( A ten minute read)

For better or worse the British Empire had a massive impact on the history of the world. It was in effect the plunder of a quarter of the world by one country.

There is probably no single reason to explain how Britain created such a vast institution and I have no intention here to attempt to give one, however it might help to examine the emotional residue of lost empire, and a peculiarly English neurosis about national pride.

Why? because, Britain has never faced up to the shame of empire.

Perhaps Brixit is going to uncover the monumental ignorance surrounding the subject and the EU referendum is the last throes of Empire working its way out of its systems.

The consequences of departure appear to matter less that May’s vapid promise that Brexit will be “red, white and blue.”

It’s impossible to know the extent to which May believes her own myth-making but May’s global Britain will not be an open-armed nation going out into the world. It is a superannuated vision incubated by an amnesiac view of history in which the empire was an act of beneficence, and the outrages perpetrated in its name never happened.

Brexit may well turn out to be a reflection of the rectitude effects left by the collapse of the Empire.

In order to examine anything one needs to know it existed or happened in the first place so as to bear witness or to do anything about it.

The question is what were the motivations behind the creation of the Empire itself?

In world history was it a positive force or a negative force is in many ways irrelevant, the fact is that it was a transformative force.

It constantly mutated, evolved and changed in reaction to events, opportunities and threats. Motivated by greed and selfishness it consisted of an incredibly diverse set of actors through its many years of existence.

So at the risk of disturbing the past here are a few undeniable Empire facts.

Never mind that the majority of people under 50 on both sides of the English channel only have a hazy idea of what the Empire and Commonwealth were all about.

Never mind that approximately 35 million Indians died because of famines caused by British misrule, or that Winston Churchill blamed one of these famines on the “beastly” Indians for “breeding like rabbits”.

Never mind that concentration camp was invented by the British Empire.

Never mind that 5.5 million million Africans were forcibly taken to the Caribbean colonies by British slave traders, that the wealth they extracted came at a horrific cost and that while that wealth continues to flow through British society today, its extraction is still keenly felt in the islands of the West Indies.

( £16 to £17 billion in today’s money, or 40 percent of all government expenditure in 1834 – paid, after the abolition of slavery, to slave owners slaves were given nothing).

Never mind that the Empire was a system of wealth extraction in which the lives of millions of people were disregarded in favor of the greed of the British nation and those who served it.

Never mind  that millions of Irish died in the Famine and the another million fled to the USA.

Never mind when it was all done that the British were erratically carving up their empire into new nations, imperial officials attempted to obliterate the truth of what had happened during empire through the systematic destruction and burning of official documents. In Delhi, this destruction went on for so long that the smoke from the fires hung above the Indian capital.

Never mind the bribe to the DUP.

Never mind Boris Johnson when he said that the continent of Africa “may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more”.

Never mind that in September of 2015, David Cameron told the Jamaican parliament that it needed to “move on from the painful legacy of slavery”, before announcing his government’s plan to build a £25 million prison on the island.

If we ignore or condone the never mind attitude the story of modern Britain is, in many ways, a tale of dwindling self-regard.

These imperial crimes – and many more – are either not known or glossed over, lost in the tide of colonial nostalgia and the fog of ignorance that is trying to put the Great back in Great Britain by evoking the indomitable spirit of a time when Britain bestrode the globe is a recipe for disillusionment.

If its true history is ever addressed in time, a less bellicose country could emerge — wryer, more self-aware, and chastened, perhaps, by the guilty knowledge that its national success-story was built on exploitation and conquest.

Such a response in Britain seems unlikely to happen, partly because many Brits do not know about – or refuse to accept – the darkness of empire.

Last year, Conservative MP Liam Fox tweeted that Britain “is one of the few countries in the European Union that does not need to bury its 20th century history”. Post-Brexit, Fox is now a cabinet minister, in charge of international trade – hardly the place you want an empire booster.

In January of 2016, a YouGov poll found that 44 percent of Britons (and 57 percent of Conservatives) thought their country’s “history of colonialism” was something to be proud of, and 43 percent thought the British Empire was a “good thing”.

The manufacturing of ignorance that keeps English people from learning about Britain’s imperial past continues to this day.

English history is not just Hitler and the Henry’s.

In place of realistic forecasts, May has offered a vision entitled “global Britain”. It seems like an obvious sham constructed around a massive contradiction: that by turning our backs on our closest neighbors we will open our arms to the world.

Of the over 100 former colonies, protectorates or dominions once ruled by Britain (depending on how you count them) 52 eventually transformed into the Commonwealth, although 31 are not that significant for trade.They still have populations of less than 1.2 million.

Persuading former colonial countries to sign trade deals might be difficult.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership recently sealed between the USA, Japan and ten other Pacific Rim countries included five Commonwealth countries. Canada has already done a deal with the EU. The UK would have to negotiate separate trade deals with its larger former colonies, if they were agreeable.

Sir John Seeley once stated that the British Empire was acquired in a ‘fit of absent-mindedness’. What he meant by this was that the Empire was acquired for a variety of reasons that did not add up to a coherent whole.

It assumed that British civilisation was innately superior to those it was subjugating.

Gain an income on the back of his nation’s prestige and maritime exploits.The famous ‘East India Company’ had to go cap in hand to the British Government to save it from bankruptcy but not before many individual investors and directors had made fortunes.

Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation.

How Brexit may influence the teaching of imperial history has yet to be written.

Defining the start and finish for the dates of the British Empire is not an easy task but I have a feeling that Brixit might achieve this goal.

My feeling is if you can’t escape fantasies of empire, if you can’t learn about what really happened in the name of the British crown, you will never be able to imagine a new identity for the country, an identity that can speak more fully to the multicultural nation you have become.

If you ever wanted evidence that England still suffer from Empire fantasy just look at the arrival yesterday of 65,000-tonne of new aircraft carriers at a cost £6.2bn for the pair, plus £200m rebuilding a jetty at HM Naval Base Portsmouth (while the country faces disintegration on many fronts, see previous post.)

It could not highlight its Empire aspirations in a world of increasing inequality. (This is the equivalent of 214 thousand free university places or 11,500 extra doctors) Not to mention the renewal of Trident another £205 billion or the HS2 which is set to cost £27.4bn.

The Royal Navy undoubtedly became a formidable military institution, but it was not always inevitable that Britannia would rule the waves. But did it turn England into a limited company, an institution, not a country or is the East India Company riding the waves again.

Its plain to see that your current trajectory, careering away from Europe with some puffed-up idea about your own importance, is undoubtedly a result of this failure of education, to face up to your Imperial crimes and demonstrate humility.

I’m often amazed at the lack of awareness of many British people about what actually went down under the Union Jack. Just as Ireland needs to emerge from its adolescent phase of a dwindling isolationist theocracy by facing certain issues head-on, Britain needs to emerge from its blood soaked past in the same manner because the issues won’t go away, they will always deeply underpin the prevailing narrative and culture.

“British Empire State of Mind”, will take a nuanced approach and “help provide some context for what’s going on in the world today, in terms of global inequality, poverty and how Britain helped create the conditions that caused and continue to perpetuate it now”.

As the UK leaves the European Union, so long as it’s a fantasy wrapped in the Union flag, with the bonkers notions that humans are divided in races, some superior to others etc the keeping of the lifeblood of commerce flowing freely will become more important than ever before.

In this nostalgic la-la-land, this gung-ho attitude to empire has spread much further than the corridors of power. Its legacy is still all around us.

The political imbroglio with a whole country’s future — and collective sanity — in its hands you would think that the British Crown which is a corporate sole and represents the legal embodiment of executive, legislative, and judicial governance would call a second referendum.

Unfortunately a second referendum on the terms of exit are viewed as acts of treason.

It seems, jingoism has become our asylum — a mad refuge from Brexit’s cold truths.

Its time England stopped negotiating with its self and the media and start to look after its people not an Empire that does not exist.

All comments appreciated all like clicks chucked in the bin.

//players.brightcove.net/624246174001/ryaWt2q-W_default/index.html?videoId=4713180189001

( A seven minute read)

The British establishment is slowly coming to terms with the enormity of the legal and political cluster bomb that Brexit has unleashed on it.

From the outside England paints a picture of a country falling asunder, in desperate need of restoration in more ways than one.

Big Ben might have gone silent for four years, and India and Pakistan might be celebrating 70 years of separation complements of the Empire, Mrs T May is going to soon have to lay her cards upon the table in more ways than one.

She is picking unilateral limits on the rights of other EU citizens to work in the UK over membership of the single market – the hardest of Brexits.

Where she has failed is to explain to the country the true extent of the economic damage this will entail and the entire of the requirements of dealing with their European colleagues.

In my view in order to find a positive outcome for both sides, a wholesale change of ministers would be preferable, but this is unlikely – at least for the moment – for the sake of Conservative party unity.

It might help to have a few ministers educated in the way Brussels works.

You simply cannot talk to European leaders like you talked in the Brexit campaign, and you will look like a fool if you do.

For the Brits, they must realize if they are to get anywhere, they must first acknowledge common concerns. There are plenty to be found: on economic growth, on trade, on Russia, on tackling terrorism, and yes, on freedom of movement.

If concerns can be framed as common ones, then the EU is willing to negotiate.

What absolutely will not fly is any notion that Britain is getting a special deal: à la carte, cherry-picking, having and consuming cake – whatever you want to call it. EU leaders know this would be the beginning of a death spiral for European unity and will defend it at all costs.

The common understanding of the Brexit dynamics is that due to the time pressures imposed by Article 50, it will be England under pressure to sign a quick deal. But not taken into account is the degree to which Europe itself could change during this period.

The fact that they’ve banned foreign academics from advising them on their EU strategy is mind-bendingly stupid.

Of the many issues behind Britain’s exit, the right to live and work on equal terms anywhere in the EU has been the most painful for the UK government post-referendum. The UK has always been a country of immigrants and diversity, and has grown great on the back of it but the question of EU migration was not anywhere to be found on the ballot paper.

The EU migration issue is not going anywhere fast, no matter how many well-meaning facts you throw at it.

Because England pandered mostly to false rhetoric about immigration it now finds itself on the threshold of becoming a satellite tax haven that in the long-term is going to break up under political pressure for Scotland and bribes to the DUP.

This again raises the question of whether London and Scotland could form a union and remain in the EU, leaving the rest of the UK out in the cold. Can you imagine if the whole of London went on strike for a day? That would be a statement, and each time London did it, GDP and the pound would crash. At the end of the day the UK, or even just England, is tiny. London might be the powerhouse of the UK – it pays a third of the UK’s tax but London is not a state within a state.

Combined with the strain of its ageing population it needs to be addressing both the perception and the reality, both are essential, but pandering to either is wrong when you see the following:

( A health service that is in need of thousands new nurses, a mental health service that is collapsing, a prison system that is overcrowded, understaffed, a screwed up educational system that produce debts on average of £30,000 @ 6%pa, a housing shortage,  personal and national debt levels out of control, enormous growth in inequality, pensioners struggling, the cost of public transport going through the roof, food banks on the increase, binge-drinking, gambling, a homeless crises, a people trafficking problems, an ageing population, an energy crises, that will push the cost of production in Great Britain up, a woeful imbalance of the English economy towards London: to mentions just a few of the problems that need to be properly addressed.)

It has not even build a single runway in a single airport in less than 30 years.

Taking the above into account its easy to building policies around popular fears, rather than established facts which is undermining everything that country is and always has been.

England is in bad need of some wisdom, by addressing the social and economic problems experienced by the people who feel they are under threat.

In or out of the EU England is and will be in a personified holy mess.

Some one with an ounce of wisdom needs to say ” We want a rerun of the In or Out referendum.” Sovereignty is not absolute, inside the union or outside it. If freedom means more than being left alone, there will be less of that as well.

It is unrealistic to hope that a deal between the Tories and the DUP will have no impact on the politics of Northern Ireland. It is very tough to see how a U.K. government dependent  on Democratic Unionist Party – which is propping up the Prime Minister’s minority government for its survival as part of a £1.5bn deal can be perceived as unbiased in its efforts to forge compromises between the DUP and Ireland.

The truth is that the English government has no answers to the “really tough questions” on Ireland’s post-Brexit border. A vision of a seamless, friction less border where nobody is aware that it exists...for now that seems to me pie in the sky.

In my opinion it’s a tragedy of the Brexit debate that it appears any common European identity is not valued by everyone In England.

England is full of wealth, of multifarious produces, supply for human want in every kind ; yet England is dying of inanition, to be shut-in by narrow walls of isolation is the last thing the doctor wants.

In my view British insularity is not just a feature rather a state of mind.

The major flaw with the United Kingdom’s government lies not in the fact that it’s outdated and unfit for the times we live in, but in the mistaken belief shared by the majority of British citizens that their country enjoys the best and most democratic government system known to man, regardless of the fact that it has no written constitution, that many of the freedoms taken for granted in other countries and enshrined in their fundamental charters are linked to the British Sovereign’s “Royal assent” that could be withdrawn any time at his/her whim, and that upper chamber of parliament is made of unelected members to whom pompous titles are bestowed upon, together with an alphabet soup of “honors” such as MBE, CBE, CMG, KCMG, etc.

The fact is, very many British people are unsettlingly down to earth, and perpetually riveted to the TV and football matches and bygone glory.

Each medal won in Rio – 27 golds, 23 silvers and 38 bronzes – came at a price of £4,096,500 in National Lottery and exchequer funding over the four-year Olympic cycle. The Scrap Value per gold medal : $501.

The recent 6 medals won by immigrants at the London World Championships 2017 – £27 million.

‘Foreigner’ can range from someone with different skin colour, accent, beliefs or customs, to those who do not support a particular football team or even those who live on the wrong side of a main road. British people are very sensitive to ‘accents.’

England is not a land of optimists, it’s a mixture of the class system governed by Postcode lottery of life,( Quoting – Cecil Rhodes: “to be born British is to have won the lottery of life”) that stigmatizes people by race, religion, or nationality.

The whole country is drowning in ‘heritage.’ Out of the 196 countries on the world today, there are only 22 of them that Britain has not invaded.

In this technological driven world insularity can only be viewed as a race to disaster. The future is so much more important.

Career politicians only interested in their own agenda while Academia as it exists today is the product of two past great intellectual revolutions with the current technological revolution demanding unity.

Nobody gets the name of the country right. Great Britain hasn’t existed since 1801.

Populist governments don’t usually work out.

I don’t know what it can do. It might be the world’s fifth biggest economy, but it is in the process of becoming a drab nation to justly regarded as one of the most ominous, “divine right,” of the Referendum.

How does Britain really stack up against the rest of the world?

No matter how much Monty Python may poke fun at the British, eccentricity will remain a national characteristic.

To ignore reality to impose its own vision of the world is a pillar of English philosophy. The right to be different, be it individually or as a nation, is part of the cultural heritage of this country. Britons do this entirely in order to refract the rules of reality itself through their own twisted lens, thus allowing them to declare their nation the winners at the game of life without having to do anything particularly special.

The people have a lot to be proud of, along with some shameful scars in their colonization. However they are afflicted by a national disease which makes them think they invented everything. The mere fact that someone ejaculated in someone’s birth canal and the baby landed on English soil makes each Englishman or woman the direct inheritor of the genius of these towering figures, and you should treat all the locals as though you were personally addressing Dickens or Darwin, even if they have trouble with revolving doors.

Nearly 52 per cent of Brits who voted to leave are out celebrating that the process of leaving the EU is at last underway, while the 48 per cent who voted remain are still looking on in horror. But after all’s said and done, things might not change that much after all the warnings of disaster. A compromise will emerge between the UK and EU, in the mean time England will have shot itself in the foot.

Only 1.5 billion people in the world might speak English, 1.051 billion speak Mandarin Chinese, with another 490 million speaking Hindi and 420 million Spanish.

However, Britain remains in limbo. It exports 44 percent of its goods to the common market, accounting for 3.3 million jobs. That privileged position is now lost.

Some one kindly tell me who is saying good by to the EU. 

Is it Great Britain, England, or the United Kindom, or is it the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

How Europe responds is far more important.

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( A Ten Minute Read)

What will Sparks’ it?

Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction?

Some of hypotheses are undeniably hysterical, for sure, but the consequences will be more terrifying, and indefensible, than we have ever seen before.

It’s always tempting to predict death and destruction, because you’ll be at least a little bit right and no one will fault you if you’re wrong.

So will it be a clash of civilizations, severe climate change resulting in climate mitigation; resource depletion, a populist uprising. The development of robotic soldiers with the ability to wage war without putting troops on the front line. Computer glitches causing corporations wars; or diplomatic misunderstandings, all of which can lead to war. Terrorism, inequality, and internal political or civil strife can also create the pressure for war.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there were only a few hundred Islamist fighters in the Hindu Kush mountains. Fast forward through 16 years of the war on terror costing some $4,000bn (£3,300bn) and leaving 1.3 million dead, and the number of terrorists is currently about 100,000. Even on its own terms, the war on terror has been an abysmal failure. How on earth did this happen?

If civilization conflicts are not the least of our worries there are indeed a vast verity of triggers.

The Trump transition is likely to exacerbate US-China tensions. Trump has threatened a trade war with China. Kim Jong Un decides to attack his neighbors in the South Pacific and Trump decides to fire back.

The Ukrainian crisis was preceded by two decades of NATO expansionism up to the borders of Russia and now it is widely recognized that Russia is waging a campaign of covert political manipulation across the United States, Europe and the Middle East.

The original post-war European Union project was based around peace, social justice and harmony. The unraveling of this project might be Brexit accompanied by rising nationalism, which is likely to exacerbate the dangers of war on a continent with a fraught history of bloody conflict.

The Middle East cauldron centered around Isis and the Syrian war.

The Syrian war has seen allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – arming and funding radical Jihadist groups, such as the al-Nusra front. The terrorist attacks in Europe have demonstrated the difficulty in containing the spill-over. The Syrian war has seen the return of great-power politics with the involvement of Russia. This contamination has the potential for a wider conflict in which western countries could be drawn in.

India and Pakistan could go to war

Take your pick.

Mine is in keeping with the default operational mode of capitalism.

One might even argue that capitalism often resolves systemic economic crises through war. After all, a war economy with militarization, mobilization, full employment and jingoism can be viewed as the ultimate solution to economic woes and social unrest.

We are now at the beginning of Technology that is overseeing an extraordinary re-distribution of wealth that is tilting society off its axis.

The richest 1 percent have almost 40 percent of our worlds wealth, while the bottom 90 percent have 73 percent of the debt.

This is largely the result of technology.

And just wait until the work force is truly affected by the rise of robots and automation.

You don’t have to look too far back into history to see that when the marginalized have had it with the system, it doesn’t take a lot to set flame to tinder.

The emerging technologies like industrial robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are advancing at a rapid pace, but there has been little attention to their impact on employment and public policy. So technology is likely to be at the center of the next major geopolitical battle.

The anti-immigration, anti-one percent, anti-capitalism and anti-everything else we’re seeing right now isn’t just going to go away in a society where people feel their voices are not being heard.

The next major war, wouldn’t be fought with bombs, men, or even robots. It wouldn’t be waged on a battlefield or in the sky.

Instead, it will be a silent war.

During the past couple of decades, most of the world’s private and public infrastructure had become predominantly digital.

The next major war will decimate that infrastructure.

Water-treatment facilities, oil pipelines, dams, electrical grids, telecommunications platforms, food shipments, public and private transportation, traffic lights, prisons, every single drip of media—and a long, long list of other things we need for survival but take for granted—will all be vulnerable.

Our smartphones and computers will be black rectangles. The Internet: poof! Water infrastructure will stop working, power plants will go offline. Crops, which are now operated by digital irrigation systems, will die.

And that will all be in the first few hours.

Imagine what will happen in the coming days, weeks, and months. We will essentially be sent back centuries. Computer hackers—possibly from an adversarial country—taking down power plants, water systems, the Internet, or private infrastructure. Real cyber warfare could destroy actual machines.

The first technology revolution caused World War I. The second technology revolution caused World War II. This is the third technology revolution.

So could it in fact trigger a Third World War.

As soon as 2025, large parts of the world will experience perennial water shortages, by 2050, the world’s populations will be a third to a half again as large as today. Put rising population and rising incomes together and, experts tell us, by 2050 global food needs will double, with water requirements going up accordingly.

[It takes 2,400 liters to produce a hamburger, common in many middle-income diets, it takes about 40 liters of water to produce a slice of bread, a staple of low-income diets.] On a humanitarian level, the possibilities are devastating.

Climate change requiring a shift in the way we think about the global distribution of resources.

Some will say that technology will help to get us out of the sustainability jam, but it will be nothing more than a quick fix to the vast graveyards of abject inequality created by algorithms for profit.

This is why we must now create a new World Organisation to vet all technology. (See previous posts)

World leaders have a duty to educate people to prevent the pain caused by a rapid rise in automation and artificial intelligence.

Instead we see the transition of Western democracy to oligarchy and the descent into soft fascism is under way. Citizens will need to participate actively, rather than as passive consumers, to demand an end to this cycle of violence from governments and to defend the assault on democratic processes which are already having its foundations rocked by Social Media filtered platforms that have profit as their mantra.

In today’s ultra-globalized and ultra-specialized economy? The level of economic adaptation — even for large countries like Russia and the United States with lots of land and natural resources — required to adapt to a world war would be crushing, and huge numbers of business and livelihoods would be wiped out. War could break out in a number of places, drawing in combatants in unpredictable ways. Combatants very rarely start a global war on purpose; the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations need to be vigilant about the threat of crisis escalation.

The spread of internet technology and social media has brought the world much closer together. Today, people from enemy countries can come together in cyberspace and find out that the “enemy” is not so different.

YouTube and Facebook makes it much more difficult for governments to carry out large-scale military aggression’s, but on the other hand all it took during World War I was one shot. Maybe all it will take for World War III is one line of code.

We shouldn’t scoff at the warnings that something like this could happen one day.

Statesmanship must go beyond diplomacy, in particular to championing new agricultural technologies. Without growing more food with less water (land, too) the water-war surprises will come, perhaps not in one year, perhaps not in four, but soon, and long into the future. Even the big threats—nuclear warfare or an ecological catastrophe, perhaps following from climate change—aren’t existential in the sense that they would wipe us out entirely. And the current bugaboo, in which our electronic progeny exceed us and decide they can live without us, can be avoided by unplugging them.

The new technologies may be self-accelerating, but they are not self-determining. I would say that the odds are good for our survival, providing that AI does not acquire the ability not just to think like us but to self-replicate.

The revolutionary potential of future technologies is to change Homo sapiens itself, including our bodies and our minds, and not merely our vehicles and weapons. The most amazing thing about the future won’t be the spaceships, but the beings flying them. 

The truth is that from the standpoint of morality, like many other standpoints, we are hardly adapted to the world in which we live.

Technology will be the result of ever renegotiated agreement with society. Because they are so potent, their paths may undergo wild oscillations, but I think the trend will be toward the dynamic middle: much slower than the optimists expect, much faster than the pessimists think humanity can bear.

However the cold war may be over, but the Doomsday Machine that came out of the confrontation with the Soviets is still with us—and on a hair-trigger.

As global conflicts grow increasingly messy, narratives spun by propagandists and troll factories will wreak havoc via social media, state news organs and even the global free press.

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