The news from Accra is a bracing tonic for anyone weary of the West’s moralising monotone. Ghana’s parliament has passed a bill criminalising aspects of LGBTQ+ identity, and the response from the Commonwealth has been a shrill chorus of condemnation. The British High Commissioner has been summoned, aid threats are being brandished, and the usual suspects in London are dusting off their sanctimony. But let us pause. What does it mean for the Commonwealth to demand that Ghana—a sovereign republic with its own cultural and religious heritage—adopt the sexual mores of Bloomsbury dinner parties?
This is not about human rights. It is about power. The Commonwealth, that peculiar hangover from empire, has long traded on a fiction of shared values. In practice, it was a club for post-colonial elites to maintain British influence while pretending to be equals. Now it has become a moral tribunal, issuing diktats on issues that were scarcely discussed in Westminster a generation ago. The British government, which a few decades ago prosecuted gay men and treated homosexuality as a security risk, now lectures Ghana on ‘British values’. The irony is so thick you could cut it with a pith helmet.
Ghana’s bill is draconian. It proposes prison sentences for merely identifying as LGBTQ+. That is wrong, illiberal, and I say so without hesitation. But the response from the Commonwealth is worse: it is dishonest. It treats a complex social and theological debate as a binary test of civilisation. It ignores the reality that most Ghanaians, like most Nigerians, Ugandans, and Kenyans, see homosexuality as inconsistent with their traditions and faith. To them, the Western demand is not liberation but a new form of colonisation: the imposition of a secular, progressive orthodoxy that has no roots in their soil.
The usual retort is that human rights are universal. But whose universality? The right to free expression was once universal; now it is subject to ever-narrowing exceptions for hate speech. The right to religious freedom is universal; except when it collides with LGBTQ+ rights, in which case it must yield. The West has spent two decades refashioning its own moral code, and now it expects the rest of the world to adopt it overnight. Worse, it uses the levers of aid and diplomatic pressure to enforce compliance. This is not persuasion. It is financial blackmail dressed as principle.
Let us also note the hypocrisy of the timing. While the Commonwealth wrings its hands over Accra, Saudi Arabia—where homosexuality is punishable by death—is a valued trade partner and ally in the war on terror. No aid is threatened there. Do not mistake this for consistency. It is the selective outrage of the powerful, whose moral compass spins wildly according to economic interest.
The real issue is not Ghana’s bill. It is the West’s assumption that its own cultural revolution must be adopted globally, and that any resistance is proof of backwardness. This is decadence disguised as universalism. The Victorian empire builders thought they were spreading civilisation; we think we are spreading rights. Both are forms of cultural imperialism, and both are doomed to provoke backlash.
A wiser Commonwealth would respect the sovereignty of its members. It would acknowledge that Ghana is a democracy with its own processes, and that change—if it comes—must come from within. Instead, it threatens expulsion. That will not liberalise Ghana. It will strengthen the hand of the very traditionalists the West despises, and weaken the moderates who could eventually shift opinion.
The sad truth is that the Commonwealth no longer stands for anything real. It is a debating society for the globalist elite, issuing press releases while the world burns. Ghana may be wrong, but at least it is honest about its values. The Commonwealth pretends to hold universal principles, but those principles change with the wind. That is not leadership. That is sanctimony. And the history of empires suggests it will not end well.
