We ended up eating an excellent lunch in the gallery’s restaurant called Light – a good name for the style of cooking and for the gallery itself and for the effect of being near the sea.
What’s Harrow doing in China?
Harrow School is planning a new “campus” in China, on top of the eight it already offers there. You can see why it might want to do such a thing. There is plenty of money in China, where British public schools have a high reputation. Such are the ironies of modern Left-wing thought that Communist China may now be more welcoming to Harrow than is Sir Keir Starmer’s Britain. Promotional pictures show happy Chinese children (of both sexes) wearing Harrovian boaters. To apply the title of its school song, perhaps Harrow will survive in prosperous exile from its original home, Forty Years On.
There is also an argument that the attitudes of China’s regime can be mitigated by Western engagement, producing little oases of liberal civilisation in the great wilderness of totalitarianism. A similar case is made on behalf of the few remaining “non-permanent” judges in Hong Kong, led by the former president of the Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger. Their presence is said to help maintain the standards of the English law against Beijing’s politicisation of justice.
Unfortunately, it is not true. The reason for this is contained in the word “totalitarian”. In China, the control of the nation by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is total. Despite all the changes post-Mao Tse-tung and the vast growth of personal wealth, this remains the case. Whatever is taught in China, whatever law is administered in any part of China, even Hong Kong, indeed whatever human activity in any field is pursued in China, everything comes under the all-seeing eye of the CCP and can be suppressed, punished and destroyed at any moment, without redress.
It follows that all British institutions which lend themselves to China compromise their most distinctive virtues by doing so. They become little fig leaves for the nakedness of dictatorial power. “Still must the battle for freedom be won,” says an extra verse of Forty Years On specially composed in honour of Harrow’s most famous old boy, Winston Churchill. Quite, and by sucking up to Beijing, it won’t be.