The Commonwealth Burden

An albatross, as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner found to his cost, may be an imposing bird in flight, but awfully heavy to carry around one’s neck. It is in this sense that it is apposite to compare the Commonwealth of Nations to the albatross.

“How long,” asked Enoch Powell, not at all rhetorically, in a recent article in the London Daily Telegraph, “can we healthily continue the diet of delusion?”—in reference to the inordinately long and extravagantly expensive circus then starting in New Delhi. I refer of course to the Conference of Commonwealth Heads of State or Government. I cavil only at the qualification “healthily,” which implies that until and including the present, Britain’s health has been unaffected by the “delusion” that the Commonwealth has any meaning other than symbolic.

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Brian Crozier

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An albatross, as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner found to his cost, may be an imposing bird in flight, but awfully heavy to carry around one’s neck. It is in this sense that it is apposite to compare the Commonwealth of Nations to the albatross.

“How long,” asked Enoch Powell, not at all rhetorically, in a recent article in the London Daily Telegraph, “can we healthily continue the diet of delusion?”—in reference to the inordinately long and extravagantly expensive circus then starting in New Delhi. I refer of course to the Conference of Commonwealth Heads of State or Government. I cavil only at the qualification “healthily,” which implies that until and including the present, Britain’s health has been unaffected by the “delusion” that the Commonwealth has any meaning other than symbolic.