Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
So those a bit younger than my generation didn't have to risk their lives in the pointless wars that my friends did. As a student I managed to miss National Service but my non-student friends had to go.
I love this quote though I'm not enough of an insider to know whether it is really true. Wonder if anyone can guess the speaker?
'I think the problem we face is slightly different and I'm afraid it's this. That liberal elitists and I suppose I'm a member of the liberal elite myself..... are not used to losing and they're very bad losers and I suspect the public sense that and it gives rise to populism. I think that's the key social problem we face. The liberal elite are used to winning the debate. This time they're losing the debate and they don't like it.'
Russell Brand? It seems sufficiently vacuous.
Unfortunately not. You're going to have to think more highbrow.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
The jewel is looking a bit tarnished with that fecker Modi running the show.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
"They" - you are British.
Watch your mouth.
And I thought it was the left who were policing people's pronouns!
"Watch your mouth"? Bit early in the day for this kind of fighty talk, no?
No patriot refers to their country in the third party as if it has nothing to do with them.
It's a subtle tell. You should use "we".
So we should pay reparations for the people we enslaved. And you're a traitor if you disagree. Got it.
The Puritans introduced the philosophy that how you fare in life is mainly down to your own decisions, and so if you're not doing well it's mostly your own fault. In Catholic countries it's more a case of God's will, and so you can't blame yourself too much if things aren't going as well as you'd like them to. The former is more likely to produce miserable people than the latter.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
So those a bit younger than my generation didn't have to risk their lives in the pointless wars that my friends did. As a student I managed to miss National Service but my non-student friends had to go.
Never forgotten the father of a friend of mine telling me about his NS as an army officer in Malaysia during the Emergency. Facing a riot with an armed squad. Fortunately the sound of them all chambering live rounds in disciplined unison was enough to cool things down!
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
No, it wasn't a passive policy. We were actively fighting independence movements in several colonies through the 1950s, and encouraging white settlement in Rhodesia, Kenya etc. Only the Gold Coast was planned for independence, and that was deliberately slowly.
Under Macmillan there was a recognition that the world had changed, and independence was to be encouraged. Hence his "Winds of Change" speech.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
Do you genuinely see an alternative history where India continued to be ruled by the Raj after 1947? I sense at various points alternative HYUFD would be demanding the tanks be sent in to quell the separatists.
The Puritans introduced the philosophy that how you fare in life is mainly down to your own decisions, and so if you're not doing well it's mostly your own fault. In Catholic countries it's more a case of God's will, and so you can't blame yourself too much if things aren't going as well as you'd like them to. The former is more likely to produce miserable people than the latter.
So a fairly right wing view in modern terms, yet CR thinks the Puritans left wing.
I love this quote though I'm not enough of an insider to know whether it is really true. Wonder if anyone can guess the speaker?
'I think the problem we face is slightly different and I'm afraid it's this. That liberal elitists and I suppose I'm a member of the liberal elite myself..... are not used to losing and they're very bad losers and I suspect the public sense that and it gives rise to populism. I think that's the key social problem we face. The liberal elite are used to winning the debate. This time they're losing the debate and they don't like it.'
Russell Brand? It seems sufficiently vacuous.
Unfortunately not. You're going to have to think more highbrow.
The Puritans introduced the philosophy that how you fare in life is mainly down to your own decisions, and so if you're not doing well it's mostly your own fault. In Catholic countries it's more a case of God's will, and so you can't blame yourself too much if things aren't going as well as you'd like them to. The former is more likely to produce miserable people than the latter.
So a fairly right wing view in modern terms, yet CR thinks the Puritans left wing.
There's a great deal of historical discussion on the link between Puritanism, and more generally Calvinism, Presbyterianism, Quakerism, etc. etc., and the work ethic and the rise of modern capitalism.
Partly also however because they had to go into business very often. The Tories of the day were so bitterly opposed to such people - freedom,. what freedom? - that they defined them as second class people not allowed to enter the universities and the professions, or hold offices under the Crown. If anyone was being religiously intolerant in England it was the right wing royalists and C of E conservatives.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
Do you genuinely see an alternative history where India continued to be ruled by the Raj after 1947? I sense at various points alternative HYUFD would be demanding the tanks be sent in to quell the separatists.
I don't think the RF were so opposed to it as to boycott it. Look who was Viceroy.
I love this quote though I'm not enough of an insider to know whether it is really true. Wonder if anyone can guess the speaker?
'I think the problem we face is slightly different and I'm afraid it's this. That liberal elitists and I suppose I'm a member of the liberal elite myself..... are not used to losing and they're very bad losers and I suspect the public sense that and it gives rise to populism. I think that's the key social problem we face. The liberal elite are used to winning the debate. This time they're losing the debate and they don't like it.'
Russell Brand? It seems sufficiently vacuous.
Unfortunately not. You're going to have to think more highbrow.
John Humphries?
Andrew Marr?
University professor.
Sounds John Gray-ish. Goodwin maybe, but he’s been rapidly slipping down the brow scale.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
Do you genuinely see an alternative history where India continued to be ruled by the Raj after 1947? I sense at various points alternative HYUFD would be demanding the tanks be sent in to quell the separatists.
It was the defeats of 1942 in Malaya, Singapore, Burma and Hong Kong that made Indian independence happen 5 years later. In part the total humiliation of British forces, and in part the mobilisation and militarization of the Indian economy.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
Do you genuinely see an alternative history where India continued to be ruled by the Raj after 1947? I sense at various points alternative HYUFD would be demanding the tanks be sent in to quell the separatists.
Wasn't India as good as promised a chance to go for independence after the war, in return for their wholehearted participation in it?
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
Macmillan was driven by the conditions he'd seen in Stockton in the thirties. As I understood it he felt that it was the duty of the patrician to ensure that the plebs were properly housed and fed.
Also influenced by his experience fighting, and being wounded on the Western Front. He was undeniably upper class, but had a sense of social solidarity and fellow feeling that we don't see much of in the modern Conservative Party.
Disobliging knobs have entirely supplanted noblesse oblige..
Genuine problem for the political Right, even if (overall) we're right about the facts of life.
We do need an answer to the question "what happens to the losers in life's game?" And the most effective way to generate those answers is to have had direct experience of being poked with the shitty end of the stick through no fault of your own for a bit.
For a long time, wartime experience did that job. Then Major had compassion born of experience. Cameron had his experiences with his son. May had her vicarage upbringing (vicarious experience, but a start).
Without that, the Conservatives risk becoming a club for self made men where they worship their own creators. Rishi, on particular, does give off "why don't you all become hedge fund millionaires- it's easy" vibes.
We need that optimism, we need people like that. But it's not a basis to run an entire nation.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
I love this quote though I'm not enough of an insider to know whether it is really true. Wonder if anyone can guess the speaker?
'I think the problem we face is slightly different and I'm afraid it's this. That liberal elitists and I suppose I'm a member of the liberal elite myself..... are not used to losing and they're very bad losers and I suspect the public sense that and it gives rise to populism. I think that's the key social problem we face. The liberal elite are used to winning the debate. This time they're losing the debate and they don't like it.'
Russell Brand? It seems sufficiently vacuous.
Unfortunately not. You're going to have to think more highbrow.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
The Puritans were miserable buggers.
Going round Glastonbury Abbey recently made he sadly realise just how much was lost, when the monasteries were dissolved.
Though given what we know about abuse within the various Churches now - what must it have been like when they had legal immunity?
A big part of the Reformation was ending the parallel legal system, where the Church tried its own.
I’ve long thought that the aggression of some of the reformers reminded of the behaviour of some victims…
I've no doubt that there were abusers among the reformers. One thing is plain. Between the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the Poor Law of 1601, there was little relief offered to the desitute. Indeed, the Tudors mandated increasingly savage penalties against beggars and vagrants, until a succession of poor harvests in the 1590's led the government to change its mind.
The Puritans introduced the philosophy that how you fare in life is mainly down to your own decisions, and so if you're not doing well it's mostly your own fault. In Catholic countries it's more a case of God's will, and so you can't blame yourself too much if things aren't going as well as you'd like them to. The former is more likely to produce miserable people than the latter.
So a fairly right wing view in modern terms, yet CR thinks the Puritans left wing.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
I'd say it was on its way out, once South Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand became independent in 1931.
Quick note on cyclists running red lights - here in Melbourne, cyclists and pedestrians share a traffic phase, but only in one direction (and if you're turning left out right, you have to give way to the pedestrians. This is the same for drivers on their phase).
Interesting solution, with vulnerable road users grouped together.
Interesting, so if I have that correctly that's 4 phases and pedestrians can always cross the roads walking say N-S when traffic or cyclists are also going N-S, and both the latter have to give way if turning both ways?
And there is no phase where pedestrians are moving across an arm of the junction where no motor or cycle traffic cannot go along it according to the signal pattern?
That seems to go against the principle of separation of vulnerable modes of travel in space and/or time.
Interesting contrast to the phasing on a UK CYCLOPs junction as mainly seen in Manchester (parallel cycle and pedestrian routes round the outside which get their own all-motor-traffic-stopped phase) or the Dutch "all green" design (phase where motors are all stopped, and pedestrians and cyclists can go anywhere).
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
"They" - you are British.
Watch your mouth.
And I thought it was the left who were policing people's pronouns!
"Watch your mouth"? Bit early in the day for this kind of fighty talk, no?
No patriot refers to their country in the third party as if it has nothing to do with them.
It's a subtle tell. You should use "we".
So we should pay reparations for the people we enslaved. And you're a traitor if you disagree. Got it.
No, it means you don't refer to your country dismissively in the third person as if it has nothing to do with you.
It doesn't confer you own personal responsibility for everything your ancestors did or didn’t do.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
No, it wasn't a passive policy. We were actively fighting independence movements in several colonies through the 1950s, and encouraging white settlement in Rhodesia, Kenya etc. Only the Gold Coast was planned for independence, and that was deliberately slowly.
Under Macmillan there was a recognition that the world had changed, and independence was to be encouraged. Hence his "Winds of Change" speech.
Malaysia was certainly intended to be independent, but the British were absolutely determined that its government would be a friendly one, rather than communist.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
Macmillan was driven by the conditions he'd seen in Stockton in the thirties. As I understood it he felt that it was the duty of the patrician to ensure that the plebs were properly housed and fed.
Also influenced by his experience fighting, and being wounded on the Western Front. He was undeniably upper class, but had a sense of social solidarity and fellow feeling that we don't see much of in the modern Conservative Party.
Disobliging knobs have entirely supplanted noblesse oblige..
Genuine problem for the political Right, even if (overall) we're right about the facts of life.
We do need an answer to the question "what happens to the losers in life's game?" And the most effective way to generate those answers is to have had direct experience of being poked with the shitty end of the stick through no fault of your own for a bit.
For a long time, wartime experience did that job. Then Major had compassion born of experience. Cameron had his experiences with his son. May had her vicarage upbringing (vicarious experience, but a start).
Without that, the Conservatives risk becoming a club for self made men where they worship their own creators. Rishi, on particular, does give off "why don't you all become hedge fund millionaires- it's easy" vibes.
We need that optimism, we need people like that. But it's not a basis to run an entire nation.
People who are rich and successful have a remarkable if perhaps predictable ability to attribute their success entirely to talent and hard work; the thought that they might have been picked out almost randomly as winners in life's lottery, perhaps by birth or contacts or plain chance, doesn't seem to appeal to them.
The Puritans introduced the philosophy that how you fare in life is mainly down to your own decisions, and so if you're not doing well it's mostly your own fault. In Catholic countries it's more a case of God's will, and so you can't blame yourself too much if things aren't going as well as you'd like them to. The former is more likely to produce miserable people than the latter.
So a fairly right wing view in modern terms, yet CR thinks the Puritans left wing.
I never said anything of the sort.
But you're certainly a bit of a Puritan yourself.
Yes you did, earlier this thread. You said I only cited left wingers, clearly implying the Puritans as left wing.
I see them as neither of the right nor left, but rather in the fine tradition of English (and Scottish) radical thought.
And yes, I am a Puritan* in many of my religious and political positions.
*Puritanism is itself a very diverse set of philosophies.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
That's broadly true, and the French came to a similar conclusion. And, as with so much, largely geopolitically and economically driven as opposed to ideologically driven.
A smarter move would have been to offer votes on integration or association as France did with some of its colonies.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
No, it wasn't a passive policy. We were actively fighting independence movements in several colonies through the 1950s, and encouraging white settlement in Rhodesia, Kenya etc. Only the Gold Coast was planned for independence, and that was deliberately slowly.
Under Macmillan there was a recognition that the world had changed, and independence was to be encouraged. Hence his "Winds of Change" speech.
Atlee's government wanted to make the empire pay for itself (hence the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme and the like), so I guess there must have been some sort of feeling that it was unsustainable in the long term.
But, yeah, the full horror of the position wasn't revealed until Macmillan's "audit of empire" which came in, what, 1957?
And even then it was thought that only Ghana and Nigeria were really regarded as being ready for independence - it was assumed by most people that divestment of the other colonies would be a long, slow process.
The only person arguing for a speedy end to empire was Iain Macleod, and I suspect even he would have been shocked if you were to have told him in 1960 that the process would be more or less complete within a decade.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
A hell of an impressive beard to hide a beer belly!
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
Unsightly belly flab? Adopt a casual demeanour to look 10 kilos lighter. Attract women! Attract men! Feel younger! Adopt a casual demeanour today!
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
Unsightly belly flab? Adopt a casual demeanour to look 10 kilos lighter. Attract women! Attract men! Feel younger! Adopt a casual demeanour today!
Also 'reluctantly'. WTF was that about.
No true patriot should besmirch their fellow citizens premature dad bods, unless done reluctantly.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
I think the choices were (1) to give India dominion status in the aftermath of WWI and have it as an allied commonwealth realm and "five eyes" type partner in the longer term, but without immediate direct British control or (2) to firmly hold onto it, with some home rule concessions in domestic matters, for a further 30 years.
We chose the latter but I think it was the wrong choice in hindsight and complicates our relationship with India and our geostrategic position in the region to this day.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
Observing the multinational clientele around the pool last week, more often than not it was the bloke carrying a few extra pounds, rather than his female companion.
I love this quote though I'm not enough of an insider to know whether it is really true. Wonder if anyone can guess the speaker?
'I think the problem we face is slightly different and I'm afraid it's this. That liberal elitists and I suppose I'm a member of the liberal elite myself..... are not used to losing and they're very bad losers and I suspect the public sense that and it gives rise to populism. I think that's the key social problem we face. The liberal elite are used to winning the debate. This time they're losing the debate and they don't like it.'
Russell Brand? It seems sufficiently vacuous.
Unfortunately not. You're going to have to think more highbrow.
John Humphries?
Andrew Marr?
University professor.
Sounds John Gray-ish. Goodwin maybe, but he’s been rapidly slipping down the brow scale.
It would be interesting to see if Goodwin's brow scale slipping has coincided with him saying more and more things that you disagree with.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
Do you genuinely see an alternative history where India continued to be ruled by the Raj after 1947? I sense at various points alternative HYUFD would be demanding the tanks be sent in to quell the separatists.
Wasn't India as good as promised a chance to go for independence after the war, in return for their wholehearted participation in it?
Churchill opposed Indian independence in the 1945 election
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
Do you genuinely see an alternative history where India continued to be ruled by the Raj after 1947? I sense at various points alternative HYUFD would be demanding the tanks be sent in to quell the separatists.
Wasn't India as good as promised a chance to go for independence after the war, in return for their wholehearted participation in it?
Churchill promised it full home rule and dominion status (I think) and through somewhat gritted teeth. It wasn't enough by that stage.
To be fair the Indian Army was by and large wholly loyal to the end.
The Puritans introduced the philosophy that how you fare in life is mainly down to your own decisions, and so if you're not doing well it's mostly your own fault. In Catholic countries it's more a case of God's will, and so you can't blame yourself too much if things aren't going as well as you'd like them to. The former is more likely to produce miserable people than the latter.
So a fairly right wing view in modern terms, yet CR thinks the Puritans left wing.
There's a great deal of historical discussion on the link between Puritanism, and more generally Calvinism, Presbyterianism, Quakerism, etc. etc., and the work ethic and the rise of modern capitalism.
Partly also however because they had to go into business very often. The Tories of the day were so bitterly opposed to such people - freedom,. what freedom? - that they defined them as second class people not allowed to enter the universities and the professions, or hold offices under the Crown. If anyone was being religiously intolerant in England it was the right wing royalists and C of E conservatives.
Only after Cromwell had executed the King, forced royalists into hiding or exile and banned the Book of Common Prayer and high church Anglican services when Lord Protector
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
Unsightly belly flab? Adopt a casual demeanour to look 10 kilos lighter. Attract women! Attract men! Feel younger! Adopt a casual demeanour today!
Also 'reluctantly'. WTF was that about.
Two sad lonely keyboard dwelling frustrated angry fuckwits tapping it out whilst longing manfully for each other.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
A hell of an impressive beard to hide a beer belly!
It's weird, but it sort of works, right?
Sort of very slightly ages and matures you, and therefore sort of provides cover for a slight paunch.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
Do you genuinely see an alternative history where India continued to be ruled by the Raj after 1947? I sense at various points alternative HYUFD would be demanding the tanks be sent in to quell the separatists.
Wasn't India as good as promised a chance to go for independence after the war, in return for their wholehearted participation in it?
Churchill promised it full home rule and dominion status (I think) and through somewhat gritted teeth. It wasn't enough by that stage.
To be fair the Indian Army was by and large wholly loyal to the end.
If you ignore those lads fighting for the Japanese.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
Unsightly belly flab? Adopt a casual demeanour to look 10 kilos lighter. Attract women! Attract men! Feel younger! Adopt a casual demeanour today!
Also 'reluctantly'. WTF was that about.
Perhaps trying to avoid getting in touch with subliminal desires?
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
I'd say it was on its way out, once South Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand became independent in 1931.
They weren't independent, they were still dominions with the King as their head of state.
Westminster didn't finally give up the right to pass laws for Australia until the 1980s for instance.
By the end of January 1950 however India was a fully independent Republic
I love this quote though I'm not enough of an insider to know whether it is really true. Wonder if anyone can guess the speaker?
'I think the problem we face is slightly different and I'm afraid it's this. That liberal elitists and I suppose I'm a member of the liberal elite myself..... are not used to losing and they're very bad losers and I suspect the public sense that and it gives rise to populism. I think that's the key social problem we face. The liberal elite are used to winning the debate. This time they're losing the debate and they don't like it.'
Russell Brand? It seems sufficiently vacuous.
Unfortunately not. You're going to have to think more highbrow.
John Humphries?
Andrew Marr?
University professor.
Sounds John Gray-ish. Goodwin maybe, but he’s been rapidly slipping down the brow scale.
It would be interesting to see if Goodwin's brow scale slipping has coincided with him saying more and more things that you disagree with.
I was being generous. I’ve always thought he was a twat, just a twat who’s drinking more and more of the stupid juice.
The Puritans introduced the philosophy that how you fare in life is mainly down to your own decisions, and so if you're not doing well it's mostly your own fault. In Catholic countries it's more a case of God's will, and so you can't blame yourself too much if things aren't going as well as you'd like them to. The former is more likely to produce miserable people than the latter.
So a fairly right wing view in modern terms, yet CR thinks the Puritans left wing.
I never said anything of the sort.
But you're certainly a bit of a Puritan yourself.
Yes you did, earlier this thread. You said I only cited left wingers, clearly implying the Puritans as left wing.
I see them as neither of the right nor left, but rather in the fine tradition of English (and Scottish) radical thought.
And yes, I am a Puritan* in many of my religious and political positions.
*Puritanism is itself a very diverse set of philosophies.
I didn't do "this" I just pointed out the truth.
Self-flagellation, guilt, humiliation and pleasure-hating is you all over.
It's a bit odd, and not sure why you're like that, but you are and, to be fair, you admit it.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
"They" - you are British.
Watch your mouth.
And I thought it was the left who were policing people's pronouns!
"Watch your mouth"? Bit early in the day for this kind of fighty talk, no?
No patriot refers to their country in the third party as if it has nothing to do with them.
It's a subtle tell. You should use "we".
So we should pay reparations for the people we enslaved. And you're a traitor if you disagree. Got it.
No, it means you don't refer to your country dismissively in the third person as if it has nothing to do with you.
It doesn't confer you own personal responsibility for everything your ancestors did or didn’t do.
For example, saying, “One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are” is dismissive and not patriotic. The patriot would say: “One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby us British men are”.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
That's broadly true, and the French came to a similar conclusion. And, as with so much, largely geopolitically and economically driven as opposed to ideologically driven.
A smarter move would have been to offer votes on integration or association as France did with some of its colonies.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
Unsightly belly flab? Adopt a casual demeanour to look 10 kilos lighter. Attract women! Attract men! Feel younger! Adopt a casual demeanour today!
Also 'reluctantly'. WTF was that about.
Perhaps trying to avoid getting in touch with subliminal desires?
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
I'd say it was on its way out, once South Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand became independent in 1931.
They weren't independent, they were still dominions with the King as their head of state.
Westminster didn't finally give up the right to pass laws for Australia until the 1980s for instance.
By the end of January 1950 however India was a fully independent Republic
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
He wasn't leftwing, just a patrician Tory who also built lots of new homes and grew the economy.
It was Attlee who nationalised much of industry, created the NHS and expanded the welfare state and gave India and Pakistan independence and began the end of Empire. Macmillan just didn't reverse the process
No, credit where it is due. After the Suez fiasco, Macmillan saw that things had changed and Empire no longer tenable. In the late 1940s and up to Suez we were actively trying to keep the Empire and involved in multiple small wars to keep it.
By the end of his premiership nearly all were on the road to independence, or had achieved it.
The Empire ended effectively when Attlee gave independence to India, the jewel in the crown and more populous and more important economically than all our African colonies combined.
Macmillan just didn't stop the by then inevitable African independence movements
Do you genuinely see an alternative history where India continued to be ruled by the Raj after 1947? I sense at various points alternative HYUFD would be demanding the tanks be sent in to quell the separatists.
Wasn't India as good as promised a chance to go for independence after the war, in return for their wholehearted participation in it?
Churchill promised it full home rule and dominion status (I think) and through somewhat gritted teeth. It wasn't enough by that stage.
To be fair the Indian Army was by and large wholly loyal to the end.
If you ignore those lads fighting for the Japanese.
Yes, I thought that would come up.
The INA was a tiny portion of the Indian Army, many of whom regretted it and subsequently changed their minds, and were detested by the vast bulk of the Indian Army.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
I noticed the exact same phenomenon in France, last week. Paunchy young men. Stats confirm that the French are indeed chubbing out
They can’t be very appealing to young women. They have smaller penises, lower testosterone, bigger guts, lower IQs, and less earning power - than their fathers and grandfathers
"Some people might say: “But we’ve got to, we’ve got to show that we’re on the right side, we’ve got to accomplish it, even if other people don’t do it.” I think that’s the politics of narcissism: “I want to feel good.” But in the meantime, you’re wasting resources and you’re wasting time. There is a serious possibility that we’re now in the early stages of runaway climate change. We should be focusing everything we’ve got — not on having an infinitesimal impact on global carbon levels, which would be the case even if the whole net-zero programme was implemented, but on policies of adaptation. And adaptation is not going to be easy. Remember, most climate scientists agree that once human-induced climate change is in the works, it goes on for decades or even centuries. You can’t just stop it. There’s a general idea among environmentalists that we started this so we can stop it. They are wrong. We started it, probably, but we can’t stop it."
"I’ve said previously we’re living in an age of tragedy. I’m not too sure about that anymore. I think we’ve advanced further than tragedy. We’re entering an age of absurdity. Consider German climate policy. Germany, as we keep hearing, is incomparably more adult, more advanced, more modern, and in every way superior to bungling Britain. But in Germany, the result of their closing down of nuclear and going for renewables has been an increased reliance on the dirtiest kind of coal. Well, this is tragic, but it’s even more than tragic. It is completely absurd.
And it’s difficult to put these arguments forward because people start shouting at you or they start crying or they say they can’t get up in the morning. I rather brutally suggest: “Well don’t. Stay in bed until you get a better reason for getting up. And if you don’t, well, there we are. Progress always has casualties.”
The Puritans introduced the philosophy that how you fare in life is mainly down to your own decisions, and so if you're not doing well it's mostly your own fault. In Catholic countries it's more a case of God's will, and so you can't blame yourself too much if things aren't going as well as you'd like them to. The former is more likely to produce miserable people than the latter.
So a fairly right wing view in modern terms, yet CR thinks the Puritans left wing.
There's a great deal of historical discussion on the link between Puritanism, and more generally Calvinism, Presbyterianism, Quakerism, etc. etc., and the work ethic and the rise of modern capitalism.
Partly also however because they had to go into business very often. The Tories of the day were so bitterly opposed to such people - freedom,. what freedom? - that they defined them as second class people not allowed to enter the universities and the professions, or hold offices under the Crown. If anyone was being religiously intolerant in England it was the right wing royalists and C of E conservatives.
Only after Cromwell had executed the King, forced royalists into hiding or exile and banned the Book of Common Prayer and high church Anglican services when Lord Protector
Into the 1850s*, some of those restrictions? That's a looooong time for you Tories to use that excuse.
*University Reform Act 1854, on checking my memory.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
I noticed the exact same phenomenon in France, last week. Paunchy young men. Stats confirm that the French are indeed chubbing out
They can’t be very appealing to young women. They have smaller penises, lower testosterone, bigger guts, lower IQs, and less earning power - than their fathers and grandfathers
Of course, compared to all the sad lonely semi-retired or unemployed/unemployable lefty men on here - who have nothing better to do than inhabit this blog for Guardian mutual wanks 18-hourd a day, day-in, day-out - we have large penises, trim bodies, higher IQs, work for a living and have very good and contemporary earning power.
“A man was rushed to hospital on Friday evening after being attacked by a dog, believed to be an American bully XL, in a south London park.
“A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said the victim, aged in his 40s, was bitten on the arm in Pasley Park, Walworth, just after 18:00 BST. They said that the owner fled the scene with the grey dog before officers arrived.”
The Puritans introduced the philosophy that how you fare in life is mainly down to your own decisions, and so if you're not doing well it's mostly your own fault. In Catholic countries it's more a case of God's will, and so you can't blame yourself too much if things aren't going as well as you'd like them to. The former is more likely to produce miserable people than the latter.
So a fairly right wing view in modern terms, yet CR thinks the Puritans left wing.
There's a great deal of historical discussion on the link between Puritanism, and more generally Calvinism, Presbyterianism, Quakerism, etc. etc., and the work ethic and the rise of modern capitalism.
Partly also however because they had to go into business very often. The Tories of the day were so bitterly opposed to such people - freedom,. what freedom? - that they defined them as second class people not allowed to enter the universities and the professions, or hold offices under the Crown. If anyone was being religiously intolerant in England it was the right wing royalists and C of E conservatives.
Only after Cromwell had executed the King, forced royalists into hiding or exile and banned the Book of Common Prayer and high church Anglican services when Lord Protector
Into the 1850s*, some of those restrictions? That's a looooong time for you Tories to use that excuse.
*University Reform Act 1854, on checking my memory.
Historically, religious tolerance is quite a new idea.
Cromwell was unusual in that as long as you were a somewhat fruit&nuts Presbyterian type, he wasn’t hung up on minor matters of doctrine. That was considered broad minded in his day.
Anything of bells and smells and you were for the high jump, of course.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
I noticed the exact same phenomenon in France, last week. Paunchy young men. Stats confirm that the French are indeed chubbing out
They can’t be very appealing to young women. They have smaller penises, lower testosterone, bigger guts, lower IQs, and less earning power - than their fathers and grandfathers
Of course, compared to all the sad lonely semi-retired or unemployed/unemployable lefty men on here - who have nothing better to do than inhabit this blog for Guardian mutual wanks 18-hourd a day, day-in, day-out
See what I mean about rightwingers hating Britons?
”I crossed the road to get us both out of the way, and began walking away, quickly, thinking that was the end of it. But suddenly the same dog had run across the two-lane road and was hurtling towards us. Instinctively, I scooped Monty up into the air, as the dog smashed into my stomach, sucking the air from my windpipe, its teeth bared.”
“A man was rushed to hospital on Friday evening after being attacked by a dog, believed to be an American bully XL, in a south London park.
“A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said the victim, aged in his 40s, was bitten on the arm in Pasley Park, Walworth, just after 18:00 BST. They said that the owner fled the scene with the grey dog before officers arrived.”
And still the government dithers. And still we wait for the inevitable video of a child dying
What do you expect the government to do? Are you advocating for armed teams of dog wardens or something? If not, what would it take to solve the problem and how much would it cost?
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
I noticed the exact same phenomenon in France, last week. Paunchy young men. Stats confirm that the French are indeed chubbing out
They can’t be very appealing to young women. They have smaller penises, lower testosterone, bigger guts, lower IQs, and less earning power - than their fathers and grandfathers
Of course, compared to all the sad lonely semi-retired or unemployed/unemployable lefty men on here - who have nothing better to do than inhabit this blog for Guardian mutual wanks 18-hourd a day, day-in, day-out - we have large penises, trim bodies, higher IQs, work for a living and have very good and contemporary earning power.
Just like our fathers and grandfathers.
You are the exception that proves the rule, @Casino_Royale
“A man was rushed to hospital on Friday evening after being attacked by a dog, believed to be an American bully XL, in a south London park.
“A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said the victim, aged in his 40s, was bitten on the arm in Pasley Park, Walworth, just after 18:00 BST. They said that the owner fled the scene with the grey dog before officers arrived.”
And still the government dithers. And still we wait for the inevitable video of a child dying
What do you expect the government to do? Are you advocating for armed teams of dog wardens or something? If not, what would it take to solve the problem and how much would it cost?
“A man was rushed to hospital on Friday evening after being attacked by a dog, believed to be an American bully XL, in a south London park.
“A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said the victim, aged in his 40s, was bitten on the arm in Pasley Park, Walworth, just after 18:00 BST. They said that the owner fled the scene with the grey dog before officers arrived.”
And still the government dithers. And still we wait for the inevitable video of a child dying
What do you expect the government to do? Are you advocating for armed teams of dog wardens or something? If not, what would it take to solve the problem and how much would it cost?
Bring in immediate laws on muzzling
Its alright. Rishi has promised they will be banned by the end of the year. Trust in Rishi.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
I noticed the exact same phenomenon in France, last week. Paunchy young men. Stats confirm that the French are indeed chubbing out
They can’t be very appealing to young women. They have smaller penises, lower testosterone, bigger guts, lower IQs, and less earning power - than their fathers and grandfathers
Of course, compared to all the sad lonely semi-retired or unemployed/unemployable lefty men on here - who have nothing better to do than inhabit this blog for Guardian mutual wanks 18-hourd a day, day-in, day-out - we have large penises, trim bodies, higher IQs, work for a living and have very good and contemporary earning power.
I've never once stopped to wonder how big or small my grandfathers' penises were.
I sort of think that I'm on the "normal" side of this particular divide, but I really can't be sure.
My paternal grandfather was banging one of the housemaids well into his 70s so I sort of assume he had a decent hog on him. Relax, prudes, this was in South Africa and it was before racism was bad.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
I noticed the exact same phenomenon in France, last week. Paunchy young men. Stats confirm that the French are indeed chubbing out
They can’t be very appealing to young women. They have smaller penises, lower testosterone, bigger guts, lower IQs, and less earning power - than their fathers and grandfathers
Of course, compared to all the sad lonely semi-retired or unemployed/unemployable lefty men on here - who have nothing better to do than inhabit this blog for Guardian mutual wanks 18-hourd a day, day-in, day-out
See what I mean about rightwingers hating Britons?
I hate Britons who hate themselves and us, and are rather pathetic and desperate about how they go about it.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
"They" - you are British.
Watch your mouth.
And I thought it was the left who were policing people's pronouns!
"Watch your mouth"? Bit early in the day for this kind of fighty talk, no?
No patriot refers to their country in the third party as if it has nothing to do with them.
It's a subtle tell. You should use "we".
All it tells you is that I've lived abroad for much of my working life and even in London most of my colleagues aren't British, so when I talk about Britain there is no assumption of "we" with respect to my audience. If I'm making a purely factual statement about the British state's actions or behaviour I'll refer to Britain. If I'm making a more subjective point about shared responsibility I'll say "we" like I did in the very comment you are referring to. You don't own patriotism - you don't even seem to like much of this country particularly - and you certainly have earned no right to lecture me on patriotism or tell me what I can or cannot say.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
Macmillan was driven by the conditions he'd seen in Stockton in the thirties. As I understood it he felt that it was the duty of the patrician to ensure that the plebs were properly housed and fed.
Also influenced by his experience fighting, and being wounded on the Western Front. He was undeniably upper class, but had a sense of social solidarity and fellow feeling that we don't see much of in the modern Conservative Party.
Disobliging knobs have entirely supplanted noblesse oblige..
Genuine problem for the political Right, even if (overall) we're right about the facts of life.
We do need an answer to the question "what happens to the losers in life's game?" And the most effective way to generate those answers is to have had direct experience of being poked with the shitty end of the stick through no fault of your own for a bit.
For a long time, wartime experience did that job. Then Major had compassion born of experience. Cameron had his experiences with his son. May had her vicarage upbringing (vicarious experience, but a start).
Without that, the Conservatives risk becoming a club for self made men where they worship their own creators. Rishi, on particular, does give off "why don't you all become hedge fund millionaires- it's easy" vibes.
We need that optimism, we need people like that. But it's not a basis to run an entire nation.
People who are rich and successful have a remarkable if perhaps predictable ability to attribute their success entirely to talent and hard work; the thought that they might have been picked out almost randomly as winners in life's lottery, perhaps by birth or contacts or plain chance, doesn't seem to appeal to them.
Possibly why Gove, even when he's wrong or being compulsively sneaky, is usually interesting. He's aware of the Sliding Doors moment in his life
"Some people might say: “But we’ve got to, we’ve got to show that we’re on the right side, we’ve got to accomplish it, even if other people don’t do it.” I think that’s the politics of narcissism: “I want to feel good.” But in the meantime, you’re wasting resources and you’re wasting time. There is a serious possibility that we’re now in the early stages of runaway climate change. We should be focusing everything we’ve got — not on having an infinitesimal impact on global carbon levels, which would be the case even if the whole net-zero programme was implemented, but on policies of adaptation. And adaptation is not going to be easy. Remember, most climate scientists agree that once human-induced climate change is in the works, it goes on for decades or even centuries. You can’t just stop it. There’s a general idea among environmentalists that we started this so we can stop it. They are wrong. We started it, probably, but we can’t stop it."
"I’ve said previously we’re living in an age of tragedy. I’m not too sure about that anymore. I think we’ve advanced further than tragedy. We’re entering an age of absurdity. Consider German climate policy. Germany, as we keep hearing, is incomparably more adult, more advanced, more modern, and in every way superior to bungling Britain. But in Germany, the result of their closing down of nuclear and going for renewables has been an increased reliance on the dirtiest kind of coal. Well, this is tragic, but it’s even more than tragic. It is completely absurd.
And it’s difficult to put these arguments forward because people start shouting at you or they start crying or they say they can’t get up in the morning. I rather brutally suggest: “Well don’t. Stay in bed until you get a better reason for getting up. And if you don’t, well, there we are. Progress always has casualties.”
This is very negative. It's seeming to say that because doing what is necessary to ameliorate climate change is difficult we should stop trying. Maybe just abandon some coastal communities? Scientists say that we can achieve net zero with the tools we have already and doing so will stop things getting too much worse - probably catastrophically worse if we get into a positive feedback loop. John Gray is launching attacks on people who "start shouting at you or they start crying". Who cares? We should tackle the known problems with the known solutions and get the added benefit of energy security with cleaner air at a long term lower cost.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
"They" - you are British.
Watch your mouth.
And I thought it was the left who were policing people's pronouns!
"Watch your mouth"? Bit early in the day for this kind of fighty talk, no?
No patriot refers to their country in the third party as if it has nothing to do with them.
It's a subtle tell. You should use "we".
All it tells you is that I've lived abroad for much of my working life and even in London most of my colleagues aren't British, so when I talk about Britain there is no assumption of "we" with respect to my audience. If I'm making a purely factual statement about the British state's actions or behaviour I'll refer to Britain. If I'm making a more subjective point about shared responsibility I'll say "we" like I did in the very comment you are referring to. You don't own patriotism - you don't even seem to like much of this country particularly - and you certainly have earned no right to lecture me on patriotism or tell me what I can or cannot say.
That makes you an enemy of the people in their eyes, like, erm, that judge who was a (whisper it) GAY.
I am routinely resiled as a Britain hater on here, but I’m about the only poster - apart from SeanF - who thinks the British Empire was pretty cool, all things considered.
I suspect the die was cast in the 1890s with the collapse of Home Rule for Ireland.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
"They" - you are British.
Watch your mouth.
And I thought it was the left who were policing people's pronouns!
"Watch your mouth"? Bit early in the day for this kind of fighty talk, no?
No patriot refers to their country in the third party as if it has nothing to do with them.
It's a subtle tell. You should use "we".
All it tells you is that I've lived abroad for much of my working life and even in London most of my colleagues aren't British, so when I talk about Britain there is no assumption of "we" with respect to my audience. If I'm making a purely factual statement about the British state's actions or behaviour I'll refer to Britain. If I'm making a more subjective point about shared responsibility I'll say "we" like I did in the very comment you are referring to. You don't own patriotism - you don't even seem to like much of this country particularly - and you certainly have earned no right to lecture me on patriotism or tell me what I can or cannot say.
That makes you an enemy of the people in their eyes, like, erm, that judge who was a (whisper it) GAY.
Wasn’t he “blatantly” or “openly” gay, that particular judge?
I've never once stopped to wonder how big or small my grandfathers' penises were.
I sort of think that I'm on the "normal" side of this particular divide, but I really can't be sure.
I bet you have the tiniest penis on here.
It comes across with every post that you write.
Ever tried to measure a flatworm? Any zoologist knows that the statement of the length of something with a hydraulic endoskeleton has to be bound about with caveats and specifications.
I am routinely resiled as a Britain hater on here, but I’m about the only poster - apart from SeanF - who thinks the British Empire was pretty cool, all things considered.
I suspect the die was cast in the 1890s with the collapse of Home Rule for Ireland.
TBF one might rightly complain about some foreigners coming over, and insisting on operating your railways to suot themselves, and taking the profits out of the country. Even if the train service improved. As in India (which was n ot hard as there were zero railways anywhere at the relevant time of the UK takeover, the Tranent and Cockenzie Waggonway, Little Eaton Gangway, and similar operations aside).
It's just a shame that the PB rightwingers haven't quite cottoned on to the comparison with the current state of the realm.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
Macmillan was driven by the conditions he'd seen in Stockton in the thirties. As I understood it he felt that it was the duty of the patrician to ensure that the plebs were properly housed and fed.
Also influenced by his experience fighting, and being wounded on the Western Front. He was undeniably upper class, but had a sense of social solidarity and fellow feeling that we don't see much of in the modern Conservative Party.
Disobliging knobs have entirely supplanted noblesse oblige..
Genuine problem for the political Right, even if (overall) we're right about the facts of life.
We do need an answer to the question "what happens to the losers in life's game?" And the most effective way to generate those answers is to have had direct experience of being poked with the shitty end of the stick through no fault of your own for a bit.
For a long time, wartime experience did that job. Then Major had compassion born of experience. Cameron had his experiences with his son. May had her vicarage upbringing (vicarious experience, but a start).
Without that, the Conservatives risk becoming a club for self made men where they worship their own creators. Rishi, on particular, does give off "why don't you all become hedge fund millionaires- it's easy" vibes.
We need that optimism, we need people like that. But it's not a basis to run an entire nation.
People who are rich and successful have a remarkable if perhaps predictable ability to attribute their success entirely to talent and hard work; the thought that they might have been picked out almost randomly as winners in life's lottery, perhaps by birth or contacts or plain chance, doesn't seem to appeal to them.
Possibly why Gove, even when he's wrong or being compulsively sneaky, is usually interesting. He's aware of the Sliding Doors moment in his life
I am routinely resiled as a Britain hater on here, but I’m about the only poster - apart from SeanF - who thinks the British Empire was pretty cool, all things considered.
I suspect the die was cast in the 1890s with the collapse of Home Rule for Ireland.
I think you’re right. Cecil Rhodes was himself a Home Ruler.
In the end, though, I think that democracy and nationalism are the destroyers of empires. Having these things at home, but not in the colonies, becomes unsustainable.
That, and the fact that these days, it’s much more cost-effective to get the goods you need through trading, rather than by occupying territory.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
Macmillan was driven by the conditions he'd seen in Stockton in the thirties. As I understood it he felt that it was the duty of the patrician to ensure that the plebs were properly housed and fed.
Also influenced by his experience fighting, and being wounded on the Western Front. He was undeniably upper class, but had a sense of social solidarity and fellow feeling that we don't see much of in the modern Conservative Party.
Disobliging knobs have entirely supplanted noblesse oblige..
Genuine problem for the political Right, even if (overall) we're right about the facts of life.
We do need an answer to the question "what happens to the losers in life's game?" And the most effective way to generate those answers is to have had direct experience of being poked with the shitty end of the stick through no fault of your own for a bit.
For a long time, wartime experience did that job. Then Major had compassion born of experience. Cameron had his experiences with his son. May had her vicarage upbringing (vicarious experience, but a start).
Without that, the Conservatives risk becoming a club for self made men where they worship their own creators. Rishi, on particular, does give off "why don't you all become hedge fund millionaires- it's easy" vibes.
We need that optimism, we need people like that. But it's not a basis to run an entire nation.
People who are rich and successful have a remarkable if perhaps predictable ability to attribute their success entirely to talent and hard work; the thought that they might have been picked out almost randomly as winners in life's lottery, perhaps by birth or contacts or plain chance, doesn't seem to appeal to them.
Possibly why Gove, even when he's wrong or being compulsively sneaky, is usually interesting. He's aware of the Sliding Doors moment in his life
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
I agree it should be non-partisan, and it's natural to support your side in sport etc.. But affection for familiar surroundings shouldn't extend to bias. I wouldn't back my country unless I felt it was right, would you? Say our cricket team was accused of nefarious manipulation of the ball - would you support it anyway, or dismiss the allegation out of hand?
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
I noticed the exact same phenomenon in France, last week. Paunchy young men. Stats confirm that the French are indeed chubbing out
They can’t be very appealing to young women. They have smaller penises, lower testosterone, bigger guts, lower IQs, and less earning power - than their fathers and grandfathers
Of course, compared to all the sad lonely semi-retired or unemployed/unemployable lefty men on here - who have nothing better to do than inhabit this blog for Guardian mutual wanks 18-hourd a day, day-in, day-out
See what I mean about rightwingers hating Britons?
I hate Britons who hate themselves and us, and are rather pathetic and desperate about how they go about it.
This really isn't hard, Foxy.
Learn it.
I hate no one, least of all my own people and country.
It is you with the anger and hate issues. You need to chill a bit and take a bit more pleasure in the beautiful variety of modern Britain.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
So, you like Harold Macmillan because he was actually rather left-wing?
Got it!
Macmillan was driven by the conditions he'd seen in Stockton in the thirties. As I understood it he felt that it was the duty of the patrician to ensure that the plebs were properly housed and fed.
Also influenced by his experience fighting, and being wounded on the Western Front. He was undeniably upper class, but had a sense of social solidarity and fellow feeling that we don't see much of in the modern Conservative Party.
Disobliging knobs have entirely supplanted noblesse oblige..
Genuine problem for the political Right, even if (overall) we're right about the facts of life.
We do need an answer to the question "what happens to the losers in life's game?" And the most effective way to generate those answers is to have had direct experience of being poked with the shitty end of the stick through no fault of your own for a bit.
For a long time, wartime experience did that job. Then Major had compassion born of experience. Cameron had his experiences with his son. May had her vicarage upbringing (vicarious experience, but a start).
Without that, the Conservatives risk becoming a club for self made men where they worship their own creators. Rishi, on particular, does give off "why don't you all become hedge fund millionaires- it's easy" vibes.
We need that optimism, we need people like that. But it's not a basis to run an entire nation.
People who are rich and successful have a remarkable if perhaps predictable ability to attribute their success entirely to talent and hard work; the thought that they might have been picked out almost randomly as winners in life's lottery, perhaps by birth or contacts or plain chance, doesn't seem to appeal to them.
Possibly why Gove, even when he's wrong or being compulsively sneaky, is usually interesting. He's aware of the Sliding Doors moment in his life
"Some people might say: “But we’ve got to, we’ve got to show that we’re on the right side, we’ve got to accomplish it, even if other people don’t do it.” I think that’s the politics of narcissism: “I want to feel good.” But in the meantime, you’re wasting resources and you’re wasting time. There is a serious possibility that we’re now in the early stages of runaway climate change. We should be focusing everything we’ve got — not on having an infinitesimal impact on global carbon levels, which would be the case even if the whole net-zero programme was implemented, but on policies of adaptation. And adaptation is not going to be easy. Remember, most climate scientists agree that once human-induced climate change is in the works, it goes on for decades or even centuries. You can’t just stop it. There’s a general idea among environmentalists that we started this so we can stop it. They are wrong. We started it, probably, but we can’t stop it."
"I’ve said previously we’re living in an age of tragedy. I’m not too sure about that anymore. I think we’ve advanced further than tragedy. We’re entering an age of absurdity. Consider German climate policy. Germany, as we keep hearing, is incomparably more adult, more advanced, more modern, and in every way superior to bungling Britain. But in Germany, the result of their closing down of nuclear and going for renewables has been an increased reliance on the dirtiest kind of coal. Well, this is tragic, but it’s even more than tragic. It is completely absurd.
And it’s difficult to put these arguments forward because people start shouting at you or they start crying or they say they can’t get up in the morning. I rather brutally suggest: “Well don’t. Stay in bed until you get a better reason for getting up. And if you don’t, well, there we are. Progress always has casualties.”
This is very negative. It's seeming to say that because doing what is necessary to ameliorate climate change is difficult we should stop trying. Maybe just abandon some coastal communities? Scientists say that we can achieve net zero with the tools we have already and doing so will stop things getting too much worse - probably catastrophically worse if we get into a positive feedback loop. John Gray is launching attacks on people who "start shouting at you or they start crying". Who cares? We should tackle the known problems with the known solutions and get the added benefit of energy security with cleaner air at a long term lower cost.
I think the problem is that he is deriding 'net zero' as having no merit at all. There is obviously some point in having policies that seek to radically reduce carbon emissions. However the structural gains come with the construction of new infrastructure, and probably also now adaptation which is happening at nowhere near the pace it should. The problem he is describing well is that the response to climate change is being turned in to a moral drama that is experienced at the level of the individual, with punitive policies that hit the poorest in society hardest fuelling popular revolts. This is not going to solve the broader problems.
I am routinely resiled as a Britain hater on here, but I’m about the only poster - apart from SeanF - who thinks the British Empire was pretty cool, all things considered.
I suspect the die was cast in the 1890s with the collapse of Home Rule for Ireland.
I think you’re right. Cecil Rhodes was himself a Home Ruler.
In the end, though, I think that democracy and nationalism are the destroyers of empires. Having these things at home, but not in the colonies, becomes unsustainable.
Empires in the sense we commonly think about are of course unsustainable.
But, the US is an “empire” as well. Russia too.
The UK, US, and Russia all “colonised” large landmasses in the 19th century. The US and Russia kept their conquests, though.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
"They" - you are British.
Watch your mouth.
And I thought it was the left who were policing people's pronouns!
"Watch your mouth"? Bit early in the day for this kind of fighty talk, no?
No patriot refers to their country in the third party as if it has nothing to do with them.
It's a subtle tell. You should use "we".
All it tells you is that I've lived abroad for much of my working life and even in London most of my colleagues aren't British, so when I talk about Britain there is no assumption of "we" with respect to my audience. If I'm making a purely factual statement about the British state's actions or behaviour I'll refer to Britain. If I'm making a more subjective point about shared responsibility I'll say "we" like I did in the very comment you are referring to. You don't own patriotism - you don't even seem to like much of this country particularly - and you certainly have earned no right to lecture me on patriotism or tell me what I can or cannot say.
With respect, fuck off, old boy.
I love everything about this country and my contempt is solely reserved for those who denigrate or undermine it.
I have a foreign wife and went to an international school. I will take absolutely no lectures whatsoever from you about objectivity or my awareness of other audiences.
I am routinely resiled as a Britain hater on here, but I’m about the only poster - apart from SeanF - who thinks the British Empire was pretty cool, all things considered.
I suspect the die was cast in the 1890s with the collapse of Home Rule for Ireland.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
For way less than the cost of the Falklands War we could have bought all the islanders farms in the highlands of Wales and Scotland and given them each a load of sheep and they could have continued their lifestyle with better weather if fewer penguins. But, of course, despite what we were told it was never about the people living on the islands, but about the likelihood of oil beneath the seas all around.
No, it's about them allowing to live on the only islands they've ever called home and choose their own way of life.
So, quite a lot like the Chagos then?
I've never said the Chagos weren't badly treated. Nor that they shouldn't return.
It's the naïve self-flaggelating Britain haters (like you) who I'm calling out.
It seems to me it is the right who hate Britain, its peoples and institutions.
Being a patriot doesn't stop me being critical of the crimes of empire. This one within my lifetime.
The fact that the Chagossians were deported to Mauritius says to me that we understood the islands to be part of Mauritius.
I've never heard you saying a patriotic thing in your life.
I'm all ears.
You have clearly not been paying attention!
I have often extolled a different sort of patriotism to yours, the English radical tradition that goes back to Pelagius, continues through the Lollards, the folk tales of Robin Hood, the Puritan reformers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, the Levellers, the Diggers, the abolitionists, Peterloo, the Chartists, Corbett, Captain Swing, the Trade Unions, the factory reformers, the city leaders that built the civic institutions of our industrial cities, the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, etc etc.
"A different sort of patriotism" - in other words, celebrating all the Lefties in history. And only them.
Patriotism isn't partisan, like you seem to think it is; it's agnostic and about backing your country and people.
That's why I'd back Atlee in a corner as well as Churchill.
It's interesting that you see the Puritans, the Abolitionists, the factory reformers and civic fathers (I had in mind Joe Chamberlain and the like) as left wingers.
If you want a more recent example of a right wing Prime Minister that I am proud of, I would cite Harold MacMillain, who saw the winds of change and liberated the Empire, while consolidating the welfare state, and building more council houses per year than any other postwar PM.
The Puritans don't fit easily into left or right. They're more like the rulers of Iran.
The Puritans are responsible for the fact that a lot of British people today walk around with miserable looks on their faces, whereas the same kinds of people in places like Spain, Italy, Portugal are happier, or at least appear happier.
One thing I've, reluctantly, noticed recently is just how tubby British men are - even the young ones, who sort of hide it with larger polos/sweatshirts, beards and a casual demeanour.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
I noticed the exact same phenomenon in France, last week. Paunchy young men. Stats confirm that the French are indeed chubbing out
They can’t be very appealing to young women. They have smaller penises, lower testosterone, bigger guts, lower IQs, and less earning power - than their fathers and grandfathers
Of course, compared to all the sad lonely semi-retired or unemployed/unemployable lefty men on here - who have nothing better to do than inhabit this blog for Guardian mutual wanks 18-hourd a day, day-in, day-out - we have large penises, trim bodies, higher IQs, work for a living and have very good and contemporary earning power.
Just like our fathers and grandfathers.
..
This site is lucky to have such a esteemed and venerated poster on it.
Mauritius is crying crocodile tears over BIOT. Boris is right: look at a map. They are over 1,200 miles away. The Maldives or Seychelles would have a better claim, and that wouldn't be a good one either.
They want the fishing grounds and hate the MPA around it, which the Royal Navy occasionally police. So if the UK have decided to dance on leaseback then I suspect this is actually about alliance building in the Indian Ocean area. The UN vote is meaningless - people forget the sort of states actually in the UN and how they are bought and corralled by China. Fascinating that it was the African Union that initiated it.
The base is a strategic one and absolutely needed given China's ambitions to colonise every reef and atoll in the area.
So it will be kept come what may.
The Chagos Islands were part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius - so regardless of their distance from anywhere the British themselves considered the territories to be linked until they were forced to give up their control of Mauritius in 1968. At that time the British clung onto the Seychelles and the Chagos Islands. The Seychelles were later granted independence and the Chagossians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a Stalin-style forced population transfer so we could suck up to the Americans, the new big boys in the neighbourhood. Most of the exiled Chagossians have ended up in either Mauritius of the Seychelles - so again you can see why Mauritius might consider it their business. An utterly shameful affair. Very hard to imagine the white Falkland Islanders ever getting the same kind of treatment.
"They" - you are British.
Watch your mouth.
And I thought it was the left who were policing people's pronouns!
"Watch your mouth"? Bit early in the day for this kind of fighty talk, no?
No patriot refers to their country in the third party as if it has nothing to do with them.
It's a subtle tell. You should use "we".
All it tells you is that I've lived abroad for much of my working life and even in London most of my colleagues aren't British, so when I talk about Britain there is no assumption of "we" with respect to my audience. If I'm making a purely factual statement about the British state's actions or behaviour I'll refer to Britain. If I'm making a more subjective point about shared responsibility I'll say "we" like I did in the very comment you are referring to. You don't own patriotism - you don't even seem to like much of this country particularly - and you certainly have earned no right to lecture me on patriotism or tell me what I can or cannot say.
I am routinely resiled as a Britain hater on here, but I’m about the only poster - apart from SeanF - who thinks the British Empire was pretty cool, all things considered.
I suspect the die was cast in the 1890s with the collapse of Home Rule for Ireland.
I think you’re right. Cecil Rhodes was himself a Home Ruler.
In the end, though, I think that democracy and nationalism are the destroyers of empires. Having these things at home, but not in the colonies, becomes unsustainable.
Empires in the sense we commonly think about are of course unsustainable.
But, the US is an “empire” as well. Russia too.
The UK, US, and Russia all “colonised” large landmasses in the 19th century. The US and Russia kept their conquests, though.
China also. The unpleasant truth is that ethnic cleansing and/or forcible assimilation are the two sure methods of ensuring that conquests are permanent.
Quick note on cyclists running red lights - here in Melbourne, cyclists and pedestrians share a traffic phase, but only in one direction (and if you're turning left out right, you have to give way to the pedestrians. This is the same for drivers on their phase).
Interesting solution, with vulnerable road users grouped together.
Interesting, so if I have that correctly that's 4 phases and pedestrians can always cross the roads walking say N-S when traffic or cyclists are also going N-S, and both the latter have to give way if turning both ways?
And there is no phase where pedestrians are moving across an arm of the junction where no motor or cycle traffic cannot go along it according to the signal pattern?
That seems to go against the principle of separation of vulnerable modes of travel in space and/or time.
Interesting contrast to the phasing on a UK CYCLOPs junction as mainly seen in Manchester (parallel cycle and pedestrian routes round the outside which get their own all-motor-traffic-stopped phase) or the Dutch "all green" design (phase where motors are all stopped, and pedestrians and cyclists can go anywhere).
Yep exactly. There is a deliberate mixing of contrary pedestrian, cyclist and vehicle phases, and without exception drivers/cyclists turning left/right give way to everyone else.
It's similar with uncontrolled junctions too - cars always give way for pedestrians and cyclists who are heading straight on (as they should in the UK...)
The only downside is the massive tram network means the chance of getting caught in a rail is high - but the cycle lane design forces you to cross at 90, reducing the risk somewhat.
The Puritans introduced the philosophy that how you fare in life is mainly down to your own decisions, and so if you're not doing well it's mostly your own fault. In Catholic countries it's more a case of God's will, and so you can't blame yourself too much if things aren't going as well as you'd like them to. The former is more likely to produce miserable people than the latter.
So a fairly right wing view in modern terms, yet CR thinks the Puritans left wing.
There's a great deal of historical discussion on the link between Puritanism, and more generally Calvinism, Presbyterianism, Quakerism, etc. etc., and the work ethic and the rise of modern capitalism.
Partly also however because they had to go into business very often. The Tories of the day were so bitterly opposed to such people - freedom,. what freedom? - that they defined them as second class people not allowed to enter the universities and the professions, or hold offices under the Crown. If anyone was being religiously intolerant in England it was the right wing royalists and C of E conservatives.
Only after Cromwell had executed the King, forced royalists into hiding or exile and banned the Book of Common Prayer and high church Anglican services when Lord Protector
Of course, the Laudian Book of Common Prayer had been imposed on the Scots in the first place, by KCI, which is what kicked it all off ioriginally. So it was a bit much of the Royalists to whine about it being banned.
Comments
As a student I managed to miss National Service but my non-student friends had to go.
Under Macmillan there was a recognition that the world had changed, and independence was to be encouraged. Hence his "Winds of Change" speech.
Partly also however because they had to go into business very often. The Tories of the day were so bitterly opposed to such people - freedom,. what freedom? - that they defined them as second class people not allowed to enter the universities and the professions, or hold offices under the Crown. If anyone was being religiously intolerant in England it was the right wing royalists and C of E conservatives.
Goodwin maybe, but he’s been rapidly slipping down the brow scale.
We do need an answer to the question "what happens to the losers in life's game?" And the most effective way to generate those answers is to have had direct experience of being poked with the shitty end of the stick through no fault of your own for a bit.
For a long time, wartime experience did that job. Then Major had compassion born of experience. Cameron had his experiences with his son. May had her vicarage upbringing (vicarious experience, but a start).
Without that, the Conservatives risk becoming a club for self made men where they worship their own creators. Rishi, on particular, does give off "why don't you all become hedge fund millionaires- it's easy" vibes.
We need that optimism, we need people like that. But it's not a basis to run an entire nation.
It seems that young women are slightly better at keeping it under control, certainly to how I remember 10-15 years ago, so not quite sure what's happened here.
But you're certainly a bit of a Puritan yourself.
And there is no phase where pedestrians are moving across an arm of the junction where no motor or cycle traffic cannot go along it according to the signal pattern?
That seems to go against the principle of separation of vulnerable modes of travel in space and/or time.
Interesting contrast to the phasing on a UK CYCLOPs junction as mainly seen in Manchester (parallel cycle and pedestrian routes round the outside which get their own all-motor-traffic-stopped phase) or the Dutch "all green" design (phase where motors are all stopped, and pedestrians and cyclists can go anywhere).
It doesn't confer you own personal responsibility for everything your ancestors did or didn’t do.
I see them as neither of the right nor left, but rather in the fine tradition of English (and Scottish) radical thought.
And yes, I am a Puritan* in many of my religious and political positions.
*Puritanism is itself a very diverse set of philosophies.
A smarter move would have been to offer votes on integration or association as France did with some of its colonies.
But, yeah, the full horror of the position wasn't revealed until Macmillan's "audit of empire" which came in, what, 1957?
And even then it was thought that only Ghana and Nigeria were really regarded as being ready for independence - it was assumed by most people that divestment of the other colonies would be a long, slow process.
The only person arguing for a speedy end to empire was Iain Macleod, and I suspect even he would have been shocked if you were to have told him in 1960 that the process would be more or less complete within a decade.
We chose the latter but I think it was the wrong choice in hindsight and complicates our relationship with India and our geostrategic position in the region to this day.
To be fair the Indian Army was by and large wholly loyal to the end.
I pity you both.
Sort of very slightly ages and matures you, and therefore sort of provides cover for a slight paunch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_(gay_culture)
Westminster didn't finally give up the right to pass laws for Australia until the 1980s for instance.
By the end of January 1950 however India was a fully independent Republic
Self-flagellation, guilt, humiliation and pleasure-hating is you all over.
It's a bit odd, and not sure why you're like that, but you are and, to be fair, you admit it.
Might explain a lot.
The INA was a tiny portion of the Indian Army, many of whom regretted it and subsequently changed their minds, and were detested by the vast bulk of the Indian Army.
I noticed the exact same phenomenon in France, last week. Paunchy young men. Stats confirm that the French are indeed chubbing out
They can’t be very appealing to young women. They have smaller penises, lower testosterone, bigger guts, lower IQs, and less earning power - than their fathers and grandfathers
John Gray on Net zero.
"Some people might say: “But we’ve got to, we’ve got to show that we’re on the right side, we’ve got to accomplish it, even if other people don’t do it.” I think that’s the politics of narcissism: “I want to feel good.” But in the meantime, you’re wasting resources and you’re wasting time. There is a serious possibility that we’re now in the early stages of runaway climate change. We should be focusing everything we’ve got — not on having an infinitesimal impact on global carbon levels, which would be the case even if the whole net-zero programme was implemented, but on policies of adaptation. And adaptation is not going to be easy. Remember, most climate scientists agree that once human-induced climate change is in the works, it goes on for decades or even centuries. You can’t just stop it. There’s a general idea among environmentalists that we started this so we can stop it. They are wrong. We started it, probably, but we can’t stop it."
"I’ve said previously we’re living in an age of tragedy. I’m not too sure about that anymore. I think we’ve advanced further than tragedy. We’re entering an age of absurdity. Consider German climate policy. Germany, as we keep hearing, is incomparably more adult, more advanced, more modern, and in every way superior to bungling Britain. But in Germany, the result of their closing down of nuclear and going for renewables has been an increased reliance on the dirtiest kind of coal. Well, this is tragic, but it’s even more than tragic. It is completely absurd.
And it’s difficult to put these arguments forward because people start shouting at you or they start crying or they say they can’t get up in the morning. I rather brutally suggest: “Well don’t. Stay in bed until you get a better reason for getting up. And if you don’t, well, there we are. Progress always has casualties.”
*University Reform Act 1854, on checking my memory.
Just like our fathers and grandfathers.
“A man was rushed to hospital on Friday evening after being attacked by a dog, believed to be an American bully XL, in a south London park.
“A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said the victim, aged in his 40s, was bitten on the arm in Pasley Park, Walworth, just after 18:00 BST.
They said that the owner fled the scene with the grey dog before officers arrived.”
https://x.com/bbcnews/status/1705519808995807676?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
And still the government dithers. And still we wait for the inevitable video of a child dying
Cromwell was unusual in that as long as you were a somewhat fruit&nuts Presbyterian type, he wasn’t hung up on minor matters of doctrine. That was considered broad minded in his day.
Anything of bells and smells and you were for the high jump, of course.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/i-spent-weeks-reading-dog-31004128
”I crossed the road to get us both out of the way, and began walking away, quickly, thinking that was the end of it. But suddenly the same dog had run across the two-lane road and was hurtling towards us. Instinctively, I scooped Monty up into the air, as the dog smashed into my stomach, sucking the air from my windpipe, its teeth bared.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66900999
“XL bully dog attack: More injuries in Sheffield as another dog attack reported to police
“An XL bully has been seized by the police after another dog attack in which a member of the public was seriously injured in Sheffield.”
https://www.nationalworld.com/news/crime/xl-bully-seized-by-police-in-sheffield-4346636
This really isn't hard, Foxy.
Learn it.
It's seeming to say that because doing what is necessary to ameliorate climate change is difficult we should stop trying. Maybe just abandon some coastal communities?
Scientists say that we can achieve net zero with the tools we have already and doing so will stop things getting too much worse - probably catastrophically worse if we get into a positive feedback loop.
John Gray is launching attacks on people who "start shouting at you or they start crying". Who cares?
We should tackle the known problems with the known solutions and get the added benefit of energy security with cleaner air at a long term lower cost.
I suspect the die was cast in the 1890s with the collapse of Home Rule for Ireland.
“Modern man has SHORTER PENIS, bigger MOOBS and less fertile than forefathers, says study”
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/778700/Modern-man-alpha-male-feminisation-masculisation-smaller-penis-bigger-breasts-less-fertile
It comes across with every post that you write.
It's just a shame that the PB rightwingers haven't quite cottoned on to the comparison with the current state of the realm.
In the end, though, I think that democracy and nationalism are the destroyers of empires. Having these things at home, but not in the colonies, becomes unsustainable.
That, and the fact that these days, it’s much more cost-effective to get the goods you need through trading, rather than by occupying territory.
It is you with the anger and hate issues. You need to chill a bit and take a bit more pleasure in the beautiful variety of modern Britain.
But, the US is an “empire” as well.
Russia too.
The UK, US, and Russia all “colonised” large landmasses in the 19th century. The US and Russia kept their conquests, though.
I love everything about this country and my contempt is solely reserved for those who denigrate or undermine it.
I have a foreign wife and went to an international school. I will take absolutely no lectures whatsoever from you about objectivity or my awareness of other audiences.
Not sure about Fred West.
Sorry, what or who are we backing Attlee against?
On the new doctrine that the quality of patriotism depends on anatomical attributes ...
https://www.gourmetnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Veroni-Giant-Mortadella-copy.jpg
I You see, you don't deny it.
Microcock.
It's similar with uncontrolled junctions too - cars always give way for pedestrians and cyclists who are heading straight on (as they should in the UK...)
The only downside is the massive tram network means the chance of getting caught in a rail is high - but the cycle lane design forces you to cross at 90, reducing the risk somewhat.