If anything, Britain is owed a debt for its imperial and colonial endeavours, argues Daniel Hannan in the Mail. “Our species benefited hugely from the industrial revolution, the abolition of the slave trade and the defeat of Nazism.” Here’s an excerpt.
Some senior retired mandarins, including the former Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill, have just produced a report, ‘The World in 2040’, which is aimed more or less explicitly at an incoming Labour Government.
It sets out their vision of how Britain should conduct itself as a “medium-sized off-shore nation”. In essence, they think we should be humbler, readier to pool our sovereignty and less hung up on our past.
They want Britain to be more engaged on climate change, and “to share rights in multinational institutions with emerging powers”. Perhaps most strikingly, they propose renaming the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office and abandoning its headquarters, the handsome Victorian palace on King Charles Street designed by George Gilbert Scott.
“Modernising premises – perhaps with fewer colonial-era pictures on the walls – might help create a more open working culture and send a clear signal about Britain’s future?”
It is not clear whether that ungrammatical question mark is an attempt to ape the rising intonation of young people or whether the authors know, on some level, that what they are asking for is risible.
For one of this country’s greatest assets, embodied in that building’s grand staircases and marbled meeting halls, is its story. Few nations have done more, down the years, to promote human rights and the rule of law.
When we talk of countries becoming more developed, we mean (though we are too polite to put it this way) that they are becoming more like us. In other words, that they are acquiring free parliaments, independent courts, uncensored media and secure property rights.
The report’s authors write that “former colonies are making increasingly vocal demands about the need for reparations from colonialism”.
Well, perhaps so. But where do you suppose they got that idea? In no small measure, from British universities and British cultural representatives. Our self-flagellating wokery has been picked up overseas, with the striking result that there is far more resentment about British colonialism now than there was at the time or during its immediate aftermath.
Although you would not think so today, most of Britain’s colonies were brought to independence without a shot being fired in anger – something no other empire has managed. Yes, there were tragic exceptions, notably Cyprus, Kenya and India.
But, even in India, when the colonial flag was lowered for the last time in 1947, assembled representatives of the new Government sang Auld Lang Syne with tears in their eyes.
In recent years, a cartoonish version of history has been promulgated in this country, and exported around the world, in which Britain is cast as the villainous Alan Rickman of the global drama. As a result, many people in former colonies fulminate against an imagined version of British colonialism in a way that their grandparents, experiencing the real-life version, never did.
I don’t enjoy having to write these things. I have always been sceptical of the British Empire on liberal grounds. But the idea that Britain owes a debt to the places it modernised would have astonished Victorian officials, who saw colonies as an administrative headache, but who felt under pressure from missionaries, abolitionists and assorted humanitarians to assume responsibility for new tracts of land.
If the British Empire was an attempt at financial exploitation, it was a spectacularly inefficient one, for taxes in Britain were always higher than in her colonies.
If anything, Britain is owed a debt. Our species benefited hugely from the industrial revolution, the abolition of the slave trade and the defeat of Nazism.
Worth reading in full.
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My first thought, albeit tangential, was what have the Romans done for us, prompted from the Life of Brian. What has the British Empire done for us? The answers would not invariably fit on a post card.
“If Anything, Britain is Owed a Debt for the Achievements of Empire”
Too damned right.
We endowed at least 25% of the globe with Civilisation and I fail to understand why we are not entitled to royalties in perpuity, suitably indexed-linked, for our magnificence and munificence.
Sedwill and his fifth columnist chums need to swing for what they’re doing.
Off-T.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/04/10/angela-rayner-starmer-tax-council-house-row-sunak-tory/
Now the boot is on the other foot Ranting has gone AWOL.
Not to forget that USA was one of our colonies. They have not done too badly despite the alleged malign influence of Britain on its colonies. Perhaps those moaning about it should ask themselves why the haven’t thrived in the same way as USA.
The American colonists were formed of people who wanted to escape this oppressive island. Persecution was rife. The Catholics, the Quakers, the Irish and many others found life here unbearable. Life for our own poor citizens was short and brutal, either as labourers, millworkers, soldiers or navy so it’s no wonder people chose to leave. Protests here were put down brutally, such as in Peterloo, so the colonies are not unique in this regard.
However, we had strong reformist voices here, willing to speak up about injustice, and they made considerable headway. We’ve tidied up our act a little bit, but we still have some echoes of the old oppressive society here, no matter how much some would deny this.
But we’re not bleating about reparations from our government for past injustices
There is one historical fact about the British Empire which most people are ignorant of. British people have not been ‘citizens’, but subjects of the King or Queen of the day. When India became part of the Empire, her people also became ‘Subjects’ of the King or Queen. Indian and British, Jamaican and British. There was never a law passed which gave White British any benefit over any other Subject (which is why calls of ‘institutional racism’ are so poor. Britain has never been ‘institutional racist’). This only became an issue in the 1950’s when travel from afar became easier and cheaper and only dealt with in the early 1960’s by calling these subjects ‘Overseas Nationals’
I have occasionally pondered on whether people gaining British Citizenship are regarded as citizens where those of us who would like to be, remain subjects.
This farce of historical guilt needs to die.
Anyone who talks about slavery, without acknowledging all the slave takers throughout history, have an undisclosed agenda.
Should we sue the Norwegians and Danes for taking Saxon, Briton and Irish slaves? What about the Barbary pirates? Or the Arab slave owners who castrated their slaves to prevent breeding.
I’m sick of this shit.
Someone ought to inform Hannan that, after fourteen years of Conservative Party led governments, we no longer have uncensored media or secure property rights. Where has he been these last several years?
Hannan has long been a waste of space.
“Our species” didn’t benefit from the millions of political killings which happened in Russia and probably, also elsewhere in eastern middle Europa, under Stalin and from the 50 years of Bolshevist reign of terror that much. This may have been politicallly preferable for the Britain of Churchill. But for the victims themselves, this will have made preciously little of a difference.
Another courageous article by Daniel Hannan. I remembered that there was an Indian author years ago who was also brave enough to praise the British legacy in India, and just now found his name again: Dr. Kartar Lalvani.
“The indisputable fact is that India as a nation as it stands today was originally put together and created by a small, distant island country,” says Dr Kartar Lalvani, founder of the vitamins company Vitabiotics and a former Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year, in the book he has spent the past eight years writing, The Making Of India: A Story Of British Enterprise.”
Here are two reviews of his extraordinary book:
The Remarkable Raj: Why Britain should be proud of its rule in India | UK | News | Express.co.uk
The Making of British India: The Untold Story of British Enterprise (britishempire.co.uk)