameron’s reign had the effect of targeting, for the worse, some of the most vulnerable poor people, including people with disabilities. While the Hamilton report noted that Cameron got a number of families off welfare, the truth is more nuanced than the Hamilton accolade suggests. In fact, it was also true that the number of people reliant on foodbanks grew during this time. One study in 2015 estimated a 19 percent rise in foodbanks and related this directly to austerity measures of the British government.

Secondly, Cameron has also been a major player in the toxic politics over im-

migration in the UK and EU. Under his stewardship, we already saw some of the problematic language and actions of his successor. Indeed there was a demonization of immigrants and Theresa May, then Home Secretary under Cameron, even arranged a billboard campaign telling illegal immigrants to “go home or face arrest” in known multiethnic areas of the UK. May eventually backed down from this indecent campaign and said it would not be repeated. Many Caribbean immigrants who went to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s in what was called the “Windrush” generation felt the effects of this policy, with some being wrongly deported in what became the “Windrush scandal”. Mr Cameron was also associated with problematic language about refugees, deeming them “swarms” at one point in his administration, although at the time he used this “insect metaphor” the UK was taking in far, far below the number of refugees taken in by countries like Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan.

Thirdly, Cameron himself, in contradiction of his putative support for the anti-Brexit stand, at one point toyed with anti-EU feeling to appease his parliamentary back benchers. The rest is history. Cameron’s referendum option backfired and Brexit was the reality.

The Hamilton report on this Great Speaker exposes even as it is designed to

hide the underbelly of Western ‘normalization’ of its economic goals and political policy frameworks as logical and beyond challenge. The lesson here is that the Western canon on international affairs is blithely taken

as the “truth” even if it involves social, economic, political or military marauding into foreign territories — whether the intervention is an IMF visitation into a developing country or a military incursion into anywhere but another Western nation.

At best, a kind of pro forma “regret” might follow ten years or more after an act of national indiscretion or of international crime (check the decision to invade Iraq), but the ability of Western societies’ to conduct national and international activities with the halo of justification continues.

All this was implicit in the starry praise of Cameron in the Hamilton announcement. While to be fair, he is by no means as bad as some of his predecessors as prime ministers (one can think of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism for example), placing his actions in a more realistic frame than accorded in the announcement was the main purpose of my response.

All for, and in support of the record.

Nigel Westmaas

Africana Studies