It is rare for a political memoir to be anything but a blandly written exercise in self-congratulation, and it is to Rory Stewart’s credit that his is lively, readable and self-conscious. His Politics On the Edge: A Memoir from Within is a valuable testament to the rot that has spread so far and so wide in British politics. He is also recognisably human in a way that slick careerists like David Cameron and Rishi Sunak are not. Stewart’s memoir reads like a memoir by an actual individual—another rarity of the genre.

Perhaps this is because Stewart came to politics late after a career in diplomacy and years of walking from Afghanistan to Nepal. Privileged his upbringing may have been, but he has had a full life outside of politics and evinces a genuine interest in people, places and principles—all things that are sadly lacking in much of our political class.

Stewart’s exposure of the farcical and ineffective inner workings of successive Tory governments since he was elected to Parliament in 2010 is damning. The scheming, dishonest, backstabbing, vulgar nature of politics is hardly news, but Stewart shows just how malignant the Tories have become ever since Brexit and the rise of Boris Johnson. His insights into the characters of figures like Johnson and Liz Truss, both of whom he worked directly under at different points of his political career, are as valuable as they are depressing, and expose them as the intellectual and moral pygmies that we already knew they were.

In the end, having failed in his bid for leadership of the party in 2019, Stewart resigned from the Cabinet and was purged by the victorious Johnson. This is another rarity in politics: Stewart had said he would not remain in the Cabinet if Johnson became prime minister, and, unlike so many who casually abandon their principles when they get in the way of ambition (Michael Gove springs to mind), he stuck by what he had said.

Would the Brexit debacle have gone ahead if Stewart had become prime minister? He states that he would have championed a version of Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement rather than the chaotic Brexit we actually got from Johnson or supporting a second referendum. Sensible as Stewart makes the May agreement sound, one wonders how he would have managed to get it through Parliament, given that May herself failed time and time again to do so. Appeals to sensible centrism had long since lost their persuasive powers in the Tory party.

One of Stewart’s less endearing characteristics is his somewhat self-important view of himself. In the book, he is a reluctant hero, come to save the Tories (and the rest of us) from a Johnsonian disaster. He is a defender of the centrist liberal consensus against right-wing radicals hell-bent on revolution. And he, the noble idealist, is slowly disillusioned by politics: ‘I felt myself becoming less intellectually inquisitive, coarser and less confident every single day.’ Elsewhere: ‘I began to feel that the longer I stayed in politics, the stupider and the less honourable I was becoming…’ In the end, Stewart seems to hate what he calls ‘this rebarbative profession’.

All this sometimes feels self-indulgent, albeit genuine. And, in fairness, Stewart does warn us from the outset:

‘I have tried to be honest about my own vanity, ambitions and failures, but I will have often failed to judge myself in the way that I judge others. I can see no way, however, of entirely avoiding the risks of personal memory in reconstructing a decade of life. The alternative would be blandness, evasion or silence.’  

In avoiding those literary sins, Stewart is very successful. But one does sometimes tire of the ‘centrist saviour’ mode in which he writes: ‘[If Johnson’s] lies took him to victory, his mendacity and misdemeanours would rip the Conservative Party to pieces, unleash the most sinister instincts of the Tory Right, and pitch Britain into a virtual civil war.’ Stewart, of course, saw himself as the one to save us all from that outcome.

Lest I give a false impression, I did enjoy the book, and I admire Stewart. He is honest, decent and self-reflective, despite the odd lapse into the sanctimonious. And he is fundamentally right about the disaster that was Boris Johnson and Brexit. Though how Brexit could have been anything but a disaster, whatever form it took, is beyond me—Johnson’s deal was not, after all, radically different from May’s.

But he also misses something very important: the Tory Party was already rotten long before Johnson came to power. Stewart is initially sceptical about David Cameron, but comes to see him as the ‘last representative of the old Blairite liberal order’. And he positively swoons over Theresa May—in a recent interview with her on the podcast he co-hosts with Alastair Campbell, he called May ‘one of my genuine political heroes’.

Yet it was Cameron who promised a Brexit referendum to appease ‘the most sinister instincts of the Tory Right’, and May who, as Home Secretary, presided over the ‘hostile environment policy’ that led to the wrongful deportation of scores of non-white British citizens. A study commissioned by the Home Office itself found that the Windrush scandal was a result of decades of racist policymaking.

In other words, the worst instincts of the Tory party were nurtured, if not completely welcomed, from at least 2010, not 2016, and Stewart’s failure to see that, not to mention his failure to do anything about it while in Parliament, was his most serious flaw. The journalist Nick Cohen, in his review of Stewart’s memoir, puts it more bluntly:

‘Stewart cannot tell the whole story because he does not understand the failings of moderate conservatism. The most glaring is its self-delusion. There was no way the party would accept him or any other liberal conservative as its leader. The Tories are a hard right-wing party now and becoming more right wing with every passing year.’

Cohen is slightly too harsh on Stewart, but he is essentially correct. Would we have been better off if Rory Stewart had become prime minister? Probably. But how likely was that in the first place with a Tory party like the one we have had for quite some time? Not very. Stuck in a bubble of centrist conservatism, Stewart cannot help but miss this essential point. He is a principled, decent man who has lived a very interesting life. He is also very enjoyable to read. But the ‘good chap’ theory of politics has always been a flawed and foolish one, and Stewart’s blind impotence in the face of his party’s embrace of catastrophic populism is not charming in the slightest.

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The post ‘This rebarbative profession’ – Rory Stewart’s ‘Politics on the Edge’, reviewed appeared first on The Freethinker.

During the coronation of King Charles III, the Metropolitan Police arrested 64 people, most of whom they claimed were there to disrupt the inauguration of our new head of state. Six of these were members of the group Republic, which seeks to abolish the monarchy. They were detained for 16 hours.

What terrible disruption did these nefarious republicans have in mind? Were they planning to plant bombs in letterboxes? Were they going to throw paint at the King’s golden carriage? No. They were there to hold up some placards in protest against the institution of monarchy. They liaised with the Met for months before the coronation and, so far as we know, had no plans to do anything seriously disruptive, let alone illegal.

The Republic protesters were arrested because the police suspected they were going to ‘lock-on’ to objects so that they could not be easily removed. This power was given to the police by the absurd and draconian Public Order Act 2023—which was passed shortly before the coronation, perhaps not so incidentally.

The arrests were an affront to the very idea of British liberty. Graham Smith, the head of Republic, has denied that he and his fellow protesters had any equipment which would have allowed them to attach themselves to anything. But even if they did, they would have simply been victims of legal rather than illegal illiberalism.

Worse, the coronation arrests form part of a pattern. At the King’s Accession Proclamation in Oxford last September, one man was arrested for shouting three words: ‘Who elected him?’ Not long afterward, in London, another man was threatened with arrest for walking while holding a blank sheet of paper: he was told by an officer that he would probably be arrested if he dared to write ‘Not my king’ on it.

Meanwhile, King Charles III, the supposed defender of our constitution and our liberties, has been silent throughout it all. Is not the monarch, symbolically at least, supposed to be the ultimate guarantor of our freedom?

Enter Graham Smith once more, who, fresh from detention, has recently released a book making the case against the monarchy and for a republic. In writing Abolish the Monarchy: Why We Should and How We Will, Smith has done all republicans a great favour: here, in one slim volume, is the ultimate knockdown of the royals, which shreds every one of the usual monarchist arguments and presents an inspiring vision of a future British Republic.

Smith’s book is tightly argued and very well-researched: a testament to his decades of republican activism. Every monarchist should read it. If they remain unconvinced upon closing it, they either have a brilliant case for monarchy that has yet to be made or their brains have simply gone so soft from Windsor worship that they are unable to change their minds.

Most of the arguments Smith presents will not be new to staunch republicans like me, but they are argued so well and backed up so strongly that one envies his knowledge and skill. Even one well-versed in the perfidy of the Windsors might discover new lows. Did you know, for example, that, in the 1960s, the late Queen Elizabeth II successfully lobbied for the royal household to be exempt from race discrimination laws and that this exemption still stands today?

Not that Abolish the Monarchy is merely a personal attack on the royals, though there is plenty of that. It is, fundamentally, a book about our constitution and our principles. Smith argues that the monarchy is the source of many of our political woes, not because the monarch has day-to-day political power, but because the near-limitless power of the Crown is now invested in the Prime Minister:

‘This idea of Britain’s parliamentary democracy as the blueprint the world has taken to its heart, of Britain as one of the oldest, most stable democracies in the world, is founded on a bargain that has suited the interests of both the royals and the political classes alike. The reality is somewhat different: a parliament that has stumbled from one reform to the next, begrudgingly moving on the issue of suffrage while slowly centralizing power in the hands of the House of Commons, and then concentrating power further into Downing Street. Simply put, who has power and why in Britain, is a matter of historical contingency. We could do a lot better.’

This centralisation of power, and the powerlessness of our head of state in the face of it, is one of Smith’s favourite themes. Without an elected head of state and a written constitution, we are left at the mercy of parliamentary sovereignty—which in practice means the supremacy of the government. There is almost nothing stopping the Prime Minister of the day from legislating for whatever they wish, so long as they have an unassailable parliamentary majority. And this is not even to mention the sweeping powers, not subject to any sort of democratic process, afforded to the Prime Minister by the royal prerogative and the Privy Council.

Of course, we are unlikely to become a dictatorship, as Smith acknowledges. We have a strong liberal democratic culture despite the flaws in our constitution. But we would be better off with proper constitutional guarantees of our liberties, rather than trusting their safekeeping to Prime Ministers with monarchical powers. And these flaws can still threaten our democracy even if we never become a full-blown authoritarian state—think, for example, of the Queen’s helplessness in the face of Boris Johnson’s 2019 prorogation of Parliament, which the Supreme Court held to be unlawful.

Another of Smith’s most important points is that Britain’s transformation into a democracy is incomplete. All that we have gained over the centuries has had to be wrested away from the clutches of monarchs and politicians, and our liberal culture owes little to them – least of all to the monarchs. All we lack now is a properly democratic constitutional system. A liberal democratic culture without a written liberal democratic constitution and all the structures that flow from such a constitution is one always at the mercy of the dishonest and the mendacious, just as a written constitution is hardly worth the paper it is written on if there is no democratic culture in place to uphold its spirit. Right now, we have one, but not the other.

But what if we had both? What if we also had a written constitution, a fully democratic parliament, and an elected head of state—that is, what if we had a secular democratic parliamentary republic?

Would Britain be soulless? Would it be (to caricature the monarchist position) just another boring country? The answer to both questions is no. We would still have our history and our culture, and we would have finally fulfilled the promise of our long and honourable democratic tradition.

No president would be perfect, but they would be accountable, and they would represent us in a way no monarch ever could. Personally, I would prefer a head of state who could effectively enforce a written constitution and bravely lead the way in defending liberal values. Think of Václav Havel and Mary Robinson, two presidents who proudly supported Salman Rushdie in the 1990s while our own head of state, the great champion of our vaunted liberties, was silent. Our monarchs seem to have spent more time secretly lobbying for tax exemptions than standing up for liberty.

If there is one criticism I would make of Abolish the Monarchy, it is that it is at times too tame, too moderate. This is part of Republic’s strategy to widen its appeal, but it does a disservice to the genuine radicalism at the heart of the republican position. This is why Abolish the Monarchy does not quite fit into the great British pamphleteering tradition epitomised by Thomas Paine.

Certainly, Smith is right that demanding a British Republic is not to advocate a replay of the French Revolution, and that we already have most of the pieces in place to create a democratic parliamentary republic. But there is something revolutionary about the spirit of republicanism. As he points out, republicanism is essentially the demand for a true liberal democracy: ‘[republicanism is about] more than replacing one head of state with another—it’s about rebalancing power between government, Parliament, and people. … The challenge is to take what we have and make it democratic, top to bottom.’ Republicans should not be so coy about the radicalism of this project.

The monarchy is by definition undemocratic, if not anti-democratic, as well as sectarian and secretive. Almost all the members of the Royal Family are, in this republican’s view at least, negligible human beings. If the royals are stunted by their upbringing, a republic would set not only us but them free, too. For republicans, the Crown is not the bedrock of our liberties, but rather the fount of all that is rotten and fetid in our politics. The constitutional monarchy is an insult to the best of our history and culture. In short: bring on the British Republic.

Graham Smith, Abolish the Monarchy: Why We Should and How We Will, published by Penguin, 1 June 2023.

See also: The Freethinker and early republicanism: the letter by a ‘librarian from Colchester’ that led to the formation of Republic

Graham Smith (not that type of republican), interview on the National Secular Society podcast.

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The post Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed appeared first on The Freethinker.

In the last fortnight, the National Secular Society participated in two quite different discussion events in London. Both events contributed to the debate on how and why Britain should continue its movement towards greater secularisation, why religious privilege should be abolished, and the extent to which free speech should be a fundamental democratic principle.

On Wednesday 10th May, the Free Speech Union hosted FSU In-Depth: Blasphemy law by the back door, in central London. The speakers included the NSS’s CEO, Stephen Evans. He was joined by Dr Rakib Ehsan, author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities; Emma Webb, director of the UK branch of the Common Sense Society and a member of the National Conservatism conference committee; and Ben Jones, the deputy director of the FSU cases team, who has recently completed a PhD on British ex-Muslims. The meeting was chaired by the FSU’s founder and director, Toby Young.

On Wednesday 17th May, the NSS hosted Future of church and state in Committee Room 5 of the Houses of Parliament. Stephen Evans chaired a disparate panel consisting of the veteran Labour journalist and long-term secularist Polly Toynbee; Martyn Percy, former Dean of Christ Church, Oxford; Tommy Sheppard, a Scottish National Party MP and chair of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group; and Jayne Ozanne, a gay evangelical Christian activist.

In the ‘culture wars’ which are so fracturing British society at present, the NSS occupies a finely balanced position.

On the one hand, the society has been a strong critic of the imposition of de facto blasphemy laws by religious groups in the UK. Opposition to blasphemy laws and the free criticism of religion, as Evans observed at the FSU meeting, have long been key aspects of secularism. This goes right back to 1883, when GW Foote, the second president of the NSS and first editor of the Freethinker, was imprisoned for publishing cartoons that were blasphemous of Christianity. Secularists, from a political perspective, have always resisted the authority adopted by religious institutions and their power to impose their doctrines on wider society.

In recent years, probably dating back to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, the main drive to rein in free speech about religion in the UK has come not from Christians, as in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, but from hardline Muslim organisations and leaders. This was made clear in the Batley Grammar School case, the Jesus and Mo cartoon mug case, and, earlier this year, the Wakefield Koran-scuffing case. The NSS has certainly been vocal in criticising the readiness of secular authorities, including schools and the police, to sacrifice the teacher who showed a cartoon of Mohammed in class, or the student who dropped a Koran, to the wrath of religious demagogues.

As Evans also pointed out, the NSS and the FSU – along with other organisations, including Humanists UK – have criticised the definition of ‘Islamophobia’ that was proposed by the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims and subsequently adopted by Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party, and all of Scotland’s political parties. According to this definition, ‘Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.’ But this invocation of racism enables it to be used as a way of silencing people who criticise Islam, said Evans: as Charles Bradlaugh, founder of the NSS, put it, ‘without free speech, no search for truth is possible.’

The problem is with what Young, who makes no secret of his right-wing sympathies, calls the ‘woke’ left – many of whom, particularly at educational and arts institutions, seem to have fallen over themselves to adopt this muddled concept. When the law academic Steven Greer was accused of Islamophobia by the Bristol Islamic Society – falsely, as was later proven – it was his own progressive colleagues, as well as the university authorities, who were involved in his ostracism and effective ‘cancellation’.

On the other hand, Rakib Ehsan argued that freedom of expression was the ‘friend’ of socially conservative minorities, such as the Muslim community in which he had grown up. He explained that one of the reasons he supported free speech was that he wanted to be able to criticise the teaching of some forms of sex and relationships education at his children’s school. In doing so, he accepted that the right to criticise extends to everyone. (Readers may recall the controversy surrounding the protests by conservative Muslim parents in Birmingham in 2019 against the teaching of LGBT relationships at a primary school.)

George Orwell, one of the greatest of free speech advocates and a socialist, declared, ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ The FSU has duly adopted this as one of its slogans. In ironic contrast, the Guardian seems of late to have become ambivalent about Orwell’s legacy, including these very words.

Such points of tension raise fundamental questions. If there should be free speech about religion, should there also be free speech about other equally emotive subjects, such as race or transgender debates? Where is the line to be drawn, in any of these cases, between criticising ideas and criticising persons? How far should either notions of offensiveness, or parents’ rigid views about any subject, influence what is taught in schools?

The attitude of the FSU was clear: ‘free speech’ simpliciter should be added to the list of ‘British values’ that are affixed to the classroom wall in schools across the country. At a time when many in the Conservative party are trying to replace the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights, the ‘British values’ list almost seems to have become a mini-manifesto for the Bill. Those on the left may see the whole idea of ‘British values’ as a distasteful form of nationalism, as well as overly authoritarian. And yet it was the left-leaning and nationalistic SNP that introduced Scotland’s Hate Crime Act 2021, which restricts speech about a range of protected characteristics, including, to a lesser extent, religion.

Among Britain’s neighbours, free speech on religion and other matters is currently under threat. As Young pointed out, the Criminal Justice Bill 2022, currently passing through the Irish Parliament, looks like an attempt to reintroduce blasphemy offences into a country that has only just formally abolished them. The Bill would criminalise behaviour that is ‘likely to incite violence or hatred’ against a person or group on account of protected characteristics, including religion, provided such behaviour is done either with intent to incite violence or with recklessness as to whether violence is incited. This seems like a dangerously low bar. The European Union is also considering whether to extend ‘the list of EU crimes to hate speech and hate crime’, which may have a similar effect.

For its part, the FSU is in turbulent waters: although it claims to be a ‘non-partisan, mass-membership public interest body’, its director’s sympathies make it all the easier for progressives simply to dismiss it as a right-wing organisation. On the same day that the NSS was meeting to discuss church and state, Young gave a talk to the National Conservatism conference entitled ‘A Dispatch from the Woke Wars’ – a move unlikely to endear him to the left.

Progressives who have endorsed the Islamophobia definition would doubtless claim that criticism of Islam by an organisation like the FSU can all too easily slip into xenophobia and hatred of Muslims and immigrants generally. This is an area fraught with controversy. It certainly increases the delicacy of the NSS’s position, as the representative of ‘secular liberals’ who support free speech on religion but categorically oppose what the NSS describes as ‘anti-Muslim bigotry’.

National Conservatism emphasises ‘God and public religion’; the list of talks at its conference included such titles as ‘Faith, Family, Flag, Freedom’. Its supporters would doubtless not have approved of many of the secularist campaign aims discussed by Stephen Evans, Polly Toynbee et al.; indeed, the week before, Young had interrogated Evans as to whether the NSS’s opposition to state-funded faith schools was not just ‘dogmatic secularism’. The proposals mooted by the panel included removing the bishops from the House of Lords, disestablishing the Church of England, abolishing prayers at the beginning of Parliamentary sittings, and removing state funding from faith schools. Abolishing the monarchy was mentioned, though the NSS itself does not have a position on this issue.

Although all the speakers were broadly secularist, there were differences of emphasis, and a few tensions, between the religious and non-religious stances represented.

On the non-religious side, Tommy Sheppard focused on the removal of bishops from the House of Lords and the replacement of Parliamentary prayers, which he said ‘offends against our sense of democracy’, with a ‘secular moment of reflection’. Polly Toynbee, for her part, poked fun at the anachronistic moments in the coronation, including the ‘Wizard of Oz’ anointment behind a screen. She read out the oaths which the king swore to ‘maintain the laws of God’ and the ‘Protestant reform religion’, and described the event as a ‘shocking wake-up moment’ for those who had not expected so much religion to be involved. She also highlighted the continued opposition to assisted dying legislation by bishops and other religious representatives.

There was something of the sermon in Martyn Percy’s thoughtful speech, in which he compared the Church of England to a ‘overcrowded vestry cupboard’. He focused on the Church’s numerous involvements in child sexual abuse scandals and safeguarding failures in recent years, right up to the present. He also made the point that the Church has its own system of canon law which still ‘trumps common law’. The solution, he said, quoting Michael Caine, was to ‘blow the bloody doors off’ and clean it out from top to bottom.

Jayne Ozanne said that she was not opposed to religious leaders in the House of Lords, as long as they were required to ‘earn the right’ to be there rather than entering ex officio. As a gay Christian, she bemoaned the way in which the bishops in the Lords used their position to push for exemptions to legislation which had the effect of discriminating against people like herself. She also criticised the Church of England’s ‘institutional homophobia’.

In the Q&A session, however, Ozanne warned Toynbee to ‘careful about ridiculing religion’ in the context of the coronation. Toynbee responded tartly that it was ‘not a question of being rude about what some people think of as sacred’, but of the ‘ludicrous’ intersection between religion and the monarchy.

One of the issues which was rather glossed over was how disestablishment would occur in practice. Given the nearly five centuries in which the Church of England has been intertwined with the secular state, there are likely to be far-reaching legal and practical difficulties in disentangling them. This does not mean it should not be done, but, as with any major constitutional change, it will take time and resources, and the devil will be in the detail.

Another problem raised by the discussion goes back, once again, to the culture wars. If Britain is so divided on so many fundamental issues, from Brexit to ‘British values’, from immigration to the definition of ‘woman’, it is very unclear how we as a society are going to be able to reach a consensus on what collective traditions and ideas, if any, we want to adopt. One of the key arguments made by monarchists and supporters of the established church has long been that church and king, and their associated ceremonies, are historic traditions that provide Britain with some sort of identity. Right-wing commentators delight in painting the aims of secularists and humanists as purely destructive, and as leading to a cultural and moral wasteland. This is clearly wrong; but more needs to be done to counter this narrative.

Ultimately, in modern Britain, there seems little necessity to retain an established church, or even a monarch. But the case for their abolition would be strengthened if more consideration were given to what exactly is going to happen once they have gone.

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The post Blasphemy and bishops: how secularists are navigating the culture wars appeared first on The Freethinker.

How, it might be asked, can Salman Rushdie’s new novel about a semi-divine sorceress and the city she creates from a handful of magical seeds have anything worthwhile to say about the ‘real’ world? Surely such stuff is just frivolous fantasy?

Such a demand for relevance to everyday life would miss the point: that serious literature, whether it employs the fantastical or the realist mode, uses the unreal to see the real anew.

This point is, crudely speaking, the guiding principle of what I have come to think of as the Rushdian philosophy of literature, which is most distinctly spelt out across various essays in his non-fiction collection, Languages of Truth (2021). As he puts it: ‘For me, the fantastic has been a way of adding dimensions to the real, adding fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh dimensions to the usual three; a way of enriching and intensifying our experience of the real, rather than escaping from it into superhero-vampire fantasyland.’

Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City, is a sterling example of this philosophy in action. Yes, there is a sorceress who creates a city using magic seeds, and yes, there are also some goddesses and superhuman martial artists, too. But Victory City is very much about the real world and has much to say about the present moment—not in spite of the fabulism, but through it.

The novel tells the story of Pampa Kampana and the city she creates, Bisnaga. Bisnaga is the ‘garbled mispronunciation’ by a foreigner of ‘Vijayanagar’, which is just one letter short of Vijayanagara—the historical South Indian city and empire whose name translates as ‘City of Victory’. Fictionalised versions of real historical figures from Vijanayagara make up much of the novel’s dramatis personae, while real historical events are reimagined throughout. This is one way Rushdie ties the fictional to the real: he provides an alternative or mirror mythology by looking at real history askew and infusing it with his own imaginings. 

In Rushdie’s version, the origins of this great empire lie in the grief of a young girl, Pampa, who watches as her newly-widowed mother immolates herself. After this traumatising experience, the goddess Parvati, one of whose local names is Pampa, gives the girl divine powers, a mission, and a curse:

‘[Y]ou will fight to make sure that no more women are ever burned in this fashion, and that men start considering women in new ways, and you will live just long enough to witness both your success and your failure, to see it all and tell its story, even though once you have finished telling it you will die immediately and nobody will remember you for four hundred and fifty years.’

And so Pampa Kampana creates Bisnaga with magical seeds, and for nearly 250 years she shares in its triumphs and disasters. Pampa always seeks to promote beauty and truth and the rights of women against violence, intolerance and religious fanaticism. Sometimes she is successful, and at other times, she is not. Over the centuries, she is variously Queen of Bisnaga, an exiled enemy of the state and, in the end, a poet mutilated by a king, with only her words, her story, left to her.

In fact, Pampa’s words are the key to the novel, which is structured as a retelling by a modern author of Pampa’s lost and recently found Jayaparajaya (‘Victory and Defeat’). Pampa’s verses make up, in this world, one of the great texts of history, alongside, for example, the ancient Hindu epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. This narrative technique is in keeping with Rushdie’s love of multi-layered fiction. His novels often interrogate the act of storytelling itself: in Victory City, the stories of Pampa Kampana and Bisnaga are refracted through the words of the narrator, who also occasionally interjects to analyse Pampa’s ‘original’ text.

It is not just in its form that Victory City evokes traditional Rushdian themes, but in its content, too. The novel explores exile, hybridity, migration, religion, love, and metamorphosis, and asks a favourite question of Rushdie’s: ‘[N]ow that we find ourselves here…how shall we live?’

That question is spoken in Victory City by the first king of Bisnaga, Hukka, as he and his brother (and Bisnaga’s second ruler) Bukka regard the city and the people newly grown from Pampa’s magical seeds. This new-born civilisation and its populace must decide how they shall live. Over more than two centuries, we are given a variety of answers to the question. Sometimes, Pampa’s ideal of a liberal empire, where women are equal to men, with art and beauty and enquiry at its core, wins out; at other times, it is stifling religious orthodoxy that rules; at yet other times, chaos, violence and strife.

As the words of Parvati to Pampa imply, history is contingent and cyclical, and there can be no final victory. There are only victory and defeat, and victory and defeat, ad infinitum.

Or, as Pampa writes near the end while Bisnaga burns and falls forever (a scene which is exquisitely rendered):

‘Nothing endures, but nothing is meaningless either. We rise, we fall, we rise again, and again we fall. We go on. I too have succeeded and I have also failed. Death is close now. In death do triumph and failure humbly meet. We learn far less from victory than from defeat.’

It is in these cycles of victory and defeat that another Rushdian theme plays out: the clash of narratives. At one point, when Pampa’s religious grandson has become king, she seeks to convince the people of Bisnaga, through her supernatural ‘whispering’, of the superiority of her philosophy:

‘[S]he would have to persuade many of them that the cultured, inclusive, sophisticated narrative of Bisnaga that she was offering them was a better one than the narrow, exclusionary, and, to her way of thinking, barbarian official narrative of the moment.’

She both succeeds and fails in this task, at different moments in the novel, because the people of Bisnaga are as willing to believe in ‘narrow, exclusionary’ narratives as they are in ‘cultured, inclusive, sophisticated’ ones. In Victory City, there is no straightforward triumph of ‘good’ over ‘evil’, but a recognition that humanity is as vulnerable to the tribal and the fanatical as it is capable of nobility and enlightenment. This is one of the problems that humanity will always have to face in ‘real’ life, and it is as apparent in the world, right now, as in Rushdie’s fictionalised version of Vijayanagara.

For example, the conflict between the secular Bukkaites and the Hindu sectarian followers of the holy fanatic Vidyasagar mirrors the current battle between those Indians who hold to the old, secular, pluralistic ideals of Nehru and those who prefer the ascendant Hindu chauvinism of Modi and his followers.

Rushdie also examines the oppression of women under tradition and religion and, in Pampa, gives us a great tragic heroine of resistance to such oppression. In Indian mythology, the goddess Parvati is the reincarnation of Sati, the first wife of Shiva, who sacrificed herself in flames to protect her husband’s honour (hence the name of the old Hindu practice of widow burning, sati or suttee). The mission Parvati gives to Pampa in the novel is a direct repudiation of this practice: why should women have to burn in the name of male honour?

Rushdie’s Parvati has come to oppose her own mythology, and perhaps Pampa’s Jayaparajaya can be read as a female-centred, even feminist, addition to (and subversion of) the canonical texts. Pampa Kampana is emphatically not the Sita of the Ramayana, whose story consists of being a damsel-in-distress and who must constantly prove her purity to men. Today, when the women of Afghanistan are once more enslaved and abused by the Taliban and the women (and men) of Iran are being beaten and killed for championing female emancipation, this theme is all too relevant.

Even the magic and the gods and the miracles of Victory City must give way to the all too human, as another goddess tells the exiled Pampa:

‘The moment is near when the gods must retreat from the world and stop interfering in its history. Very soon human beings…will have to learn to manage without us and make their stories on their own.’

This echoes Rushdie’s point about fantastical fiction being a way to view the real world aslant.

As Bisnaga falls, its people realise that their only hope is each other:

‘[They] understood for the first time that no wall would save them if there were not human beings upon them; that in the end the salvation of human beings came from other human beings and not from things, not matter how large and imposing – and even magical – those things might be.’

Without gods and magic walls, we are left with only the human. For Rushdie, the most human of human activities is storytelling. The final lines of Victory City are given to Pampa Kampana as she dies. Her last verses tell us that kings and empires and great deeds are all just dust in the great expanse of history, and that ‘I myself am nothing now. All that remains is this city of words./Words are the only victors.’

And that is the final and greatest lesson of the novel. Forget all the politics, scheming and divine intervention: none of it really matters. All that matters are the words; all that matters is the story. Literature is here set against temporal and spiritual power—and, ultimately, wins. The exile and the outcast outlast their oppressors, even if the oppressors triumph in the short term.

Should this seem an overly optimistic conclusion, consider Ovid, whom Rushdie has elsewhere cited as an exemplar of such a long-term victory. Ovid was banished from Rome by the Emperor Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea in AD 8. In this backwater, he died forgotten. Yet he continued to write poetry that would survive to this day. In comparison, the glory of the Roman Empire seems short-lived. Or take the poetry of Federico García Lorca, which has outlasted the ideology of the Spanish fascists who murdered him; or the works of imprisoned and exiled dissidents like Serge and Solzhenitsyn, which have outlived the Soviet Union. Victory and defeat, indeed.

Bisnaga falls and Pampa dies, but through her words both her story and the highest ideals of Bisnaga, realised only partially and temporarily in her own lifetime, can continue to live and breathe and inspire. In Victory City, Rushdie shows us the triumph of love, life and literature against philistinism, death and fanaticism. When Pampa Kampana is blinded for a perceived betrayal by Krishnadevaraya, the last great king of Bisnaga, she is slowly restored by the power of telling her own story—the power of words:

‘She began to feel her selfhood returning as she wrote… She could not describe herself as happy – happiness, she felt, had moved out of her vicinity forever – but as she wrote she came closer to the new place where it had taken up residence than at any other time…’

She then begins hearing the ‘whispers’ of the people of Bisnaga, in a reversal of her own ‘whispering’, long ago, to them:

‘They brought the world back to her and took her back into the world. There was nothing to be done about the blindness but now it was more than just darkness, it was filled with people, their faces, their hopes, their fears, their lives… [N]ow, little by little, the whispered secrets of the city allowed joy to be reborn, in the birth of a child, in the building of a home, in the heart of loving families she had never met; in the shoeing of a horse, the ripening of fruits in their orchards, the richness of the harvest. Yes, she reminded herself, terrible things happened, a terrible thing had happened to her, but life on earth was still bountiful, still plenteous, still good. She might be blind, but she could see that there was light.’

Rushdie himself lost an eye to his attacker last year. Yet like Pampa, the power of his imagination and his love of the world survive. Like Pampa, he knows the horrors of this world, but also its goodness, and he can see the light, too. Even if his assassin had succeeded in murdering him, Rushdie’s words would, and will, live on and would – and almost certainly will – outlast the theocratic Iranian regime that has for so long tried and failed to still his tongue. It is a pleasing irony of history that, not long after the attack on Rushdie, the Islamic Republic brought what might just be its final reckoning upon itself with another thuggish assault, this time resulting in the murder of a woman, Mahsa Amini, for not wearing the hijab in accordance with its repressive rules.

Victory City is a literary victory, and a great one at that. In an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker this February, Rushdie expressed his wish that the novel not be seen through the lens of the attack against him. Instead, he wants ‘[readers] to be captured by the tale, to be carried away.’ In this, he has succeeded magnificently.

But it is also appropriate that so many of Victory City’s themes perfectly rebuke those who would see its author silenced or dead. Rushdie’s long resistance to tyranny, his resilience in the face of horrific violence, and his unswerving commitment to liberty and free expression are triumphs of humanism. In other words, Salman Rushdie is a victor, too.

Victory City, by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape, pp 352), will be published on 9 February 2023.

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We live today in a globalised world, where what happens on one side of our planet ripples across and impacts on the other. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the pandemic, supply chain crises, and even Zoom calls across time zones remind us of this every day.

We sometimes imagine that this is a particularly new development. And certainly the pace at which we can travel and connect with people is unprecedented. But freethinkers like George Holyoake in the 1800s also lived in a globalised world.

Or maybe one might call it a globalising world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the British empire, along with the empires of other European nations, gobbled up more and more territory in both hemispheres.

For people like Holyoake, Britain’s global empire was part of everyday life, with people, goods, and ideas from far-flung locations flowing in and out of Britain.

How this mattered for the development of British secularism is the subject of Patrick J. Corbeil’s new book, Empire and Progress in the Victorian Secularist Movement: Imagining a Secular World.

One key factor was how the expansion of the empire led to confrontations with new societies and new religions. Islam had been known for centuries, but Westerners in the nineteenth century were just beginning to learn more about Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism, as information and translations of texts were introduced to Britain from explorers and missionaries in Asia – inevitably in a piecemeal and heavily slanted way.

Freethinkers were interested in these religions as a way to make Christianity seem strange and foreign – something not suited for British civilisation. They argued that Christianity was an offshoot, and an inferior one at that, of these eastern religions. Freethinkers never quite settled on a true origin for Christianity. Some located its origins in Egypt, via the Jews; others identified Buddhism as a likely precursor.

While Christians at this time studied non-Western religions as a way to find evidence for a universal belief in monotheism, freethinkers took much of the same data but applied it in a different way to suggest that Christianity was but a forgery of these other religions, or that all religions descended from the same basic superstitions.

Were these speculations about Christianity’s origins correct? Basically, no. Some were more or less far-fetched than others. The idea that Jesus himself was born into an ancient community of Buddhists, for example, strains credulity. Corbeil’s goal, however, is not to determine whether historical figures were correct or incorrect in their assumptions, but to understand how they thought, and why they used the arguments they did.

In any case, there was sometimes an ugly undertone of antisemitism to these investigations. The Bible was seen as morally revolting in a way connected with its supposedly Jewish character. For example, the freethinker Charles Southwell infamously spoke of the ‘revoltingly odious Jew production, called BIBLE.’

Yet when it came to the practicalities of Jewish rights, freethinkers and secularists were supportive. One anonymous author wrote in 1871, ‘our duty as Freethinkers in this matter is quite clear. We must, so far as we can, break down the bonds of theological hatred and injustice, whether directed against Jews or any other class of human beings.’

In the minds of secularists, progress through self-improvement, science, and education would one day create a virtual utopia. But how did all of these encounters with people beyond Britain’s shores harmonise with this idea of progress?

The belief in progress shaped how the secularists viewed people from other societies and other races. In so far as these foreigners were seen as natural secularists – as potential agents of progress – they were celebrated, especially when they seemed to offer non-theistic systems of morality.

But the belief in universal human progress hit a snag when it was confronted with the idea that some racial groups were simply inferior and incapable of progress. As I have tried to show in my own book, and as Corbeil documents in his, while some secularists embraced this ‘scientific racism’, not all did.

Even for many of those secularists who rejected biological racism, the groups who resisted imperial expansion were nonetheless viewed in a negative light. Worse still was when religious communalism provided inspiration for this resistance. The Maori King Movement in mid nineteenth-century New Zealand, for instance, was infused with prophetic ideas from the Old Testament. In the minds of the secularists, a backward people adopting a backward religion equalled inevitable extinction in the face of progress – though this idea brought them little pleasure.

In all colonial affairs, the secularists saw the introduction of religion as a disaster. Governing a religiously diverse empire actually made secularism, in their minds, all the more necessary, since, as George Holyoake noted, ‘among the 300 millions of population in the British Empire there were not more than 50 million of nominal Christians.’

Indeed, Britain’s government of India in the second half of the nineteenth century was actually a positive lesson for secularists. If, they argued, colonial administrators allowed Indians the right to be Hindus or Muslims, and to access justice on some kind of equal footing, there was no reason that atheists and freethinkers could not live equally at home.

Since so much of present-day atheist, secularist, and humanist thinking was forged in the nineteenth century, it is worth understanding today more about how exactly these freethinkers thought. We have inherited so many of their traditions – and also their contradictions.

In the nineteenth century, the secularists were mostly powerless against the Church of England, and, to a lesser extent, against other denominations. As Corbeil puts it, ‘secularism was first and foremost a self-defensive intellectual formation.’

But what happens when this defensive nineteenth-century ideology exists in a society where non-religious people now constitute a majority, even though religions continue to enjoy many privileges? Furthermore, how do ideas about hopelessly backward religious ‘others’ and their incompatibility with progress play out today?

In the conclusion, Corbeil briefly discusses contemporary issues, including the ‘clash-of-civilisation’ rhetoric of people like the New Atheist author Sam Harris, as well as the issue of Muslim immigration into the UK. The National Secular Society calls for an end to communal faith schools, extra-legal courts like sharia councils, and education that would end the demand for such things. Corbeil, however, wonders whether this leaves new immigrants only with ‘the atomism of secular individualism’ and whether it ignores the possibility that these people ‘might have rational, or at least reasonable, grounds for remaining committed to their traditions, and for asking for accommodation for those practices.’ 

I would counter that the choice is not really so stark, nor so bleak. And furthermore, campaigners, including those such as Maryam Namazie who come from minority backgrounds, have argued that preserving these traditions can actually come at the expense of the ‘minorities within minorities’, in particular women and LGBT people.

I think Corbeil would recognise these problems, but he might also say that such noble goals have often covered up an uglier history in which a supposed defence of rights by a Western power has actually been an impetus for greater control and indeed oppression of such groups.

The issue cannot be resolved definitively here, nor in Corbeil’s book, as he readily admits. But understanding this complicated history is critical as we confront these thorny issues in an increasingly secular world.

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