The definition of “relief” when you are the Prime Minister of the UK™ is nothing to do with whether the people have enough food to eat, if the hospitals or the schools are good, whether the people are happy and have good homes.
No, apparently it is something else. Here is your modern Britain for you…
Very interesting little slice of UK political past and most likely present here.
The behaviour in Whitehall and Westminster has never been particularly good….
Whenever Gordon Brown rears his not-available-for-interview head for 10 minutes before going off to earn ludicrous amounts of money again, I’m always reminded of this…
“We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it.
“And we should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history: tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world.
“Our strong traditions of fair play, of openness, of internationalism, these are great British values.”
The thing that always bothered me about this speech is that I can’t remember Britain ever doing much apologising in the first place (link goes to a regret, not an apology). Certainly they didn’t feel as much of an apology was necessary as to pay reparations.
However, I noticed Brown was careful to say “much” of our past and fair play to him at least for that, but I don’t think a couple of wreaths and a few speeches can really paper over the mass graves.
Would an empire with much to be proud of have taken such care as to do all this?…
The full extent of the destruction of Britain’s colonial government records during the retreat from empire was disclosed on Thursday with the declassification of a small part of the Foreign Office’s vast secret archive.
Fifty-year-old documents that have finally been transferred to the National Archive show that bonfires were built behind diplomatic missions across the globe as the purge – codenamed Operation Legacy – accompanied the handover of each colony.
The declassified documents include copies of an instruction issued in 1961 by Iain Macleod, colonial secretary, that post-independence governments should not be handed any material that “might embarrass Her Majesty’s [the] government”, that could “embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others eg police informers”, that might betray intelligence sources, or that might “be used unethically by ministers in the successor government”.
In Northern Rhodesia, colonial officials were issued with further orders to destroy “all papers which are likely to be interpreted, either reasonably or by malice, as indicating racial prejudice or religious bias on the part of Her Majesty’s government”.
I cannot recommend strongly enough that you read the whole of that article.
I suppose at this point I have to say that yes, the Scots were complicit in a lot of this. It is true, and I see nothing but cause for shame in that, and in fact it is one of the reasons I want out of the UK. I don’t want Scotland to be part of anything similar in the future (or the present).
I won’t say anything more on the Brown pension speech as plenty of other articles have taken it apart well enough. I just wanted to show that, for good or bad according to your own opinion, Gordon Brown’s British Nationalism™ goes very far indeed.
In case you were wondering how far, here’s a map of all those countries NOT invaded by the UK. They’re the ones in white.
So it came out the other day that the First Sea Lord (I’ll come back to that very shortly) isn’t entirely happy about the prospects for the currently totally ruling-the-waves British Navy.
You know, that’s the one that has one aircraft carrier with no aircraft and another one mothballed, all at great expense.
You see, to keep a modern force (see photo) with modern capabilities (see previous paragraph), it seems we need to keep the union.
It’s an absurdity.
My problem though, is a bit different. Even though it’s all no more absurd than many of the other things we’ve been hearing over the indyref period, I just find it difficult to take anyone walking around called The First Sea Lord seriously.
I’ve no idea if he is a nice man or not, even if his statements seem more political than operational.
It’s just that the insistence on the pomp and circumstance that makes you arrive at the sort of place where people are walking round with these sort of titles, and we’re supposed to take them seriously, is a clear indication of a state that is living in the past.
It reminds me of the book The Last King Of Scotland in which it was written that Idi Amin had given himself the full title of…
His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.
Again, I refer you to the Bateman article on the matter, he seems to have got the idea.
“No campaigners must publicise the fact that this is as good as it gets. With a No win little is going to change. Right here, right now you can see the kind of country we are going to be living in.”
- Michael Kelly
Of course the Scottish NHS is fortunately a separate thing and has been spared the worst ravages of what has happened down south.
But bear in mind some well-known politicians have been making noises about bringing Scotland more into line with UK in the event of a No vote.
Some people are doing quite well out of what’s going on down south though. And us usual, it isn’t the public.
There must be a better way.
I’ve been doing a little series of the most banal reasons given for keeping the union together.
This one however, is a little different. With the importance of things like what kind of society we choose to live in, how to organise our democratic structures, the quality of life of the people and other matters at stake, the BBC and other media outlets have chosen to focus on what the new flag of the UK might look like if Scotland left.
Banal Non-Retentive, if you like.
Is this really the most important thing they could think to talk about?
Maybe it is, so in the spirit of not being a party-pooper and making a little joke if it, I decided to do one for them so that we can then get back to the serious matters at hand…
