Well actually Geof, I think the Tories themselves have some form on this, weren’t’ they the first to introduce concentration camps. Something that they don’t mention often today
" The 1900 UK general election was known as the “khaki election”, where the Conservative government rallied patriotic voters. It resulted in a victory for the Conservative government on the back of recent British victories against the Boers. However, public support waned as it became apparent that the war would not be easy and moral unease developed following reports about scorched earth policies adopted by the British military or the forcible internment of Boer non-combatants in concentration camps. Public and political opposition was expressed by repeated attacks on British government policies by the Liberal MP David Lloyd George"
Note the good old Manchester Guardian doing its bit
Indeed. This is part of the history of the British Empire that has always been - and actually still is - hidden from Brits themselves. When black history professor Kehinde Andrews was brave enough to tell the nation the truth on breakfast television in 2020 he was viciously attacked - yet the brutal - genocidal - history of the British Empire is well recognised in academic circles outside the UK.
But perhaps the most shocking aspect is that Britain continued to set up concentration camps and torture and kill hundreds of thousands even after the Holocaust.
In the 1950s in Kenya the British detained ‘nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people’ and subjected them to ‘forced labour, disease, starvation, torture, rape’ - and executed between 160,000 and 320,000 (officials destroyed all documentation of the deaths).
Also in the 1950s 500,000 were detained in concentration camps in Malaya - and even in Europe - 3,000 in Cyprus.
The British armed forces and civil servants actively concealed the crimes - and we are still complicit when we talk about the ‘Irish potato famine’ or the ‘Bengal famine’ as if these were not deliberately engineered by the Empire. At the height of the Irish famine, in 1847, the British exported from Ireland to England food worth £17,000,000 - an enormous sum at the time. Starvation and forced immigration halved the population of Ireland over the 1840s-80s. In the Bengal famine in the 1940s 2-4 million died - again the true numbers have been concealed - and of course the terrible partitioning of India later in the 1940s turned 30 million people into refugees, and led to many thousands of deaths.
I sometimes think that until Britain confronts honestly its history of slavery and colonialism - in the way that I think Germany has taken on board its own terrible history - it will never turn into a mature, balanced, modern society.
Maybe you could offer to deliver a short paper at Liz’s 2023 Führertagung (though hopefully she won’t last that long). I’ve now put Britannia Unchained on the bookshelf beside my copy of Mein Kampf
In his 2010 book, How to Cut Public Spending (and Still Win an Election, Matthew Sinclair, now Liz Truss’s top economic adviser, suggested freezing the state pension.
Seems the UK gov are going to need to make up for the losses, aside from their own years of mismanagement, for Brexit and Covid and whatever the Ukraine war brings. Something has to give.
They managed to avoid offering the fuel assistance to pensioners in France and Spain, where it is tropical, apparently. Two more areas they could claw savings would be the S1 health cover and pensions uprating.
I know people would say, “Noooo! That would be electoral suicide” but might the Tories be considering the time lag between savings resulting from such cuts and the gap before the next election? One or two years would save the UK how much ? By the time an election came around they could promise to reverse the cuts, or not, depending on the winds of change.
It is quite frightening to contemplate but is it remotely a danger?
We don’t need to panic - yet. It’s too close to a General Election for the Tories to tamper with pensions. Even for their big 2019 win they were absolutely dependent on pensioners’ votes. Indeed, analysts now see the ‘red wall’ Tory wins as principally the result of demographic change rather than any significant change in voting preference - working age people have simply been moving from those post-industrial seats into the big cities, for obvious reasons.
But it does show what the Tories would like to do - and probably will do if elected again - but they’ll do it early in the next term so that they can get over it electorally over the years before the following election.
? By the time an election came around they could promise to reverse the cuts, or not, depending on the winds of change.
