Britain can move on from the empire – and human rights law will help us do it | Margaret Evison

Article 2, and the chief coroner’s duty to investigate deaths of service personnel, will make us more wary about going to war

The British are showing signs of being war-weary, the great British bulldog is lying down. Why?

It may be that we have just had enough. But it is also possible that the essential identity of Britain today is changing –that John Bull is becoming a dove. Were all those senior politicians there at Nelson Mandela’s funeral because they wanted to underline the importance of his message for world change, world peace? Has Mahatma Gandhi finally been heard? The world of war is changing: look at the recent vote by MPs not to go into Syria.

The British have always fought for land, for money and goods, for dominance, to be the richest and the best (essentially the empire), and to impress on others the notion of moral high ground. To fight for one’s country, to respect the “glorious dead”, has been an important and lauded part of this heritage.

Maybe now our multicultural society sees things differently, and has more friends and family elsewhere. Politicians who represent us in parliament should reflect who we are and what we believe, and be aware that that may have changed with immigration.

We like to think the violence in our own communities may be turning us against anger and destruction as a solution. For many the Christian ethic, to turn the other cheek – to forgive – may now be more attractive. Not, perhaps, for the fighting gangs of youths who are happier on the familiar streets of Britain than in far-flung, difficult places. Some young men have always enjoyed the adrenalin of fighting, the assertion of their manhood, their supremacy and autonomy, being warriors. But it is interesting that while gang culture raged in the inner cities, in 2009 the British troops fighting in Helmand were very short of boots on the ground.

Television and head-camera recordings have brought to us all the reality of war, of killing another human because your government has told you to, of learning to hate because you are on one side. Death is never easy, it is the final reckoning, and the human drive is for survival, not silence. Death without a clear need to defend our shores, our coffers or our power, and with little clear impact on our national security, has become less acceptable. People have begun to ask why, and to pay attention to each soldier killed. The Wootton Bassett repatriations have moved us all.

President Dwight D Eisenhower, an old soldier, warned Americans that they must guard against the potential influence of the military-industrial complex in 1961, three days before he left office. And it is possible that now instead of fighting for spices, chocolate and tea, we are fighting because of the trade in metal, guns, ships and aeroplanes. This idea is intuitively unattractive to ordinary people, particularly when the same weapons could be used in the future …read more