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WHAT EXACTLY HAS THE WORLD EVER DONE FOR BRITAIN?
Friday April 8,2011
By James Delingpole (Source)
A FEW years ago I was wandering through a market in Omdurman in the Sudan when I was accosted by an angry old man. “Why did you leave us?” he said. “Things were so much better when you were here.” We British are so used to being told by foreigners how awful we are that at first I didn’t understand his point. Then slowly it dawned. Here was an old man who had compared how things were under the enlightened colonial rule of the British with how things were now under a corrupt, warring, Islamist regime. He was under no illusions who had been better at running his country: us.
Yet you’d never sense this truth from David Cameron’s disparaging remarks in Pakistan the other day about Britain’s colonial legacy, nor from the generally demeaning way we are treated on the international stage. Everywhere you go, everywhere you look Britain is having its nose rubbed in it on an almost daily basis by a viciously ungrateful world. We’ve just given Pakistan £650million for schools (or more likely for IEDs to blow up our troops in Afghanistan).
We’re about to spend £4billion (more than the entirety of the coalition’s announced cuts) bailing out the Portuguese, even though we’re not members of the eurozone. We’re squandering £1million a time on each Storm Shadow missile we fire to help “liberate” Libya. We’ve sacrificed hundreds of our best and brightest young men and women “defending freedom” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet what exactly do we have to show for all this trouble, expense and effort?
Do we get any “special relationship” benefits for slavishly supporting the US in every one of its foreign military adventures? Hardly. As President Obama made clear, he actually prefers France. Do miraculous blessings accrue to us as a result of the net £9.2billion we contribute to the EU every year? Nope, just more democratically unaccountable rules, regulations and taxes.
Have the Irish yet thanked us for the £7billion we gave to help bail out their economy just before Christmas? Of course not. We could have given them a Ferrari each and a pension for life (actually come to think of it we more or less have) and still we’d remain their oldest, most hated enemy.
And consider how much international gloating goes on when we’re knocked out of any major sporting event (the Aussies, Kiwis and South Africans if it’s cricket or rugger, everyone else if it’s football).
And how oddly reluctant everyone is – witness our recent failed World Cup bid and parallel success of that international footballing titan Qatar – to acknowledge that if it hadn’t been for Britain these games might never have been invented. Being “awarded” the 2012 Olympics was the exception to the rule that Britain is always humiliatingly snubbed when it bids to host a major world tournament.
But then probably the only reason we were given it was as a punishment: after all who wants to draw the short straw of having to fork out upwards of £10billion for an event that will bring no net financial benefit in the teeth of the most vicious recession since the Thirties?
Of course all this would be perfectly understandable if the map was still coloured pink and British warships stood ready in every ocean to enforce our imperial will at the point of their mighty cannon. But apart from the fact that we have virtually no warships left (nor soon will we have aircraft carriers with aircraft on them) we have almost no imperial territory to protect.
What we’re suffering is the very worst of both worlds. We still have to put up with all the disadvantages of being a mighty imperial power: chippy resentment; massive expense; weighty responsibilities; colonial guilt. And on the other hand, because we haven’t actually been a mighty imperial power for five decades, we’re enjoying not a single one of the financial or political benefits.
It reminds me of that scene in Monty Python’s Life Of Brian in which the Jewish resistance ask crossly: “Whatever did the Romans do for us?” Grudgingly they’re forced to admit that the Romans have in fact done quite a lot for them: the aqueduct; sanitation; irrigation; medicine; education; health; roads; wine; public baths; and public order.
And I’m sure if you asked the same question about Britain and her Empire the list would be at least as long. Which was the first country actively to campaign against the slave trade? Who gave the world the concept of parliamentary democracy? Who built the railway (and legal and administrative) systems in Africa and the Indian subcontinent? Who gave the world its most useful lingua franca (and no, it wasn’t whoever invented Esperanto)? Who invented the postal system, discovered longitude, the steam ship, the jet engine and penicillin?
For a small island in the chilly north we have achieved an extraordinary amount with relatively limited resources. What’s more we have been extremely generous in spreading these benefits while asking relatively little in return: a tradition that Tim Berners- Lee continued when he gave the world the internet for free.
It’s understandable why bigger, better endowed countries should feel bitter at their failure to match our achievements. But it doesn’t make it excusable. The fact is that we in Britain have done far, far more for the world than ever it did for us. And it’s about ruddy time that pitifully ungrateful world gave us something back.
Friday April 8,2011
By James Delingpole (Source)
A FEW years ago I was wandering through a market in Omdurman in the Sudan when I was accosted by an angry old man. “Why did you leave us?” he said. “Things were so much better when you were here.” We British are so used to being told by foreigners how awful we are that at first I didn’t understand his point. Then slowly it dawned. Here was an old man who had compared how things were under the enlightened colonial rule of the British with how things were now under a corrupt, warring, Islamist regime. He was under no illusions who had been better at running his country: us.
Yet you’d never sense this truth from David Cameron’s disparaging remarks in Pakistan the other day about Britain’s colonial legacy, nor from the generally demeaning way we are treated on the international stage. Everywhere you go, everywhere you look Britain is having its nose rubbed in it on an almost daily basis by a viciously ungrateful world. We’ve just given Pakistan £650million for schools (or more likely for IEDs to blow up our troops in Afghanistan).
We’re about to spend £4billion (more than the entirety of the coalition’s announced cuts) bailing out the Portuguese, even though we’re not members of the eurozone. We’re squandering £1million a time on each Storm Shadow missile we fire to help “liberate” Libya. We’ve sacrificed hundreds of our best and brightest young men and women “defending freedom” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet what exactly do we have to show for all this trouble, expense and effort?
Do we get any “special relationship” benefits for slavishly supporting the US in every one of its foreign military adventures? Hardly. As President Obama made clear, he actually prefers France. Do miraculous blessings accrue to us as a result of the net £9.2billion we contribute to the EU every year? Nope, just more democratically unaccountable rules, regulations and taxes.
Have the Irish yet thanked us for the £7billion we gave to help bail out their economy just before Christmas? Of course not. We could have given them a Ferrari each and a pension for life (actually come to think of it we more or less have) and still we’d remain their oldest, most hated enemy.
And consider how much international gloating goes on when we’re knocked out of any major sporting event (the Aussies, Kiwis and South Africans if it’s cricket or rugger, everyone else if it’s football).
And how oddly reluctant everyone is – witness our recent failed World Cup bid and parallel success of that international footballing titan Qatar – to acknowledge that if it hadn’t been for Britain these games might never have been invented. Being “awarded” the 2012 Olympics was the exception to the rule that Britain is always humiliatingly snubbed when it bids to host a major world tournament.
But then probably the only reason we were given it was as a punishment: after all who wants to draw the short straw of having to fork out upwards of £10billion for an event that will bring no net financial benefit in the teeth of the most vicious recession since the Thirties?
Of course all this would be perfectly understandable if the map was still coloured pink and British warships stood ready in every ocean to enforce our imperial will at the point of their mighty cannon. But apart from the fact that we have virtually no warships left (nor soon will we have aircraft carriers with aircraft on them) we have almost no imperial territory to protect.
What we’re suffering is the very worst of both worlds. We still have to put up with all the disadvantages of being a mighty imperial power: chippy resentment; massive expense; weighty responsibilities; colonial guilt. And on the other hand, because we haven’t actually been a mighty imperial power for five decades, we’re enjoying not a single one of the financial or political benefits.
It reminds me of that scene in Monty Python’s Life Of Brian in which the Jewish resistance ask crossly: “Whatever did the Romans do for us?” Grudgingly they’re forced to admit that the Romans have in fact done quite a lot for them: the aqueduct; sanitation; irrigation; medicine; education; health; roads; wine; public baths; and public order.
And I’m sure if you asked the same question about Britain and her Empire the list would be at least as long. Which was the first country actively to campaign against the slave trade? Who gave the world the concept of parliamentary democracy? Who built the railway (and legal and administrative) systems in Africa and the Indian subcontinent? Who gave the world its most useful lingua franca (and no, it wasn’t whoever invented Esperanto)? Who invented the postal system, discovered longitude, the steam ship, the jet engine and penicillin?
For a small island in the chilly north we have achieved an extraordinary amount with relatively limited resources. What’s more we have been extremely generous in spreading these benefits while asking relatively little in return: a tradition that Tim Berners- Lee continued when he gave the world the internet for free.
It’s understandable why bigger, better endowed countries should feel bitter at their failure to match our achievements. But it doesn’t make it excusable. The fact is that we in Britain have done far, far more for the world than ever it did for us. And it’s about ruddy time that pitifully ungrateful world gave us something back.
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