Megxit and Brexit

 Among the guests on the Harry'n'Meghan Netflix lovein were Graun stalwarts Afua (call me Afwah, you racist!) Hirsch and D Olusoga. Both have appeared in this specific blog, Hirsch most spectacularly for saying in the run up to the Referendum that one(!) black man she had spoken to had predicted the return of Teddy Boys running through the streets beating up black people .

Olusoga has produed some very good work on the history of slavery in the UK and traced the massive amounts of compensation paid to British families after the trade was stopped. Since then he has been an enthusiastic member of the lobby that sees racism as everywhere, in all sorts of subtle and covert forms, in microaggressions like raised eyebrows, nods, winks, glances and questions like 'Where do you come from?'  It has been developed by Black Lives Matter and its academic wing Critical Race Theory and is currently very popular, strong enough to affect the content of some academic journals in fact. 

The Netflix documentary was apparently awash with that perspective although I didn't watch it. As a supporting act on the Netflix piece, Olusoga's remarks concerned British racism. The Graun misses the specific chance to link the two issues, and the only item I coud find on Hirsch's contribution was a piece by Olusoga in the Graun in 2017) on the phrase 'Empire 2.0' which Hirsch used in the documentary ( but did not invent -- they just take in each other's washing):

 Whitehall officials had described plans for Britain’s post-Brexit trading relationship with the Commonwealth as “Empire 2.0"

The Graun today offers a general review, which follows most of the British press in seeing the 3-hour documentary as overblown, but recommends:

3. David Olusoga and Afua Hirsch should present a show about the British empire

By far the most enjoyable parts of the series have been the bits where Harry and Meghan leave David Olusoga and Afua Hirsch to give us a potted run-through of the British empire. In these parts, the weird reality-show pity-party vibe gives way to something much more meaty. We hear about British slavery, and how much of it was controlled by the royal family. We hear about the Commonwealth, and how it’s really just a last-ditch effort to cling to past glories. We see old colonial relics that line the palaces of the UK. What’s fascinating is that Harry doesn’t seem to be entirely onboard with the notion; there are times where he speaks fondly of “travelling halfway across the Commonwealth” as if he thinks it’s the entire world. But anyway, a whole show like this, unvarnished and contemporary, would be tremendous.

Returning to the missed links with Brexit, according to the Spectator:

Probably the most amusing part of the series is the insinuation that somehow the vote to leave the EU in 2016 was linked to criticism of the couple. A grim-faced Harry says the series is not ‘just about our story’, adding: ‘This has always been much bigger than us’.

Academic David Olusoga then says, unchallenged, that the ‘fairy tale’ of Harry and Meghan was ’embedding itself in a nation that is having a pretty toxic debate about the European Union.’ He continues that ‘immigration was at the absolute centre’ of that debate, and that ‘immigration is very often in this country a cipher for race’, followed by a series of clips of Brits making racist comments.