Topic: Churchill

[Sangria]

Yes, I referred to this myself earlier in the thread. It was shameful how they were treated when they returned to Ireland.

The pro-Nazis in Britain were few, but influential as you say. That story is well documented and extremely well known. In fairness the Daily Mail had changed its mind by 1939! And the active number of pro-Nazis after war broke out was tiny. Their leader, Mosley, was controversially gaoled of course.

The Royal Navy protected Ireland from invasion by the Nazis after 1939 - not out the goodness of British hearts, admittedly, but because Ireland would have been a springboard for a Nazi attack on Britain. But this had the virtue of permitting the Irish to be neutral AND to be immune from Nazi invasion and the arrival of the SS in cities like Dublin and Cork. Some countries in Europe were not that lucky.

A lot of wartime activities can be explained away as expedient in difficult times. But the treatment of Irish volunteers who'd served on the Allied side was entirely of Ireland's own choice. The fighting was over, and they'd been on as clearcut a moral side in a fight between good and evil as there has ever been in history. Yet they were treated like dirt; not just neglected as Britain's returning veterans were after WWI, but actively persecuted. I never get that.

[Corkboy]

The fighting was over, and they'd been on as clearcut a moral side in a fight between good and evil as there has ever been in history. Yet they were treated like dirt; not just neglected as Britain's returning veterans were after WWI, but actively persecuted. I never get that.

Perhaps you should refresh your knowledge of Anglo Irish history for the 800 or so years leading up to WWII. There might be a couple of bloodstained clues in there as to why Irish people weren't so enthusiastic about rowing in on the British side, in any conflict.

[FlashGordon]

Yes, I referred to this myself earlier in the thread. It was shameful how they were treated when they returned to Ireland.

The pro-Nazis in Britain were few, but influential as you say. That story is well documented and extremely well known. In fairness the Daily Mail had changed its mind by 1939! And the active number of pro-Nazis after war broke out was tiny. Their leader, Mosley, was controversially gaoled of course.

The Royal Navy protected Ireland from invasion by the Nazis after 1939 - not out the goodness of British hearts, admittedly, but because Ireland would have been a springboard for a Nazi attack on Britain. But this had the virtue of permitting the Irish to be neutral AND to be immune from Nazi invasion and the arrival of the SS in cities like Dublin and Cork. Some countries in Europe were not that lucky.

Correct, but I think we were due a bit of luck by that stage 

I agree it is shameful the way those men were treated and thankfully we have moved on a bit as nation since then.

The Royal Navy were also granted as much leeway as possible to use Irish ports to their advantage whilst we remained 'neutral' so as you say it benefited both sides.

I think the IRA's support of the Axis was very much a case of my enemies' enemy is my friend. Looking back of course it was an utterly crazy stance to take and thank god their idea of liberation didn't transpire.

[Sangria]

Perhaps you should refresh your knowledge of Anglo Irish history for the 800 or so years leading up to WWII. There might be a couple of bloodstained clues in there as to why Irish people weren't so enthusiastic about rowing in on the British side, in any conflict.

I can understand not wanting to glorify them because of the Anglo-Irish history. But after all that had come out about the activities of the Nazis, and the fact that these men had helped end all that, why was there a need to actively exclude them from work, benefits, society, etc? It would have been less effort just to keep shtum about the whole episode. And it wasn't just in the immediate aftermath of WWII, when there would still have been people who remembered the Civil War. The last of the pardons was issued IIRC in the 2000s (or was it in the 2010s).

[FlashGordon]

I can understand not wanting to glorify them because of the Anglo-Irish history. But after all that had come out about the activities of the Nazis, and the fact that these men had helped end all that, why was there a need to actively exclude them from work, benefits, society, etc? It would have been less effort just to keep shtum about the whole episode. And it wasn't just in the immediate aftermath of WWII, when there would still have been people who remembered the Civil War. The last of the pardons was issued IIRC in the 2000s (or was it in the 2010s).

Yes they could have been treated better just as the likes of Alan Turing could've been treated better in Britain but as has been said on this thread that was the time they lived in. It is much easier to look back on it rationally now and say this.

To some the fighting against an oppressive regime has never stopped on these islands. Our nation has a constant struggle with wanting to be more progressive and forgiving whilst also appreciating the history of this great nation and the persecution of our ancestors on our own shores. Thankfully 800 years of oppression won't lead to 800 years of resentment for the general populace. You will always have some that will never forgive and continue to be ready to bear arms in a fight for our independence. Luckily they are in the minority now, but for the years after WWII it wasn't too far removed from our own armed struggle so any display other than utter contempt for a member of the British Army wouldn't have been accepted by the masses.

[Corkboy]

I can understand not wanting to glorify them because of the Anglo-Irish history. But after all that had come out about the activities of the Nazis, and the fact that these men had helped end all that, why was there a need to actively exclude them from work, benefits, society, etc? It would have been less effort just to keep shtum about the whole episode. And it wasn't just in the immediate aftermath of WWII, when there would still have been people who remembered the Civil War. The last of the pardons was issued IIRC in the 2000s (or was it in the 2010s).

The official reason was that the Irish who fought for Britain had deserted the Irish army and were therefore subject to punishment, which in other countries was much more serious than being blacklisted for employment. Ireland was neutral, we were an independent nation, rules are rules.

But in reality, there were many Irish people alive in the aftermath of WWII who had personal experience of British brutality, for whom it wasn't a history lesson or some principled stand, some of my own family included. If your son had been murdered by the British, imagine how you would feel seeing your neighbour's son coming home some years later in a British uniform. At that point, would you sit down and do a side by side comparison of British versus German cruelty, or would you tell your neighbour he was fighting for the same army that murdered your son?

Muhammed Ali famously said no Vietcong ever called him nigger. Well, for an Irish person in 1945, no German ever burned his city or killed her relatives. I get that with the fullness of time, we all see these things more clearly, and it certainly does look like life under the Allies was preferable to life under the Axis but at the time, and with centuries of oppression immediately behind us, it wasn't that clear.

[Yorkykopite]

Correct, but I think we were due a bit of luck by that stage 

I agree it is shameful the way those men were treated and thankfully we have moved on a bit as nation since then.

The Royal Navy were also granted as much leeway as possible to use Irish ports to their advantage whilst we remained 'neutral' so as you say it benefited both sides.

I think the IRA's support of the Axis was very much a case of my enemies' enemy is my friend. Looking back of course it was an utterly crazy stance to take and thank god their idea of liberation didn't transpire.

I agree with all of that.

[Zeb]

Keep believing that if you want, as if the British rulers are stupid people. With the British rule over India, it was more a case of the rulers knowing it was happening, but letting it happen while merrily accumulating loot. The British rulers have always been highly, highly, intelligent people, and they certainly knew that their policies would lead to famine, but they didn't care.

May be of interest to you: http://www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-History/Assets/Documents/WorkingPapers/Economic-History/2016/WP243.pdf

It's by Tirthankar Roy.

Were Indian famines natural or manmade? ‘Manmade,’ insofar as this means that
famines were an outcome of colonial politics, is an unconvincing theory because it fails to
explain the rarity of famines during late colonial rule and presumes that the capacity of the
state to mitigate famines was limited only by its own intention to act. ‘Natural,’ insofar as this
means that climatic shocks and geographical barriers to trade jointly caused famines, is
unconvincing too because the underlying conception of the state is either undeveloped or
simplistic.

In this essay, I have suggested that the effects of geographical or political causes
depended on available information and knowledge, which constrained state capacity to act
during disasters. As statistical information and scientific knowledge improved, prediction of
and response to famines became better, and famines became rarer.

One of the things which came out of the response to that famine was a series of commissions which tried to establish the knowledge base to prevent and mitigate further famines. Of course, that only goes so far in a structure which entrenched such huge inequalities.

[FlashingBlade]

The fururor over McDonald's ( stupid, politically naieve) response to the Churchill question exposes the lack if understanding of the History of the UK and it's actions and roles in WW2.

I believe most Britain's view of WW2 are formed by history as entertainment as they no longer have first hand records ( family members who lived through it ) or really studying the history.

Most people if asked about WW2 would cite Churchill..Battle of Britain Dunkirk and Bletchley park....all recorded in entertainment...and all presented by nice upper and middle class actors.....other than chirpy cockernees WW2 seemed to be faughth soley by Upper and Middle class university educated people.

The Battle of the Atlantic was pivotal as the Blitz to the survival of Britain.. arguably the greatest risk to Britain's capitulation in WW2.....but if they made a film...who would play the dozens of nationals ..working class nationals the merchbseamen who risked their lives to feed the UK..it would be Tom Holland as a Captain on a cruiser....like Noel Cowarsd.


The role of the British on WW2 is something to be proud of..bit we cannot own...there is no right to say 'we' won the war..that generation faught and survived WW2  and they rightlyy deserve praise...not some knobhead Chelsea fan claiming it as his own at an England game....it's an insult to the WW2 generation that Britain cannot recall it accurately and with confidence....which includes that UKs iconic leader..was also a man  who undertook some bad things in his political life.

[TepidT2O]

I’d never really heard about Tonypandy before.

I’ve now read quite a bit about it and it’s a really interesting event.  John McDonnell didn’t seem to have an accurate understanding of what actually happened though.  Maybe he was just trying to provoke a reaction?

[Lush is the best medicine...]

Would say it was a bit playing to the trade union base with a subtle nod at those in the base who hate war/love Stalin and Lenin

[Lush is the best medicine...]

https://twitter.com/aaronbastani/status/1096154729149878272?s=21

Yes, this is a good take

[FlashingBlade]

Mc Donnel was so dumb it's frightening a senior Labour guy can be so naive to respond to that loaded question....for a nation who basically defines itself by the received history of WW2 and wishing to woo those voters in the next election is suicidal.

[Zeb]

This is good by Prof.Alan Lester, from 2016 I think, on how we end up totting up good to compare with bad and uses Empire as an example for why that may not be useful.

Spoiler

A bit of a departure from our standard project blog, this essay responds to the latest rehashing of the British Empire in the media. The Rhodes statue debate and a YouGov poll have both made the British Empire topical again. The Independent (Saturday, 23 Jan) has called for the Empire to be taught ‘warts and all’ so that the 44% of Britons who are proud of it have a little more to think about. This is no bad thing, but the problem comes when we identify the ‘warts.’ When the public are invited to consider imperial legacies, it is always in the form of pros and cons. The gifts that Britain gave the world versus the violence and destruction that came along with them. It is time to stop thinking about the Empire in these terms. And it’s not enough to call for schools to teach about the Empire’s bad bits as well as the good that it did, because it leads only to the same balance sheet approach. It’s the entire assumption that a balance sheet is meaningful that we need to throw out once and for all. Why? Because that approach always makes ‘benefits’ that worked very unevenly seem universal, while it reduces ‘costs’ to specific episodes rather than systematic features of imperial rule. The good was always structural, the bad always specific. Let’s take the ‘costs’ first:

Whenever we speak of the ‘bad’ side of empire, we want a list of atrocities. The events and episodes that were patently evil. The slave trade, the Indian famines, incidents of aggression like the Amritsar Massacre, the Boer War concentration camps and the suppression of Mau Mau. We’re told the British sometimes did some pretty nasty things. But the yardstick that most people use for atrocity is the Holocaust, followed perhaps by more recent genocides. It’s pretty clear that what the British did in their empire pales by comparison. Given that we’re talking about a 400 year period over much of the world, a few episodes of violence are only to be expected. In any case, the British often put right what they had done wrong, as with slavery, the most systematic ‘wrong,’ didn’t they? And sometimes they weren’t really to blame at all. If they made the Indian famines worse, they didn’t actually cause them. The debit side of the balance sheet always appears a little light in comparison with the regimes in world history that we know were evil.

Contrast that with the credit side. Here we are not talking about random acts of violence here and there, but rather systematic, enduring things. Railways, education systems, the rule of law, the English language and free trade. All forces of modernity, all benefitting the ruled as well as the rulers, all laying the foundations for our current global prosperity. Surely any sensible person would weigh these far more heavily than the odd episode of repression and exploitation? And don’t many Indians say that their country was better off under the Raj because of such things?

Well yes, many people, white and black, in Britain and the colonies, became much better off as a result of these British investments. Let’s look at each in turn. With railways male entrepreneurs from all communities and settlers growing produce on what had been Indigenous peoples’ land were able to access ports to supply consumers in Britain and elsewhere. Colonial governments were able to put down resistance easier. But people of colour generally weren’t allowed to travel on the railways on the same terms as white people. Gandhi’s political awakening came when he was thrown out of a Whites Only carriage on a South African railway. Indigenous farmers and Indian peasants were generally denied access altogether and women were often barred from travelling.

Government-run education systems varied hugely in time and place but were generally not extended to ‘natives.’ Their education was left to mission societies able to reach only a tiny proportion of them, mostly boys. One of the first things that some Indigenous elites did with their education was challenge white peoples’ entitlement to rule their countries.

The new ‘rule of law’ generally worked in favour of white settlers, elites and men. Even where explicitly racist legislation was avoided, proxies for race such as English language tests were used. These either imposed different standards on ‘native’ populations or kept Asian people out of settler colonies unless their labour was required. The wider adoption of English certainly facilitated more global conversations and business transactions among male elites. But it only served to heighten the exclusion of the majority, non-English speaking subjects and women, from access to the credit and political capital that flowed through Anglophone global networks.

Much the same could be said of free trade. It benefitted companies like Jardine Matheson (now a top 200 trans-national company registered in Bermuda for some reason), its stockholders in Britain and its Indian and Chinese trading partners. But one look at the purposes to which free trade could be put reminds us that the benefits were not universal. When British companies kicked up the biggest fuss about defending the principle of free trade in the nineteenth century, it wasn’t so that the restrictive practices of some oriental despot could be challenged, or so that slavery could be replaced by ‘legitimate commerce’ in Africa. It was because Jardine Matheson and others wanted to defend the right to sell smuggled opium to Chinese addicts, at a time when the Chinese authorities were trying to ban the trade. An argument in favour of free trade that Columbian and Afghan drug smugglers might struggle to try on today was used by the East India Company and its allies to punish the Qing empire with the loss of Hong Kong and the start of China’s ‘Century of Humiliation.’

So where does all this leave us with our balance sheets? It doesn’t mean that we simply have to shift the scales so as to weigh the two columns more evenly, or even to tip them decisively in favour of the debit column. Although it would be a good thing to recognise that ‘structural’ benefits were actually quite specific, and that specific ‘costs’ could actually be quite structural. What is the global racial humiliation of a colour bar if not structural? What it does mean is that the ‘benefits’ of empire and its ‘costs’ are too complex and too quotidian to be reduced to such a simplistic gauge. They are geographically uneven, so a calculation that empire was broadly of benefit in Britain does not mean that it was broadly of benefit universally. The ‘benefits’ were also uneven within each colony, no matter how nostalgic some Indians might be for the Raj. We never get to hear from most of those who suffered from empire, whereas those who did well tend to be more visible. Reducing empire to a costs/benefits analysis does no one any favours. Let’s tell lots of stories of empire, with different outcomes for different people in different places at different times, instead. And let’s appreciate that the way me might experience empire’s legacies in Britain may be very different from the way that other people experience them.

[close]

University of Sussex

Kim Wagner, whose book on Amritsar is just out, makes the point that we can point to things like individual instances of violence by the state or we can see it within the context that such violence was pretty normalised across the Empire. That received wisdom was that it worked and was even a necessary and proportionate response to events. That the state would look the other way when it chose to. So picking out the individual events misses how that violence was part of the institution. And within that environment, and holding those attitudes, we find Mr.Churchill.

[Mutton Geoff]

I’d never really heard about Tonypandy before.

I’ve now read quite a bit about it and it’s a really interesting event.  John McDonnell didn’t seem to have an accurate understanding of what actually happened though.  Maybe he was just trying to provoke a reaction?

Or maybe it was an honest reply,

 not sure sending soldiers to quell a strike with one fatality was Churchill's best moment as a Home Secretary, that said somebody i think said nothing can be just black and white  when reflecting on anybody Churchill made a lot of bad decisions as well as the good parts in WWII but then again during that war some people in Eastern Europe might claim he let them down as well.

Mind you when JRM excused churchill over the Concentration ( or internment as he called it ) camps in Boer War as having the same Death as Glasgow you do wonder who is creating the history these days.

As said last night it was a stupid question and got the answer it merited. Frankly i think John should have just said pass !

[So… Howard Philips]

Mind you when JRM excused churchill over the Concentration ( or internment as he called it ) camps in Boer War as having the same Death as Glasgow you do wonder who is creating the history these days.

Says a lot about how high mortality was in one of Britain's largest cities that Mogg used it as a comparator.

[J_Kopite]

https://twitter.com/aaronbastani/status/1096154729149878272?s=21

Yes, this is a good take

Waistcoat twat at tit again I see

[FlashingBlade]

A lot of British people are like Evertonians..they bang on about knowing history..yet it's only their take in history and what they've been told....and t get don't care what the rest of us shite say.


Think Everton are a very good analogy of the UK...Few decent people amongst a load of knobs...living in the past and no concept of what Europe is about or the benefits of being in it..
. #ifitwasntforthewarwewouldstillhavetheempire

[Lush is the best medicine...]

History is written by the winners, had the nazis won hitler would be predominately known as a man who massively transformed the German infrastructure instead of a massive shit

[Yorkykopite]

Says a lot about how high mortality was in one of Britain's largest cities that Mogg used it as a comparator.

Indeed. And with Rees Mogg (and the reactionary Edwardian Tory MPs he's consciously modelled himself on) that is the only time you will hear about the poverty and high mortality rates of Glasgow. It's a convenient thing to mention in order to avoid talking about concentration camps in South Africa. And it will never be mentioned again - certainly not to actually focus attention on 'Glasgow' or the failures of capitalist economics.

I detest that way of arguing.

Though I also detest the other way of arguing which is to compare the Boer camps with Belsen and say "no difference." The level of historical ignorance on both sides - far right and far left - is staggering. And they will always be ignorant because their politics are essentially frivolous.

[Yorkykopite]

History is written by the winners, had the nazis won hitler would be predominately known as a man who massively transformed the German infrastructure instead of a massive shit

History isn't always written by the winners. That's another trite saying I hate.

[Sangria]

Or maybe it was an honest reply,

 not sure sending soldiers to quell a strike with one fatality was Churchill's best moment as a Home Secretary, that said somebody i think said nothing can be just black and white  when reflecting on anybody Churchill made a lot of bad decisions as well as the good parts in WWII but then again during that war some people in Eastern Europe might claim he let them down as well.

Mind you when JRM excused churchill over the Concentration ( or internment as he called it ) camps in Boer War as having the same Death as Glasgow you do wonder who is creating the history these days.

As said last night it was a stupid question and got the answer it merited. Frankly i think John should have just said pass !

I'd excuse Churchill for the Boer War concentration camps for a different reason. He was a nobody at the time, with neither authority nor responsibility. He won fame for his exploits, but it was fame as an adventurer-writer, not as a government official. Might as well blame Max Hastings for the actions of British troops in the Falklands.

Churchill stiffened Britain's backbone and courted allies at a time when the only chance of an imminent British defeat was Britain losing its nerve and the only chance of a British victory was to join with major allies. As such Churchill was the decisive factor in Britain winning the war. He wasn't so good at details, as Alan Brooke and others have written plentifully about. That's what his subordinates were for, and a large part of Brooke's efforts were to keep him away from involving himself with details about which he understood little.

[Lush is the best medicine...]

History isn't always written by the winners. That's another trite saying I hate.

with Churchill it largely is, especially to those who haven’t studied it

[west_london_red]

As said last night it was a stupid question and got the answer it merited. Frankly i think John should have just said pass !

Any answer other then ‘hero’ would have created the same reaction I would suggest.

[Yorkykopite]

with Churchill it largely is, especially to those who haven’t studied it

But Churchill isn't the only one who writes history. And, obviously, your claim was much bigger. It was that history is always written by the winners. It's simply not true. We wouldn't be here discussing British concentration camps in South Africa if it were.

[TepidT2O]

Or maybe it was an honest reply,

 not sure sending soldiers to quell a strike with one fatality was Churchill's best moment as a Home Secretary, that said somebody i think said nothing can be just black and white  when reflecting on anybody Churchill made a lot of bad decisions as well as the good parts in WWII but then again during that war some people in Eastern Europe might claim he let them down as well.

Mind you when JRM excused churchill over the Concentration ( or internment as he called it ) camps in Boer War as having the same Death as Glasgow you do wonder who is creating the history these days.

As said last night it was a stupid question and got the answer it merited. Frankly i think John should have just said pass !

It may have been honest, but it was also ignorant.

One striker died, absolutely, but the miner died some time before the armed forces were involved. Indeed, it seems the army werent involved in any violence and that Churchill was very reluctant to send the army in.

I’m quite surprised that McDonnell did know this... or maybe he did?

[west_london_red]

I’d never really heard about Tonypandy before.

I’ve now read quite a bit about it and it’s a really interesting event.  John McDonnell didn’t seem to have an accurate understanding of what actually happened though.  Maybe he was just trying to provoke a reaction?

This is the problem with how history is taught in schools, or at least was when I was at school. Unless you did A Levels or further, History up to GSCE was pretty much limited from WW1, Germany between the wars and then WW2 with British History kind of ignored. It was only when I did my A Levels that we covered British History, be that Ireland, Gladstone, the Liberal Unionists, the creation of the Labour Party, Lloyd-George and the demise of the Liberals, the General strike, Tonypandy (my history teacher was also Welsh I should add) and a load of other events that are still very relevant today and that most people know nothing about - just what I have mentioned there, half of that we are still living the impact with when looking just at Brexit!

[Crosby Nick]

This is the problem with how history is taught in schools, or at least was when I was at school. Unless you did A Levels or further, History up to GSCE was pretty much limited from WW1, Germany between the wars and then WW2 with British History kind of ignored. It was only when I did my A Levels that we covered British History, be that Ireland, Gladstone, the Liberal Unionists, the creation of the Labour Party, Lloyd-George and the demise of the Liberals, the General strike, Tonypandy (my history teacher was also Welsh I should add) and a load of other events that are still very relevant today and that most people know nothing about - just what I have mentioned there, half of that we are still living the impact with when looking just at Brexit!

History isn’t a core subject though and there’s only so much that can be taught. I say that as someone who did A Level history and enjoy the subject ( but stupidly opted to study Medieval period rather than more modern stuff).

[TepidT2O]

It’s an almost infinite subject.

It’s impossible to cover everything.

[west_london_red]

History isn’t a core subject though and there’s only so much that can be taught. I say that as someone who did A Level history and enjoy the subject ( but stupidly opted to study Medieval period rather than more modern stuff).

Completely, it was optional from GCSE onwards when I did it but we only had one history offering at A Level which was modern British, Russian and German (1860’s to 1945) which was excellent and would have loved doing History at Uni (typically Indian parents and ‘what jobs that going to get you’ stopped me). But, even at GCSE some more content on British History would add a lot of context to currently what’s going on rather then ‘we beat the Germans twice’ which is what the average persons understanding of History is in this country.

[Qston]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/14/winston-churchill-history-brexit-john-mcdonnell

McDonnell's comments were incredibly ill informed and naive. The piece above by Simon Jenkins hits on a point others have made about a lack of understanding.

With Churchill I think a lot of revisionism goes on, and is spouted without context of the time and events. I agree with Jenkins that, through the modern prism, there are a growing number of people who view Churchill with disdain. For what it's worth, I think for the most part they are fucking idiots.

[TepidT2O]

He was quite racist of course ...but without him history could well have been very different

[Yorkykopite]

It may have been honest, but it was also ignorant.

One striker died, absolutely, but the miner died some time before the armed forces were involved. Indeed, it seems the army werent involved in any violence and that Churchill was very reluctant to send the army in.

I’m quite surprised that McDonnell did know this... or maybe he did?

I doubt he did. He strikes me as a politician who knows a check-list of things which feed his prejudice rather than someone who is genuinely interested in the past. There are many like that. Ken Livingstone is obviously the same.

In some ways Churchill's role in the great transport strike in Liverpool a year after Tonypandy was more reprehensible.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-14529243

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_Liverpool_general_transport_strike

But because the South Wales miners were more organised than the volatile Liverpool labour movement, and took their own history much more seriously, the legend of Tonypandy grew. I don't think Churchill would ever have been welcome there, even after the Second World War.

There's no question that the man hated and feared organised labour. He didn't mind individual working-class people, and in that sense he wasn't a snob, but he always threatened by collective action by the workers. Hence, as the most militant member of Baldwin's cabinet, he treated the General Strike as a war and was determined to beat the miners hollow. He also, famously, declared Labour (meaning, again the organised working class) to be "unfit to govern." That was in 1920. The insult was remembered by many hundreds of thousands of workers and kept surfacing even as late as the 1950s, whenever Churchill went to the polls.

He wasn't the greatest Briton, not by a long chalk. But he was a great Briton and his stand in 1940 was absolutely critical. To compare him to Stalin and Mao is stupid, or maybe even wicked. Anyone who does that - like that Bastani bloke - simply betrays their own lack of character.

[west_london_red]

I do wonder if instead of Tonypandy, McDonnell had said Bengal or Gallipoli how the reaction would have been?

[WhereAngelsPlay]

Shook,if you're going to c&p from articles,you have to link to those articles.


And less of the typical British response shite,we would be banned if we gave it the typical Irish,Indian,French etc,etc response.


And

[J_Kopite]

I do wonder if instead of Tonypandy, McDonnell had said Bengal or Gallipoli how the reaction would have been?

Woke diaspora kids would have even more likes on Twitter?

[Indomitable_Carp]

This is the problem with how history is taught in schools, or at least was when I was at school. Unless you did A Levels or further, History up to GSCE was pretty much limited from WW1, Germany between the wars and then WW2 with British History kind of ignored. It was only when I did my A Levels that we covered British History, be that Ireland, Gladstone, the Liberal Unionists, the creation of the Labour Party, Lloyd-George and the demise of the Liberals, the General strike, Tonypandy (my history teacher was also Welsh I should add) and a load of other events that are still very relevant today and that most people know nothing about - just what I have mentioned there, half of that we are still living the impact with when looking just at Brexit!

I agree the history curriculum is rubbish. I remember my school history education basically revolving around Tudors, Nazis, Tudors, Nazis with the occasional other topic of interest thrown in. I remember Industrialisation was taught as if Britain were a vacuum, with little to no mention of the Empire that funded it. We did learn about some other important moments, like the history of Ireland from the 17th Century to independence.

However we were never once taught about the English Civil War/War of the Three Kingdoms or the Act of the Union, which were pivotal moments in British history. We learnt very little about 20th Century British history outside of wartime. History was the one subject I really genuinely enjoyed, so many of the useful things I learned about it I learnt off my own back.

I also really think this countries obsession with 'the war' has really held us back.

[Yorkykopite]

I also really think this countries obsession with 'the war' has really held us back.

From the rest of your post it seems you were taught a fairly good range of history. Maybe the war bits, for whatever reason, were the only ones that really stuck with you?

It's a shame when that happens. There's so much more to British history. Even the interwar years, which you'll have been taught, if you were also taught about the First and Second World Wars, are extremely interesting. Pity you don't remember studying them!

[WhereAngelsPlay]

From the rest of your post it seems you were taught a fairly good range of history. Maybe the war bits, for whatever reason, were the only ones that really stuck with you?

It's a shame when that happens. There's so much more to British history. Even the interwar years, which you'll have been taught, if you were also taught about the First and Second World Wars, are extremely interesting. Pity you don't remember studying them!

Teachers usually pushed their favourite topic as well,our teacher was batshit crazy for Egypt and from the 3rd year onwards that is all she teached.

[Zeb]

typical British response - if you had read my post you would have seen that many lower-level British workers openly stated that the policies of the British in the 1800s required adjustment since they were certain to cause starvation. If this was being told to the higher-ups, yet policies were not changed, that is called genocide

Indian economic historian of India gives a typical British response? I see. Think we're done here shook. I don't see history as a set of nationalist mythologies to wave around, or I'd be on my Owain Glyndwr hobbyhorse and the treachery of the blue books. Sorry.