The Mother of Parliaments, Corruption and a Shitting Unicorn

Corruption in politics has never gone out of favour. Jiggery-pokery and power have always been attractive to lousy seedy characters. For a long time political power and the seedy were the male prerogative but sex equality has brought political bribery and corruption to the pockets of dames, too. I think you know what I’m referring to.

Ladies and gentlemen the story you are about to read is true only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Great Britain, the mother of parliaments; the exact quote is “England is the mother of parliaments.” John Bright said that on 18 January 1865. He was a Liberal MP. He believed parliament needed reforming. It certainly did and it certainly does.

Back in old John’s day buying your way into parliament was normal. Bribing politicians to get access to influence government ministers was also normal. Some things don’t change in the mother of parliaments, though at times there might be more discretion used than straight cash bungs into the hand – of the you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours variety – and so-called ‘golden showers’ that fall on a constituency as thanks for being obliging to a minister of state. Just where will HS2 that meandering white elephant of a railway line eventually end up? All depends, pal. What’s it worth to you? Scotland? Don’t make me laugh.

The year of the horse, 2014, more like the year of the unicorn. Promises, promises. That unicorn was shitting promises out of its arse. Reject independence and vote to retain the union and Scotland, that once invisible northern bit of the union, would be given its voice. Within the union. Those golden showers would drench Scots with love and respect. Lucky Scotland. So said the vow. Wow! A vow! But by the end of the year that unicorn had bolted. The stable door was shut. Bolted, too. Leaving behind a giant pile of shit. 2014 instead of golden showers Scotland got incessant blizzards – paper propaganda – nothing but promises and more promises – and a few threats. There were a lot of those – that the elderly would lose their pensions, the unemployed their benefits and the young would be denied hospital treatment. Union or else! Carrot and stick. Except the unicorn had buggered off with the carrots. Buses arrived filled with campaigners from England, some had cash pressed into their greedy unionist hands, to peddle their unicorn promises. Or threats. Lies. Nothing new. Back in the 1880s, in England, the Tory and Liberal parties paid folk 5 shillings a day to parade with banners and placards, each one carrying political promises. Political promises. Short shelf life. If they outlive an election (or referendum) they’re doing well.   

Back then most voters were better off or wealthy men. Same groups of guys running for power in the mother of parliaments, where that power was used to pass legislation that maintained men like them in power. A cruel joke on the term – mother of parliaments. Father would be more honest. But honesty and politics are like water and oil. Mismatched.

Westminster, the mother of parliaments, was so corrupt it occasionally passed laws to prevent its own acting criminally. But it’s a game that’s played. Doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Doesn’t stop the corruption. Never has. She’s one bad dame, that mother of parliaments. While most folks were denied a vote, universities had their own MPs – Cambridge and Oxford each sent two to the Commons until 1950. Aberdeen and Glasgow universities got to send one between them, till 1918. All universities were represented to some degree. At Oxford, regarded by those who went there as the ‘very flower of the intellectual class of England’, 4,500 people had voter rights and over a third of them took bribes to vote for particular candidates. Sometimes the bribes didn’t materialise. A bit like PPE. Usual story of paying one set of guys to rip down opposition posters, flags and banners and other fellas to hang about to protect the candidate’s ones. Shelling out to swing elections was how the mother of parliaments operated. A favoured Tory ploy was to persuade pub landlords to have free booze on tap as an incentive to vote for them. A filthy game.

In Macclesfield, England, corruption was well-organised with votes going for as little as 3s 6d but could be as high as15 shillings (around £2,000 in today’s money). The practice obviously open to bargaining. Five out of every six votes were bought. Only 300 out of 2,000 voters at Sandwich in Kent, latish 19^th century, didn’t accept bribes from either Tory or Liberal candidates, with 800 pocketing bribes from both lots!

Buying votes was supposed to be a serious criminal offence but few cared, least of all parliamentary candidates because there was so much to gain personally by becoming an MP. And palm-greasing was just the means to an end. In the cathedral city of York voting rackets were rife with as much as £650 paid for a single vote (that is over £64,000 today in bribe shekels). In 1880 the Liberals and Tories spent about £15,000 on dirty tricks. Personation – where some dude claims to be someone else to cast votes was another dodge that no-one was ever prosecuted for.

The law invariably favoured the great and the not-so-good. And God, was brought into the grubby world of politics with the Bishop of Wakefield urging the Church of England to pray for the Unionists (Tories). The 20^th century had begun as the 19^th ended with the stink of political dirty dealing pervading every corner of British politics. An election in Worcester was declared null and void because of the level of corruption. There some of the skulduggery took place in a motor car. As one bloke entered through one door another left by the other. Every man passing through the car left with a handful of cash. Mr Moneybags behind that chicanery was George Henry Williamson, the Conservative parliamentary candidate and about-to-be elected MP for the town. George’s dishonesty was so blatant even the law and parliament couldn’t shut their eyes to it indefinitely so old George was booted out of Westminster – after two years. That was all. No fines. No hard labour. Being an MP, he landed sunny side up.

Don’t let it be said only the Tories were corrupt but the most corrupt government in the mother of parliaments is reputed to be a Tory one, under PM, Robert Walpole in 1855. How Walpole’s lot would have compared with today’s political crooks it’s hard to say. It would certainly be a close-run race. Attempts at cleaning up Britain’s duplicitous politics have gone down like a bucket of sick with politicians in the main. The author and MP Hilaire Belloc, in 1907, urged the then government to ‘set an example against corruption that was prevalent in public and private life.’  Political corruption he described as –

“ …a disease of motive having for its symptoms material consideration, preference of private to the public good, and an element of secrecy.”

Shady. Yes, we know, Hilaire. Who can reform British corruption? The very place that’s mired in it. And there’s the rub.  

“Everybody knows that earldoms, viscountcies, baronies, baronetcies, and knighthoods are now habitually sold for hard cash to gin-distillers, brewers, newspaper proprietors, bankers, brokers, successful swindlers, multiple shopkeepers, “philanthropic” sweaters, and similar low-grade creatures. The object of these sales is that prime Ministers, Cabinet Ministers, Under-Secretaries, and other political tapers and tadpoles of both factions may draw heavy salaries out of the pockets of us common Englishmen.” (Justice, 1917)

For Englishmen read a’body in the UK. The previous year Pontefract’s MP, Frederick Booth, said this in the Commons –

 ‘…there never has been so much secret bribery in the history of England than during the last twelve months.’

Thanks Fred but maybe aye and maybe naw. Bribery and corruption has proved a way of life for many MPs in the Commons but the Lords was seen as the more corrupt of two houses in the mother of parliaments. None of those sitting in the Lords is elected – the very basic principle of democracy. Placemen and placewomen with not a single vote between them yet a substantial role in governing the UK. What could possibly go wrong with that sort of low-down setup? Back in 1917 it was assumed this underhand form of government would soon stop when the bleeding obvious was stated –

 “No nation ever long submitted to the publicly exposed corruption of all its representatives.”

“Our plutocracy is rotten to the core. Time democracy had its chance.”

Such misplaced optimism. At least during the 19^th century, it was openly recognised the House of Lords was rotten to its core. Its bishops seen as the most corrupt of all. Members of the Upper Chamber didn’t even have to go to the expense of bribing anyone. Though they probably did if they weren’t hereditary peers. There was an unhealthy traffic in titles – honours and peerages. In 1922, the dam broke when the Liberal prime minister Lloyd George was caught out openly selling seats in the House of Lords (and titles to the rich) for about £10,000 a pop. It was an outrage! Some said. Others were more concerned that too many Scots were included in the Cabinet and too few men from Oxford and Cambridge and ‘the great public schools.’ An ensuing ruckus resulted in the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act, 1925 that made selling peerages and honours illegal. Which is funny because it wasn’t illegal before then. But did that fix dodgy representation in the Lords? Did it pick.

Did it clean up politics generally? Did it pick. Four days before the general election of 1924 the Daily Mail (what else!) published a fake letter, the infamous Zinoviev letter, calculated to link the Labour Party with communists in the Soviet Union. A gullible public swallowed the hoax. The Tories stormed into government.

Bribery, corruption and politics are inseparable. And sex. Can’t forget sex scandals – de rigueur in politics. One in 1963 involved a Tory minister, John Profumo, a teenage model, a Soviet naval attaché and a notorious racist, misogynist judge. And lots of lying. From just about everyone. But the judge, Lord Denning, concluded there had been no breaches of security despite the involvement of many establishment figures and foreign Johnnies. A scapegoat was put up in the figure of osteopath, Stephen Ward, who went on to commit suicide, although the whisper was he was killed by agents of MI6 for becoming an embarrassment to parliament and the royal family. Profumo would later be described as a ‘national hero’ by Margaret Thatcher.

Commenting on the Profumo affair, journalist Malcolm Muggeridge wrote,

“The Upper Classes have always been given to lying, fornication, corrupt practices and, doubtless as a result of the public school system, sodomy.” (Sunday Mirror, June 1969)

Old Fred Booth would have been gobsmacked by the 1970s. If you’re a Tory look away now but I suspect you’ve long since stopped reading this. John Poulson was an architectural designer and businessman who bribed his way to winning building contracts. Several Tories were up to their dirty necks in the affair. He and one or two other participants were jailed but none of the top Tories, including then Home Secretary Reginald Maudling was sent to chokey. MPs escaped through a ‘legal loophole’. Several scandals later Labour PM, Harold Wilson, came up with his Lavender List; a generous distribution of knighthoods and assorted honours to wealthy business associates he thought would benefit his party. These included Lord Kagan who went down for fraud while another committed suicide while under investigation for the same crime.  

Members of the mother of parliaments are just very good at avoiding jail. Take the former Liberal Party leader, Jeremy Thorpe in yet another ‘70s political scandal. This one involved sex. And politics. With Liberals and Labour furiously scratching each other’s backs. This was Rinkagate – a murder plot that had national security implications. But MPs being MPs (surely the most protected species on the planet) it was the dog that got it. Rinka the hound took the bullet. Thorpe was brought down not because of being charged with conspiracy and incitement to murder his ex-boyfriend but for his sexual predilections.

 “There is also clear evidence that leading politicians over the past 15 years, together with civil servants, the police and the security services, have been party to a cover-up surrounding the affair. Most of the politicians involved are Labour.” (National Archives)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jun/10/jeremy-thorpe-scandal-labour-cover-up-peter-hain

The 1980s were no less disreputable at Westminster with corruption and outrages coming thick and fast. One tawdry incident involved a leading Tory, Cecil Parkinson. He initially denied an affair and paternity of a child with his lover. Public revulsion at his disgraceful behaviour did his political career no harm at all and up into the Lords he went to carry on with his life. He fought maintenance of the badly disabled child through the courts, grudgingly submitting to paying for her until she reached eighteen. This rascal refused ever to see her and never sent his child a birthday card. Think we have his measure. Of his shameful behaviour his fellow Tory colleague, Edwina Currie, herself involved in an extra-marital affair with the prime minister, John Major, said this

“I feel very very sorry for Cecil and his family. Most of my thoughts on Sarah Keays are unprintable. Perhaps the most polite thing to say is she’s a right cow.” (Currie was later reported in the Daily Mirror, 1 October 2002)

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/’A+RIGHT+COW+’+EXCLUSIVE%3A+What+Edwina+called+Sara+Keays+for+kissing…-a092259742

And then there was Jeffrey Archer, Tory MP and later Peer in the Lords. He was unusual in being jailed – for perjury in a court case over a prostitution scandal. He’s still a Lord.

There’s no space for all the corruption of the eighties – just a mention of the homes for votes scandal in which the Tory-led Westminster City council in London physically moved out the homeless and sold off council homes to create an area more likely to vote Conservative.  At the centre of this abhorrent episode was Dame Shirley Porter. She was found guilty of wilful misconduct and ordered to repay £36.1million. She didn’t. She paid a fraction of that. The dame was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by John Major following a Tory victory in Westminster in 1990.

If there’s no time for all the bent political goings-on of the 1980s there definitely isn’t for the 1990s. Back alley wheeling and dealing was like a malignant disease in the mother of parliaments such as arms-to-Iraq, MPs accepting gifts for business and political favours and Monklandsgate.  1994 – North Lanarkshire, Scotland – the Labour Party. Well, it was the 1990s. Lanarkshire. Had to be Labour. Oh, and accusations of sectarianism that led to council splurging dough on catholic areas and being grippy in protestant ones. And nepotism. The Monklands West MP was Labour’s Tom Clarke, a former provost and former Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland. The Monklands East MP was also Labour – the party’s leader, John Smith. Allegations of sectarianism were never proven against any of the folk accused. Nepotism within the council was. Tom Clarke was knighted in 2021 for public and political service.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-optomistic-despite-final-split-over-monklandsgate-lastminute-byelection-poll-points-to-narrow-defeat-for-snp-candidate-1425784.html

A century on cash for votes converted to cash for questions in the 1990s. In 1994 two Tory MPs were exposed in a newspaper ‘sting’ operation and later the same year further allegations of bungs to MPs to ask questions in the Commons on behalf of a private individual. It caused a big stink

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash-for-questions_affair#:~:text=It%20began%20in%20October%201994,owner%20of%20Harrods%20department%20store%2C

 In 2006/07 two shillings pressed into the hand was never going to hack it when it came to cash for honours under Labour’s Blair government. Several men nominated by Blair for life peerages were found to have loaned large amounts of money to the Labour Party. Life is full of coincidences. The Tony’s Cronies affair may have hastened Blair stepping down as PM but in the end the Crown Prosecution Service decided against bringing charges against anyone. If you are unfamiliar with this tawdry episode, I urge you to go and read about it; a right hornet’s nest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash-for-Honours_scandal

What changed in a hundred plus years was the direction of cash flow. Politicians paying people to vote for them so they could obtain the power being in parliament provides them with to MPs agreeing to trouser cash for favours. In 2015 two prominent MPs, Labour’s Jack Straw and the Tory Malcolm Rifkind were caught on camera in a TV sting agreeing to accept money to arrange access to influential people  …

‘The report alleged that Straw boasted to undercover journalists that he had operated “under the radar” to use his influence and change EU rules on behalf of a firm that paid him £60,000 a year. A recording obtained with a hidden camera shows Straw saying: “So normally, if I’m doing a speech or something, it’s £5,000 a day, that’s what I charge.”

Rifkind reportedly claimed to be able to gain “useful access” to every British ambassador in the world. He was recorded describing himself as self-employed despite being paid £67,000 as MP for Kensington: “I am self-employed – so nobody pays me a salary. I have to earn my income.”

That’s a sentiment that hasn’t died with MPs and some dissolute ex-prime ministers. The outcry following the sting broadcast forced the parliamentary commissioner for standards to investigate the two men but, surprise, surprise, found neither was in breach of the code of conduct or the rules of the House. Which suggests that the mother of parliaments’ standards have the bar set bloody low.

Scandals, corruption, lies, nepotism – a day in the life of far too many politicians. I haven’t mentioned any of the major disgraceful episodes of recent years, we’d be here all day. As that dude Aristophanes once said –

‘Under every stone lurks a politician.’

The guy understood a thing or two. And it’s a funny thing that MPs are referred to as honourable members that can’t be called out for lying when that’s exactly what gets many politicians out of bed in the morning. I’m sure a few are decent enough folks but let’s not kid ourselves, as former US president Harry Truman observed

‘you can’t get rich in politics unless you’re a crook.’

Yes, there’s a lot of it about. The story you have just read is true. The names were changed to protect the innocent – hang on – there aren’t any innocents, so the names are all there.

The Labour Party: House of Lords, Scotland and Wales – a saga of our time

A cold January in 1910

The Labour Party

Promise to banish feudalism.

To represent working people.

Pledges to abolish the irresponsible body

Of the House of Lords.

***

Years pass.

The desperate twenties.

The hungry thirties. For working people.

The pledge of 1910, repeated.

Then quietly forgotten.

1945 Labour ‘will not tolerate obstruction of the people’s will by the House of Lords.’

But nothing about abolishing it.

Labour Lords spread like a rash over the red leather benches of the House of Lords.

***

1951: Labour urges working people to work harder.

‘For a just society’.

A just society that includes the undemocratic House of Lords at the centre of UK government.

Chin, chin, old man.

***

1955: Ban the bomb generation.

H bombs. Cold War.

Still no just society.

‘Working people still struggling’.

Especially in Scotland and Wales: greater unemployment than in England.

Labour pledges ‘full employment in Scotland and Wales’.

***

1959: Labour says ‘Britain belongs to YOU’

To everyone: ‘the haves and have nots’.

Not it seems in Scotland and Wales.

In Scotland and Wales increasing economic decline.

Labour publishes plans: Let Scotland Prosper and Forward with Labour-Labour’s Policy for Wales.

Unemployment grows.

Labour’s numbers in the House of Lords grow.  

The have nots and the haves.

***

1964: The swinging sixties.

New Britain. Scientific revolution.

More meaningless slogans. Slogans are now de rigueur for manifestos.

Stagnation and unemployment in Scotland and Wales.

Labour publishes plans: Signposts for Scotland and Signposts to the New Wales.

***

1966: ‘Britain in Crisis’

Slogans are Labour’s preferred form of communication.

Prices soaring. Economic disaster. Financial collapse.

More pledges to Scotland and Wales: Wider democracy in New Britain

Labour talks of the House of Lords having powers restricted.

Only talk.

***

1970: ‘Let’s make Britain Great’

By ‘spreading prosperity and opportunities more evenly’.

Repeats House of Lords must be reformed.

Industries and jobs ‘drain out of Scotland’.

Growing discontent in Scotland and Wales.

Proposal for devolution for Wales, Scotland and English regions.

Up to a point. ‘Preserve the union’.

Scottish Labour reject a Scottish legislative assembly.

***

1974: February. ‘Labour’s Way out of the Crisis’

What crisis?

North Sea oil revenues.

Labour welcomes opportunity for extra tax from oil company profits.

Promises assemblies in Scotland and Wales.

***

1974: October. ‘Britain will win with Labour’

Oil in Scottish waters welcomed as ‘transformatory’ for the economic future of the UK.

Labour pledges to ‘remove the House of Lords’ in the ‘first session of a new parliament’.

Talks of assemblies in Scotland, Wales and English regions.

***

1979: ‘The Better Way’

Labour will increase England’s regional powers.

Act of 1978 for referendum for a Scottish Assembly to go ahead

But with stipulation to succeed at least 40% Scottish electorate vote yes (not 40% who vote).

Labour stresses how North Sea oil offers a ‘golden prospect for wealth’ for the UK.

Labour pledges to ‘review the Honours system’.

And ‘restrict the power of the House of Lords’.   

***

1983: ‘Britain back to work. Rebuild shattered industries’

Labour will ‘introduce an early Bill to abolish the House of Lords’.

Another plan for Scotland.

North Sea oil riches Labour complains are being ‘poured down the drain’.

Labour complains that ‘unprecedented advantage of North Sea oil and gas’ are squandered.

***

1987: ‘Britain will win with Labour’

Pledges to ‘create a British Industrial Investment Bank’

With ‘strong base in Scotland, Wales and English regions’.

Talks of Scottish Assembly for Edinburgh.

Vast oil revenues still being wasted.

***

1992: ‘Time to get Britain working again’

Perpetual problem of unemployment in the UK.

Repeal Thatcher’s poll tax in Scotland.

***

1997: ‘New Labour because Britain deserves better’

Pledges to ‘end the hereditary principle in the House of Lords’

Pledges to ‘create a modern House of Lords’.

With party appointees as life peers. Not at all cronyism.

Devolution not federation.

Westminster parliament must be ‘sovereign’ power in UK.

The ‘Union strengthened’. ‘Separatism’ to be ‘banished’.  

***

2001: ‘Ambitions for Britain’

Five pledges: economic, schools, health, crime, families. (Four out of Five England only)

Separate Scottish manifesto: increase role of PFI (that left Scotland shelling out £bns to private companies)

Pledges to ‘half child poverty by 2010’.

No word of abolishing the House of Lords.

***

2005 ‘Britain Forward Not Back’

‘Decentralise power’.

‘Strengthen’ Welsh Assembly.

Complete ‘reform of the House of Lords’.

***

2010: ‘A Future Fair for All’

Pledges high speed rail ‘London to Scotland’.

‘Union will be protected’ at all cost.

‘Fairer partnerships’.

‘New Second Chamber to replace House of Lords.’

‘Fully elected’. ‘Senate of the Nations and Regions’.

***

2015: ‘Britain Can Be Better’

Labour/Tory/Libdems agree Smith Commission proposals and Gordon Brown Vow for greater powers to Scotland.

Labour vows to implement the Vow in full.

Greater powers for Scotland.

‘Safeguard the future’ of offshore oil and gas.

Scotland will ‘continue benefitting’ from the UK.

Wales will ‘have devolved powers similar to Scotland’.

‘Unless specifically reserved’.

Commitment to ‘replace the House of Lords with elected Senate’ – see 2010.

***

2017: ‘For the Many not the Few’

Labour opposes a second Scottish independence referendum.

Labour will ‘establish a Scottish Investment Bank’.

Pledges to ‘reduce size of the House of Lords’. To ‘abolish’ it.

Repeats pledge to run ‘HS2 as far as Scotland’.

‘Protect North Sea assets’ .

***

2019: ‘Real Change’

Labour will give referendum on Brexit.

HS2 will run to Scotland.

Increase pay to workers in Scotland.

Jobs for Wales.

Tax oil companies.

Pledge to ‘abolish House of Lords in favour of Senate’ – see 2010/2015/2017.

***

2022:

Labour ‘backs Brexit’.

Vow Mark II to Scotland

Labour promises ‘biggest ever transfer of power from Westminster’.

House of Lords to be ‘abolished’ – see 1910.

Labour ‘will consult’ on abolition of House of Lords.

Denies majority independence government in Scotland is a mandate for an independence referendum.

Labour still sends members to the House of Lords. Currently there are about 200 Labour members there. Labour continues to claim to speak for Scotland although it has not been in power there for twelve years, is the third party in the Scottish parliament and repeatedly goes into power sharing with Tories in councils across Scotland. Labour supports Brexit. 

https://lenathehyena.wordpress.com/2015/10/28/house-of-lords-a-parcel-of-rogues-came-down-in-their-brogues/

The land of lies: Britain’s Chinese indentured labourers

The land of lies – Winston Churchill (1905)

He was talking about South Africa. The lies were bad enough but the truth was worse.

They were kept like dogs in a kennel; they were treated as very few men treated their beasts, and if you treated a man as a beast, he became a beast.

Greed and racism. A despicable mix of attributes levelled at Britain’s proud empire and its insatiable pursuit of vulnerable areas of the world to exploit for profit. Profit to the capitalist is an addiction that’s never satisfied as we see today with oil and gas companies up to the gunwales in yields undreamed of even by them – but they’ll hold onto them despite the impact on the poorest of the world’s citizens reduced to spending the winter in freezing cold, damp homes – unable to afford to turn on a heater or cooker. It’s a funny old world.  

Simply put profit is the difference between what a business earns through manufacturing, mining or whatever and what is left after its costs, including wages. The less a worker is paid, the greater the profit. Slavery was the ultimate turn-on for business owners; no pay just basic upkeep of labourers yielded immense profits. Look around Britain at those country estates with their ginormous homes paid for by obscene profits made off the backs of slaves – or indentured labour and workers of every description.

Indentured labour – a person is forced into servitude for a specified time for tiny wages. Sometimes this involved being shipped to a different continent, to one of the British colonies. And sometimes the colonies came to Britain, in a sense. And sometimes we’re not talking about centuries ago, but the last century.

In southern Africa rivalry over control of land intensified between the British and Boers with the discovery of diamond deposits in 1868. In 1877 Britain annexed the Transvaal further antagonising the Boers resulting in their declaration of independence from Britain. On the outbreak of war the Boers defeated Britain, nevertheless, the peace settlement accommodated British sovereignty over parts of the Transvaal.

Matters might have rested there but in 1886 gold was discovered. A lot of it. And that ignited British greed. Already brittle relations between the UK and the Boers worsened over fears of a total British takeover and loss of Boer independence. The racist imperialist, Cecil Rhodes organised an armed raid, the Jameson Raid, to claim back the Transvaal with its immense gold wealth for Britain. This smash and grab attempt failed but so desperate were both sides to benefit from the region’s immense underground wealth a second war broke out between Boers and the UK during which Britain established the world’s first concentration camps, to contain their enemy, the Boers, and this time Britain came out on top.

War depleted the large numbers of native workers available or willing to go into the goldmines. This was dangerous, hazardous work excavating, blasting, drilling and extracting the ore. It was mostly unskilled labour that was needed but it was physically exhausting and the accident rate extremely high, deaths ran to thousands through accidents and sickness. Blasting, drilling and cave-ins resulted in crushed bodies and severed limbs, noxious dust led to slower death from lung disease. And because profit was always the motivating factor there was no compensation paid to victims. Survivors who couldn’t work were dismissed.

Alfred Milner, Lord Milner, a Liberal, was High Commissioner for Southern Africa at the turn of the century. In 1903 he and the Chamber of Mines were behind turning to China’s population to supply work gangs for the mines. Trafficking of ‘Chinese coolies’ was looked on as any other trade arrangement.  

Winston Churchill, then a Liberal MP, would say of Milner –

 “Having been for many years, or at least for many months, the arbiter of the fortunes of men who are ‘rich beyond the dreams of avarice’, he is today poor, and honourably poor.”

Milner had created a midden. Took decisions that caused deaths. Then simply vanished into whatever paradise awaits peers of the realm once their active years destroying lives is over.

Lives are not wrecked by UK peers alone. South Africa’s religious organisations were right behind this devilish commerce and viewed the Chinese, like South Africa’s native population, as barely human and certainly not civilized making their exploitation all the easier to stomach among whites attending church. The Bishop of Pretoria and other religious leaders stood firmly behind the ‘white working man’ and saw the importation of Chinamen as –

“…a great opportunity for Christianising effort.”

In March 1904, the British parliament debated this controversial policy. The quality of speeches might be summed up by these examples –

“Members who talk about shutting out white labour might turn their attention to the injury done to white labour in this country by the dumping down of 80,000 foreign aliens, the riff-raff of Europe” …[who take] “the bread out of the mouths of our struggling working men.”

I am reminded of Keir Starmer’s comments that the UK is recruiting too many foreigners to work in the NHS. (6 November 2002)

While some MPs likened the indentured Chinese workers to slaves thereby risking “Britain’s reputation as the mother of the free” others disagreed, insisting they were having ‘the time of their lives”.

“The life of a Chinese indentured labourer will be a paradise to what some of our fellow-citizens go through.”

Strange conception of paradise. In the real world the Chinese in the Transvaal were largely confined to their camps when not underground in the mines. The mainly very young men grew bored and increasingly frustrated by so many restrictions on top of the dangers inherent in their work. Diseases were rife and often fatal. The food was poor. It was a miserable existence with little hope of a way out before the end of their three-year contract. Many resorted to opium to relieve stress of their hazardous occupation and the tedium of their contracted existence. Where did the opium come from in such tightly controlled conditions? The whites supplied it. Opium was used as a device to control the Chinese. It was sold to them at sky high prices, leading to debt, borrowing to pay off debts or theft from fellow-workers or breaking out of camp to rob members of nearby communities. Lurid newspaper stories created fear of a Chinese menace threatening law-abiding white farmers and communities. A law was passed that allowed whites to arrest any Chinese person found outside their compound – a £1 plus expenses was paid for every Chinaman detained. Not all of them lived long enough to be arrested, with whites shooting dead any suspected of theft.

In the House of Commons in November 1906, Donald Smeaton, MP for Stirlingshire, stated –

“two pounds of opium allowed to each Chinese coolie under the recent Transvaal Ordinance is enormously in excess of the maximum consumption and leaves a large surplus in the possession of each coolie…”

Churchill contradicted him –

“I would point out that it is not correct to say that two pounds of opium are allowed to each Chinese coolie under the recent Ordinance …coolie not allowed any opium …unless he can obtain a permit signed by an Inspector of the Foreign Labour Department …”

Smeaton asked if the government was aware of the harmful impact of opium at which point the Speaker shouted him down –

“Order! Order! The honourable member is making a speech.”

Straight out of Alice and the rabbit hole. Speakers don’t change their spots.

Officially, opium smoking by the Chinese in the Transvaal was condemned and was certainly punishable by flogging – between five and fifty lashes, according to Aberdeen People’s Journal. A man found guilty got his ‘gruel’ or ‘licking’ after being stripped, held face down and soundly whipped. Then he was literally booted out the door. Not everyone was flogged. A man might be confined in jail, handcuffed to a wooden beam and forced to squat for up to eight hours.  But flogging was commonplace in the goldmine camps to impress upon the Chinese workers who was ‘top dog’. This was humane British justice in practice. A motion in the House of Commons in 1906 condemned Milner for failing to outlaw corporal punishment for minor offences in the compounds.

Over 60,000 Chinese youths and men were shipped into South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century – one of the practical exigencies of the British Empire was its ability to raise labour gangs and move them to wherever industries were short of workers. China with its large and mainly impoverished submissive people was attractive to industries within the empire. British society’s ingrained racism a useful adjunct to the Empire’s insatiable demand for cheap labour. And so their agents in China scoured the countryside for workers, or ‘coolies’ as they referred to them. ‘Coolies’ were not regarded as quite civilized so could be confined within camps, like dogs, as was pointed out at the time.  That one of the compounds was formerly used by the British as a concentration camp during the Second Boer War was further testament to the British disregard for life and a signal of the brutal nature of the indentured system.  

British and American companies with strong trading links to China enabled this official twentieth century people trafficking – simply another column in their registers of interests along with opium, tea, silk, cotton etc. Scottish companies such as Jardine Matheson & Co. and Gibb, Livingstone & Co. in conjunction with American William Forbes & Co. whose name alludes to the Scottish roots of its founder and the English Butterfield and Swire swung into action to supply the goldmines of South Africa with thousands of young workhands.

Controversial from the start, opposition to the policy grew and for as many arguing the men were volunteers there were others who documented the less than voluntary recruitment of them in China and the appalling working and living conditions that confronted them in South Africa.

In March 1904 Lord Coleridge said –

“The idea of importing Chinese, under conditions of servitude seems first to have occurred to the mind of Mr Rhodes, who desired to introduce them into Rhodesia…”

Mr Rhodes being, of course, Cecil Rhodes, once a great British hero, now seen for the wicked racist imperialist he was. For the likes of Rhodes and Milner, the ‘not quite civilized non-whites’ were appealing because of their cheapness to hire and the ease by which they could be manipulated and exploited, unlike white workers used to organising themselves to protect wages and working conditions.  As Milner said in a speech to the White League –

“We do not want a white proletariat.”

Henry Forster, Conservative MP for Sevenoaks in Kent said in the Commons on 22 February 1906 –

“Gentlemen opposite were wrong in asserting with so much confidence that the conditions were tantamount to slavery. Business men, working men engaged in the mines, trade union officials, ministers of religion, the members of the British Association visiting South Africa last autumn, and even some supporters of the present Government themselves who had been out there, all said there was no element of slavery in the conditions under which the Chinamen worked, and that the arrangements were healthy, humane, and admirable in every way.”

He was objecting to descriptions of this kind from the President of the Board of Trade, David Lloyd George (Liberal)  

“They were kept like dogs in a kennel; they were treated as very few men treated their beasts, and if you treated a man as a beast, he became a beast.

Those who argued that treatment of the indentured Chinese was remotely like slavery pointed to a clause in their contracts that said any man could return to China for a payment of £17. 10 shillings, the equivalent of £1500 today. As the average wage paid was about 35 shillings per month out of which they had to pay for their keep and the many fines imposed on them by mine management – e.g. in July 1905 fines among the  Chinese amounted to £2,000 (today’s £157,000) and in October were the equivalent of £400,000. Churchill (Undersecretary for the Colonies) said he calculated ‘a coolie could save by the most rigid self-denial …20 shillings a month” meaning it would take a labourer eighteen months to earn his passage home, barring accidents, illness or whatever.

Transvaal’s white proletariat added to the growing condemnation of the policy. At the same time resistance from the Chinese (and Indians) in the Transvaal over their employment conditions led to the system of indentured labour being abandoned by 1910.   

For far too many Brexit has lent legitimacy to British society’s inherent racist attitudes. It is abhorrent. Vilifying foreign people is abhorrent but both the Tories and Labour have leapt onto this vile bandwagon – and that of Johnson’s repugnant opinions of British exceptionalism – the best in the world. Windrush? In the past. Send them home has been the slogan coming out of Westminster for several years. Soon it will be – get foreigners in to do the work we don’t want to do. But don’t let them stay here. 1904 or 2022 nothing much has changed.

Africa has been the footstool of colonialism and imperialism, exploitation and degradation – one small incident in a land far away

Bechuanaland (Botswana) in Southern Africa once was a British protectorate. That means that for intents and purposes not much happened in Bechuanaland without permission of government in London. This was during the period of the British Empire, of which many in the UK are so very proud, when the continent of Africa was divied up between the more powerful European powers to be plundered, and Bechuanaland was brought to the notice of that rapacious old coloniser, Cecil Rhodes, for its potential as an economic link north and south, the fact it was not already coloured pink on world atlases as a British possession but most importantly, Rhodes believed it contained gold and diamonds. So, Botswana – renamed Bechuanaland by the British because of their laziness (and indifference) over mastering the pronunciation of the name of its native people, the Tswana, was made a British protectorate in September 1885.

Before the country had the union jack run up on its flagpoles British influence was at work. Education, that great moulder of character and opinion was making an impact. In Bechuanaland as in so many other places across the Empire, schools were set up by missionaries and many of them were started and run by Scots teaching Church of Scotland values. John Mackenzie from Knockando in Moray was an early missionary in southern Africa, from the 1830s, and while in Tswana territories he encouraged the British government to adopt the region as a protectorate in order to defend its people from racist Boers settling there. Mackenzie was made a Deputy Commissioner by the British government and he was replaced by Rhodes.

Students at Lovedale in 1892

At Lovedale in Cape Province, Tshekedi Khama attended the Missionary Institute secondary school that had been educating children of all creeds and including rescued slaves from its inception in 1841. A Church of Scotland missionary school, it was a non-sectarian and non-racial and open to all boys, including rescued slaves. This open policy continued until 1955 when South Africa’s apartheid system kicked in. A girls’ school followed much later, in 1868.

Scottish doctor and missionary, David Livingstone, lived and worked in southern African from the 1840s until his death in 1873, along with his family. He became a close friend of Shehele, an ancestor of Tshekedi, and when a memorial was planned to Livingstone in his home town of Blantyre, the Banangwato people in Bechuanaland were invited to contribute towards it. They gladly obliged and sent £150 that was used to create an illuminated tableaux, called the Last Journey, The Last Journey depicts Livingstone’s corpse being carried by native Africans to the east coast, a distance of 1500 miles, from where his body was shipped home to Scotland.

Bechuanaland was one of several African regions where horses were bred and when Tshekedi and a group of his fellow countrymen visited the Blantyre museum they asked to see the cavalry horses at Redford Barracks. For whatever reason they weren’t given access to the Barracks but instead were taken to Edinburgh’s Corporation Cleansing Departments stable of Clydesdales. The visitors were much taken by these large, docile animals – far larger than the horses bred in their own country – and spent a long time with them, stroking them and whispering into their ears, to the consternation of their British hosts.

Back in Livingstone’s day in Bechuanaland, mistreatment of native people by European settlers was rife. Livingstone detested this behaviour and that of the Boers in particular for they were infamous for outrageous acts of oppression and cruelty perpetrated upon peaceful villagers and he warned that people were arming to defend themselves from such assaults. Gun traders were everywhere so weapons were relatively easy to get hold of. Livingstone observed that attempts at halting the purchase of weapons was a failure.

…might as well have bolted the castle gate with a boiled carrot.

Boer leaders resented Livingstone and threatened to have him kicked out of their region. Livingstone explained in a letter to his brother, Charles, in 1849 –

The Boers or Dutch emigrants oppress these tribes and treat them almost as slaves. They would have contrived to do so to Sechele (his friend) too, but I succeeded in freeing the Bakwains (Bakens.) A considerable number of guns were purchased, and as this is the source of power of the Boers over the other tribes they began to be afraid that the other tribes would follow his example.

In 1850, Livingstone wrote to his father-in-law, Robert Moffat –

Can you get the bullet mould (perhaps 2, & ramrods to fit) of 8 to lb. or rather fit 8 to the pound bore but conical, from Birmingham? Those which have an indentation behind fire much further, the dotted line marking the indentation. Sechele is very anxious to get the seven-barrelled gun. You seem to have forgotten it.

   He was helping arm his friends among the Batswana.

*

By the 1930s Botswana’s younger people had become frustrated with Britain’s grip on the country, with all that entailed with racist views of superior and inferior races and, consequently, lack of respect for native rights.

Tshekedi was already in power, having been made regent of the Bamangwato in 1926 following the death of his brother, Sekgoma II, whose son was too young to become chief. Twenty-one-year-old Tshekedi set about consolidating his authority as leader. Alarmed by this, the British commissioner in the area, Sir Charles Rey, attempted to rein him in. When in 1933 two white men were taken before the native court accused of assaulting (raping) native girls, Tshekedi sentenced them to be flogged in public, as any native perpetrator would be. Rey was outraged by a black man overstepping himself and judging a white person.

Top – Vice-Admiral Evans arrives to conduct the inquiry into the actions of Regent Chief Tshekedi, accompanied by a hundred marines and another hundred seamen from Cape Province.
Bottom left -The inquiry. Evans announces the suspension of Acting Chief Tshekedi of the Bamangwato, he’s the small man on the right of the group of Africans facing the whites.
Middle bottom – Phineas McIntosh, left with pipe, and McNamee, right.
Bottom right – Tshekedi a year or two earlier
  

The British government reacted with a show of strength. A Vice-Admiral Edward Evans was sent in to investigate the incident. He arrived with 200 royal Marines and seamen brought in from Cape Town along with howitzers to make it crystal clear to the natives that their laws were one thing but Britain was in charge and no native chief had a right to judge any white person.

Buglers bugled as representatives of the British Crown and government assembled under a fig tree. Before them, unshaded from the sun, stood 15,000 native men and women, to witness legitimate justice. Under Britain’s superior justice Tshekedi was not permitted to have anyone speak in his defence. He was found guilty of overstepping his power by not providing the white men accused of assaulting native girls, McIntosh and MaNamee, a choice over which type of court judged them. Tshekedi was stripped of his powers and banished from Francistown by the Acting High Commissioner, Vice-Admiral Evans. During the proceedings several white women in the crowd shouted, “Stop this” and they and other whites rushed to shake Tshekedi’s hand. Tshekedi’s removal proved fairly short-lived. Evans had him reinstated following a public outcry.

The British press were predictably racist – ridiculing Batmangwato’s ‘comic opera’ army. A sneering W. J . Makin of The Sphere (23 September, 1933) wrote –

500 members dressed in cast-off uniforms of Drury Lane and other musical comedy shows of London …Some even wear kilts, with dirty white spats over their black feet.

More serious journalists, especially among the South African press, ridiculed Britain’s high-handed actions of sending in marines and howitzers, calling it –

…a mere melodramatic gesture as useless as it must have been expensive.

Around this time the British government was getting jittery over the rise of nationalism in South Africa. That a black leader took it upon himself to flog a white man was unacceptable to many in Britain. Tshekedi was a symbol of the growing confidence of black Africans and so he had to be put in his place. He argued that both of the white men were notorious for their brutal behaviour and they had lived among the Batswana for some time and this was the reason he thought it appropriate to deal with them as he would any native guilty of a similar crime. One of the men, Phineas McIntosh had, in fact, accepted his punishment but Commissioner Charles Rey was determined to drive home the message of Britain’s supremacy over him and his people. Britian’s play of strength was considered far more important than the rape of native girls and punishment of the perpetrators. The British moved the convicted men, McIntosh and McNamee, to Lohatsi to the dismay of its resident white people who petitioned to have them removed, over fears for their daughters’ safety.

The Batmangwato army

The flogging episode and its aftermath highlighted the tensions that existed between native autonomy and British control. Tshekedi was never antithetical to the British, his own father having accepted ‘British protection’ in the late 19^th century under threat from the Boers but those times had gone. His son Tshekedi having had a western education became the acceptable face of a native chief and trusted by many whites but he was no British lackey. Tshekedi was proud of his people and his country. He was a nationalist who well understood the injustices at the heart of colonialism – the leash that could and would be tightened as a reminder of where power really lay. He recognised that the protection offered to his father in the nineteenth century came as a double-edged sword – protection on the one hand and threat on the other. Westminster passed the Foreign Jurisdiction Act in 1890 that legalised the British monarch’s supremacy over native laws, rights and obligations. The British Crown’s agent was, of course, the British government. In other words, the British Crown was superior to any native power in its Empire and could countermand any court decisions. And given that the area fell under total control of Westminster, it could decide its future – whether that meant retaining Batswana chiefs or handing their country over to the British South Arican Company – and always racism was at its core.

Clearly when the protected territory is inhabited by native tribes the amount of internal sovereignty assumed by the protector is much greater than in cases where the protected State has a civilised government.

(Justice Watermeyer. A Boer judge and supporter of British imperial control in southern Africa).

So, Tshekedi was reinstated because of a backlash but his movements were restricted and he had to accept he would not act in any cases against whites. The autocratic Rey was replaced as Resident Commissioner in 1937 but his career was not harmed. Tshekedi’s Rengentship ended when the nephew he was acting for, Seretse Khama, became chief in 1949. That’s another story involving racism that resulted in both Seretse Khama and Tshekedi being exiled by the British in 1950, and subsequently banned from participating in politics.  

A correspondent to the Perthshire Advertiser in April 1952 complained about the harsh treatment meted out to Seretse and Tshekedi by the British government as a

… blot on our British sense of justice and fair play.

In 1952 Tshekedi was allowed to return to Bechuanaland as a private citizen and he helped organise the return of Seretse. The pair plus a third man eventually brought about Bechuanaland’s independence, as Botswana on 30 September, 1966. Tshekedi was dead by then. He died in London in 1959, following treatment there for kidney failure. He was 54 years old.

The title of this blog is a quote from Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana, 1960,

The Day the Music Died – on the BBC. Glasgow Orpheus Choir.

It caused a great stooshie that got a mention in the UK parliament – the BBC’s practice of censoring opinions it doesn’t like. This has nothing to do with Emily Maitlis but occurred back in the 1940s.

Today, the BBC is far more unpopular in Scotland than it is in England with 13% of Scottish households choosing not to buy a BBC licence compared with 7% in England, 6% in Wales and 10% in Northern Ireland. In Scotland it is criticised for reflecting the corporation’s southern metropolitan bias and for its determined and continuing promotion of unionism that flies in the face of at least 50% of Scottish opinion.

We should not be surprised after all the BBC is unionist – it says so on the tin and is British establishment to its core. There is a pretence is that it reflects life in these islands. Of course, it does nothing of the kind. It does nowadays what it has always done – represent a tiny section of ‘British’ society and stuffs its management with dependable British establishment types to ensure it upholds the values of people like them.

Back in the 1930s, the choral master of the Glasgow Orpheus Choir, Sir Hugh Roberton, seemed like a dependable chap. The choir, his choir, had a reputation second to none in the UK and were frequent performers on the BBC. However, come the Second World War it was drawn to the BBC’s attention that Roberton was not one of them. He was a socialist and pacifist and member of the Peace Pledge Union.

 War and art is an impossible combination, impossible as hate and love. War is in an insidious position. It scars and brutalises us unconsciously…Oh the vanity and hypocrisy and brutality of the world, oh the ignorance of the people.

The words of Hugh Roberton during World War One.

Come the Second World War, they banned him and his choir from broadcasting on the BBC.  

Roberton was portrayed as a disloyal citizen by Corporation – that moulder of opinions.  During the Second World War the BBC was the government’s powerful medium for disseminating government propaganda – George Orwell was part of that structure between 1941 and 1943 and used his experiences at the BBC in his portrayal of the propaganda arm of government, the Ministry of Truth, in his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Roberton wasn’t alone in being proscribed by the BBC which has a history of denying access to mics to people it regards as not one of us. Michael Redgrave was among a number of actors whose services were not required during the war. Redgrave accused the BBC of –

…an unwarranted infringement of the civil liberties of the individual.

The BBC’s defence was that anyone with views ‘opposed to the national war effort’ as they described it – would not be allowed on the BBC. That members of the Orpheus Choir were on active service abroad or in the Home Guard or ARP carried no weight which drew this comment from one choir member –

 Joan of Arc has been a long time dead, but it appears that the English heresy-hunter still runs to type

It was not only his pacifist beliefs that made Roberton a thorn in the flesh of Britain’s most conservative elements. The custom was that concerts would close with the national anthem. Roberton would have none of it, and always ended the Orpheus Choir concerts with a rendering of Auld Lang Syne. Such behaviour enraged a Colonel W. Mellis from Aberdeen who wrote to his local newspaper, the Press & Journal, expressing his disgust that at a concert he attended God Save the King was not performed. For those of you too young to know, the national anthem used to be played at the end (and sometimes the start) of every public activity or performance and the audience was expected to stand up to listen to it. But people increasingly ignored this custom so it was stopped in cinemas in 1974. It carried on elsewhere until recent times and is still played at the end of BBC Radio 4 daily broadcasts. Mellis deplored that ‘a man like Sir Hugh Roberton’ (I think he meant such as Sir Hugh Roberton) be allowed anywhere near a microphone.

Ian Shaw MacPhail of Aberdeen, wrote a response to what he called Mellis’ ‘hysterically loyal support of the recent childish attitude of the BBC to the Glasgow Orpheus Choir and its pacifist conductor.’ He added that a man who ‘cannot enjoy a choir when it is conducted by a pacifist’ is no music lover and argued that music cannot be controlled by government, laws or opinions and asked if Mellis thought the choir would lure the public to their moral doom by the exquisiteness of its singing? He wondered if Mellis understood what the war was being fought for –

…men have died and are at this very moment dying in the belief that their sacrifice is made so that we may retain these precious rights of mankind – liberty of conscience and freedom of citizenship and speech

MacPhail, about to join the armed forces after graduating from Grey’s School of Art in Aberdeen, backed Roberton’s right to his opinions –

This black-balling of the musician is reminiscent of the unforgivable and dishonest attitude of the B.B.C. to that immortal animal lover Grey Owl* whose crime was that in his script he made a very pertinent indictment of the ‘sadistic cruelty’ of fox hunting.

He called the BBC doctrinaire – selecting who it allowed to broadcast and who it did not. For his part MacPhail wrote he was not concerned with whether –

…the milkman is an admirer of Stalin, whether the butcher has a moustache like Hitler’s or whether Sir Hugh Roberton is a pacifist.

(Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

The BBC’s ban on the choir was raised in parliament. A Mr McGovern, MP for Glasgow Shettleston, raised the issue of ‘partiality of the propaganda and choice of propagandists by the British Broadcasting Corporation and the way in which it is being directed on totalitarian lines’ so eliminating different views on the BBC and instead of the BBC being ‘an instrument of democracy’ it was ‘one for the creation of an authoritarian regime in this country.’

Another Glasgow MP, Mr Stephen for Camlachie, said he noticed that after the ban on the Orpheus Choir had been lifted following the matter being raised with the prime minister, the BBC seldom put it on air. He described this as the BBC’s ‘victimization of this choir because of the anti-war views of the conductor.’

So, the BBC reduced its engagements of the choir after the ban was lifted. It was noticed it didn’t even merit a place on Scotland’s bit of the BBC, the ‘Scottish Half Hour’ which represented the BBC’s impressions of Scotland. The BBC’s regional director in Scotland was Melville Dimwiddie who in 1934 had issued a denial of an accusation from Hugh Roberton that the BBC was ‘an English institution with a branch office in Scotland.’ Dinwiddie’s denial was disingenuous since it most certainly was and is.

When the B.B.C. was formed it was formed with a charter akin to autocracy. Today the position of the governing body is that Scotland has no voice and Ireland had no voice. In two years’ time the charter is to be reviewed. I hope when this is done that Scotland will be given a certain measure of Home Rule.

(Sir Hugh Roberton, 1934)

Dinwiddie said there could be no better Scotsman representing Scotland than the Director General of Broadcasting, Sir John Reith. Trite nonsense and offensive to Scots with a brain. It was Dinwiddie who a decade later who told Roberton that if he changed his pacifist views he would be allowed to broadcast. Roberton insisted his views were his own business and not the BBC’s.

Hugh Roberton was unbending over substituting Auld Lang Syne at the end of concerts which he regarded was more in keeping with Scottish sentiment.  

We have a history, a tradition, all of our own … and I am sure it comes out in our singing…English choirs on the whole are probably more competent than Scottish ones: they are also more facile…their work wants root.

Roberton’s own roots ran deep in the soil of Scotland. He recognised the value of Scotland’s rich folk song tradition and rearranged many for his choir as well as writing his own songs based on old Gaelic and Scots ones.

All this happened between 80 and 90 years ago. A lot has changed at the BBC since then. Oh, wait: no, it hasn’t.

*Grey Owl was a Canadian naturalist who spent time in the UK giving talks on wildlife in the 1930s. He was the son of a Scottish father and Apache mother. One-time trapper, Grey Owl deplored hobby slaughter of animals and swapped his rifle for a pen.  “It took civilisation to teach us that killing was a sport” he said, which along with his condemnation of fox hunting, did not go down well with BBC chaps.

The Union Dividend: emigrate if you know what’s good for you

     Scotland is gradually being emptied of its population, its spirit, its wealth, industry, art, intellect and innate character. If a country exports its most enterprising spirits and best minds year after year, for 50 or 100 or 200 years, some result will inevitably follow.

Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey, 1935:

Migrating Scots mother and children, 1911
(Library & Archives, Canada)

It is reprehensible that any government would regard its people as its main export but this was the fate of Scotland following the establishment of the Union – during the later 18 ^th century, 19^th century and even into the 20^th  century.

Without the broad shoulders of the Union, Scots are frequently told, Scotland would be a failing state – which begs the question, if Scotland has done so well from the Union how is it her population was compelled to abandon her in such huge numbers soon after the Union of 1707?

Either the Union has been devilishly good for Scotland and transformed her from a backward and struggling country into one both so innovative and confidently successful that she would have no trouble forging a bright future alone or it hasn’t. Which is it? We should be told.

Size seems to confound Unionists. Scotland’s population of about 5.5 million is too small, they argue. Successful nations with similar sized populations – Ireland, New Zealand, Kuwait, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia, Norway, Oman, Croatia might disagree and by now I’m getting into the 4 millions – Latvia, Bahrain, Estonia, Cyprus, Mauritius – below 2 million and could carry on to tiny Malta, Iceland, Barbados, Bermuda, Gibraltar – all of 33,000 inhabitants. But where was I? Scotland, unlike some of the above is richly endowed with potential for market-valuable renewables, is still an oil and gas producer, has unique and sought-after food and drink commodities, has an educated and skilled workforce and strong engineering pedigree.  If Scotland with all of this is not capable of standing on her own feet then the Union has failed Scotland and failed Scotland spectacularly, reducing our country to a pathetic dogsbody of a nation perpetually insulted and patronised and one whose interests are simply ignored by Westminster where the Union’s power is anchored.  

Bring on some goalposts. Not there. Over there. Where size is clearly not the issue it must be the economy that stops independence. Scotland isn’t rich enough. Remember the guffawing back in 2014-15 when oil prices collapsed? You’d be broke, Unionists crowed while simultaneously denying Scotland’s seabed was, in fact, Scottish. They aren’t laughing now with Brent crude prices back up in the 90s. Goalpost change. Climate change – you can’t open any more oil and gas fields – although this is a reserved matter and Unionist HQ, Westminster, is doing just that. Scotland’s large and expanding renewable energy sector is dismissed by Unionists who insist England will refuse to buy Scottish power and fresh water. Doesn’t sound like the actions of a friend never mind Union partner. But the Union has never been a partnership based on respect or trust.

From the inception of the Union government in Westminster operated on the principle that England’s industries and trade took precedence over Scotland’s. And in case we didn’t get the message Scots were told their country was poor and barbaric and we should sling our hooks and leave Scotland, the worthless nation, to rot. And many did. Some were forcibly displaced. Some chose to leave. The British Empire had spaces that needed filling with Europeans – so to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa – ousting their native populations. Like so many of today’s migrants, Scots moved abroad in the hope of making a a better future for themselves and their families than was possible at home – because the Union dividend has always been a myth. Or they had no choice but to leave. Because the Union has been a disaster for Scotland.

One hundred years ago, in 1912, in the month of April 9,000 people left Scotland – just under 3,000 in a single week. In another week, in May of 1912,  3,520 Scots migrated to Canada or America from the Clyde alone. Other ports were available. On 1^st June, again from the Clyde, a further 2,000 were shipped west. On 6^th June 1912, a report claimed emigration from Scotland was running twice as fast as from England.

Canada was the favoured destination for Scots. Before the Union, Scotland established a colony in Canada in 1621. It was called Nova Scotia (New Scotland.) This colonisation proved brief, being surrendered to the French in 1632. Two centuries later, under the Union, the Canadian authorities employed squads of agents to sell Canada to Scots – to entice the brightest and best to settle there where farm land could be bought for the price of a year’s rent in Scotland and where industries required skilled men and women. Leaflets were pressed into hands and colourful posters pinned up in public places promising everything that was great and everything that was different from failed Scotland bogged down by hardship, low pay, high rents, filthy slums and poor food – the Union dividend.  

Lord Strathcona, a Scot who became a Canadian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and a big shot in Canada, enthused about the vast territory of Canada able to maintain 150,000,000 people – he wasn’t talking about Canada’s own indigenous peoples, you understand, he wanted Scots to up sticks and settle there where everything was “the best.”

“Anyone – even a lady – could succeed on the land there” Strathcona said by way of encouragement. He knew ‘ladies’ from Russia who were farming. 

Back in Scotland the Union had so run down the country Scots took little persuading to leave. In 1912 a flood of humanity boarded vessels, mainly for Canada and America, but also for South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. This flood was a continuation of the one the year before. In 1911, about 90,000 Scots packed up and left the old country. Across the rest of Europe emigration to America and Canada was slowing down but not from Scotland where it was accelerating because Scots could see no future in Scotland in the Union. In 1906 Scottish exceeded Irish emigration for the first time and did so again in 1911-12.   

In 1911 Scotland recorded its lowest death rate since 1855 (when records began) and lowest birth rate since 1873 except for 1890. The low birth rate might be explained by the drainage of young men, sometimes abandoning wives, and young women moving abroad. Scotland’s population depletion was only regarded with concern once rate payers discovered they were being asked to provide poor relief for deserted families. But emigration provided excellent business opportunities for shipping lines.

American bound from Aberdeen

Between 1830 and 1914 around 2 million Scots emigrated abroad and a similar number are believed to have moved to other parts of the UK. Throughout the 20^th century Scotland’s population decline continued. Since 1851 the proportion of Scotland’s population to the population of the UK as a whole has diminished by 25%.

People, industries and company headquarters have moved away from Scotland. The oil and gas sector off the northeast of Scotland ran counter to this long-term trend and had a major impact on population, jobs and wage levels. Unfortunately, the immense wealth produced off Scotland’s coast failed to benefit Scotland. Instead, Thatcher ensured that London and the southeast of England profited with vast building and infrastructure spending there. Compare Europe’s oil and gas capital, Aberdeen, with London. You would never know Aberdeen was the hub of so much multinational activity. Scotland was prevented from benefitting from this klondike which is an odd sort of dividend – aka no dividend at all but cynical exploitation by a greedy partner.

James Annand, an Aberdeenshire journalist and soon-to-be Liberal MP (the shortest serving MP, dying within a couple of weeks of winning and never taking his seat) was campaigning in 1903. He buttered up his audience in St Fergus with references to townies who had no idea how tough life and work were for country folk and complained about the lack of affordable farms for rent. He reminded his audience that Scotland was a poor country – a poor country? Surely some mistake – after two hundred years of that Union dividend how come Scotland was still poor? The Unionist never explained but he did emphasise just how poor Scotland was and how it was understandable that so very many Scots migrated because they could not make a decent living at home. Annand supported Scots getting out of Scotland to Canada – the land of opportunity.

Canada still tempting Scots away in its quest for “suitable men and women to go there.’  Annand mentioned Texas with its “three million acres of land, owned by a single company, that was being offered in lots for sale at £1000 each” and Australia with its “incalculable opportunities for enterprise in connection with unoccupied territory” – where indigenous people didn’t appear to matter.

And so Scotland continued to be drained of many of its most “suitable men and women” – from countryside and cities – the populations of Edinburgh and Glasgow were also in decline. The tide of migration that swept “the best young men and women of Scotland” ashore in North America was detrimental to the economy back home as well as reinforcing how Scotland was failing its own people following years of underinvestment, attacks on its manufacturing, lack of opportunities, lack of hope and ambition over generations. The coming of the Great War placed a temporary halt on Scotland’s population depletion by emigration, replacing it with another loss, of many of its fine young people, in that disastrous bloodbath.

Early in the twentieth century when England’s population was about five times greater than Scotland’s its wealth was about thirty-six times greater than Scotland’s. That Union dividend, again.

Two hundred years of the Union, of the Union dividend, and the message was – emigrate if you know what’s good for you.                   

Westminster government statistics income 2014-16

For centuries England repeatedly attacked Scotland, in an attempt to annex it. It did not succeed until 1707 when a handful of Scottish nobles sold out their country for personal gain. That was the point that Scotland became an irrelevance in the eyes of the British monarchy and government except for the money it could raise from Scots taxpayers to help pay for England’s near continuing wars and her young men to sacrifice themselves as cannon fodder – for wars have a habit of eliminating people at a fearful rate. Peacetime taxes levied by Westminster favoured English industries to the detriment of Scottish ones. The Union was an English protectionist measure set up by the monarchy and Westminster. The myth it has been good for Scotland is just that. Westminster operates to benefit the city of London and this is why present talk of ‘levelling up’ is just talk. Ireland was treated in a similar manner to Scotland. The Irish woollen trade was destroyed to protect England’s and during the terrible famine years of the 1840s while 400,000 Irish people were starving to death the grain they grew on their land was carted away to fill British bellies. Destitute Irish could see no future at home and so left. Likewise in Scotland. Between 1840 and 1940 a little short of a million Scots went to live in other parts of the UK while more than two million emigrated abroad.

The Highlands and Islands Emigration Society encouraged Scots escape starvation during the Highland Potato Famine of 1846 by emigrating to Australia. In Westminster the Emigration Act of 1851 provided subsidies to landlords to ship people abroad like so much livestock. Queen Victoria and assorted aristocrats contributed to the costs to rid Scotland of Scots, though she, herself, decided to use the country as a holiday retreat.   

At the Union Scotland’s population was about 20% of the UK’s population. Today Scotland’s 5.5 million make up 8.2% of the UK’s overall population. According to the James Hutton Institute Scotland’s rural populations could decline by 33% in little more than 20 years.

While I was able to find sources that looked at the impact of emigration on Ireland I found none on the impact of emigration from Scotland on Scotland. Although not identical emigration from Ireland has comparisons with Scotland but in Ireland’s case destitution drove emigration much more than occurred in Scotland. The perception that migrants are always poor and low skilled has never been true. Of course people emigrate for different reasons and some impoverished and low skilled will take their chances moving abroad, often under duress, but these groups are those least likely to migrate while the educated, skilled and ambitious are more likely to voluntarily emigrate.

Migrants have also moved to Scotland. Through the 19^th and 20^th centuries they came mainly from Ireland, the Baltic countries and northern Europe (a reversal of 16^th and 17^th century Scots moving abroad to trade), Italians and, of course, people from Wales and England. With increasing global migration, the number of Scots born outwith Scotland continues to increase; in 2018-19 just under 40,000 moved to Scotland from overseas – 20,000 greater than left.

Fraser of Allander gross disposable household income across UK 2018

The return of some autonomy to Scotland through the partial resurrection of a parliament in Edinburgh provided hope for the future of the country. However, Westminster jealously guards its overall control of the whole UK and will chip away at Edinburgh’s authority and will as far as possible implement policies that protect and support that southeast corner of England, as it has done since 1707. These are dangerous times for Scots. If Westminster succeeds in extinguishing Scotland’s recently found confidence and optimism the country will again be plunged into a state of hopelessness that led to people leaving over three hundred years. The Union that needed heavily armed fortifications to ensure compliance in its early days, that ran down Scotland and drained it of “its best men and women” might have proved a dividend for Westminster but at a terrible cost for Scotland.

The Dud

🚨“If you've got one shred of compassion for all those families who sacrificed so much, who lost so much, you’ll go”🚨 pic.twitter.com/AOl2D4f0Bc

— Led By Donkeys (@ByDonkeys) January 18, 2022

What’s in a name: royalty a very English affair

What’s in a name? Quite a lot.

British Air Force man Derek Neilson, who was fined £5 for throwing a tyre lever through a shop window stocked with British Coronation emblems. Following his court appearance he was locked up overnight at army barracks in Edinburgh for refusing to stand up during the playing of “God Save the Queen.” And his tie emblazoned with Elizabeth I, was confiscated.

Neilson was the extreme end of protest across Scotland from Benbecula to Auchtermuchty in the early 1950s over the naming of the queen. Reminiscent of the women’s suffrage movement protests, poster campaigns, petitions signed, windows were smashed and a pillar box in Edinburgh bearing the insignia, E.R. II, was blown up.

Back in 1901 similar protests had taken place in Scotland when Edward VII was named since there had been no Scottish kings called Edward, only English, how could he be Edward VI of the United Kingdom? Didn’t do any good then. Scots were told to just swallow it.

Then in 1953 a petition lodged with the Court of Session by the Scottish Covenant Association to veto the imposition of Elizabeth II as the queen’s title on grounds the United Kingdom of Great Britain that came into being in 1707 had no queen called Elizabeth since that time and as she was said to be queen of the Union she could not possibly be called Elizabeth II.

Dr. John MacCormick

The petition was rejected on grounds it was up to her what she called herself. This was challenged by Dr John M. MacCormick, chairman of the Scottish Covenant Association on grounds that the numeral was not a description of her Crown but of her, a person. He referred to an Act of Parliament on the subject –

Nowhere in the Act of 1953 has any authority been given to Her Majesty or her Ministers to adopt in her personal name a numeral which is contrary to the provisions of the Act of Union.

That it is well understood in England the numeral is to convey her as Elizabeth of England . . .

It cut no ice. Scotland was then fairly solidly unionist. At least those in senior roles in Scotland were solidly unionist and pleased themselves about constitutional matters irrespective of popular opinion.

Names do matter. And names do change. Place names tend to be changed to underline domination. The British Empire was famous for doing that but it’s a common practice among powers replacing traditional native names with ones honouring political, military or royal figures. Think of Volgograd becoming Stalingrad in honour of the Soviet leader or Maryburgh that became Gordonsburgh then Duncansburgh and finally, Fort William, in Scotland. The William being the bloody butcher Duke of Cumberland, himself. I hope in a future independent Scotland someone with a morsel of decency will arrange a competition to rename the place. There are 26 towns called Independence in the US alone and that has a certain ring about it.

Names matter or else place names wouldn’t be altered. Names mattered a great deal in 1953 when Princess Elizabeth came to the throne. Which ordinal number should be added to the new queen’s name, I or II, was debated in Westminster. It used to be that a description was good enough to differentiate monarchs of the same name – descriptive term like Alfred the Wimp, Margaret the Cow or such. Then they began to number them, like farm stock.

It is not compulsory for a monarch to be known by his or her given first name. Usually with royal types they have several to choose from. Queen Elizabeth’s own father chose to be George VI even though George was the last of his many names and he was Albert or Bertie before his coronation. Elizabeth might have chosen to be Queen Alexandra or Queen Mary (both her names.) Mary would was been an interesting choice, and legitimate since she was becoming the monarch of a union formed only since 1707. If it is, as was stated then, the UK was a successor state to England then equally the UK is a successor state to Scotland. But that was/is assuming the UK is an equal union and nobody but a dissembler would say it has ever been that. It was most definitely not regarded this way in London, where it mattered.

In the event Elizabeth Windsor – now there’s another example of changing identities for the House of Windsor and other similar wings of the family took their name from royal castles when their own names became too embarrassingly German during war with Germany.  So Saxe Coburg Gotha was dispensed with in favour of Windsor. It could so easily have been the House of Balmoral. But wasn’t. It’s an English/Scottish thing. Again.

As I was saying, in the event Princess Elizabeth and parliament decided she should present herself as a successor to Elizabeth Tudor of England – which she isn’t. Okay, let’s stop there for a minute. Elizabeth of England had no children. The English line of Tudors therefore died out with her. However, in that way that royals are inter-bred she is kind of related, wait for it, through the Scottish House of Stuart. So, no direct link with Elizabeth of the rotten teeth. Cut to the chase, Lena. The Tudors line ran dry. The Stuarts in the form of Mary Queen of Scot’s son, James VI, took up the English as well as the Scottish throne – Scotland and England were separate nations in 1603. A bit of cut and pasting heads and the Stuarts were replaced by the German cousins, the Hanovers – and hey presto we have the Saxe Coburg and Gotha dynasty that was renamed, Windsor. Hope that’s clear.

It won’t have escaped the notice of those of you paying attention that James VI is never referred to by the big 6 in England but the wee I since England had never had a King James previously. Sounding familiar? Rules are there to be broken, as they say in Westminster. Talking of Westminster the debates over the royal name chuntered on.

3 March 1953 –

After the passage of all this various legislation through the Parliaments of the Commonwealth the Queen will be as much the Queen of India and of Ceylon as she is of England or of the United Kingdom,” said Gordon Walker, Labour MP.

His conflation of England with the UK did not go unnoticed. Walker, continued

I think one is still entitled to talk about the “Queen’s English” and the “Queen of England.”

Labour MP, John Rankin, representing Glasgow, wanted to know who advised the choice of title pointing out it was incorrect in reference to Ireland and equally wrong in its reference to Scotland,

We in Scotland have always recognised the English as a very kindly and generous people” to which M. McGovern of Glasgow Shettleston piped up, “Who circulated that?”

Rankin ignored the comment. Referring to the man who was the accepted authority on all things coronation, Lawrence Tanner, Keeper of Muniments and Library, Westminster Abbey, who described the new queen as Queen Elizabeth II the sixth Queen Regnant of England. Rankin said this was

phrase that gives offence to many people in Scotland … where does Scotland come in? Does it mean that she is not Queen Elizabeth II of Scotland? If so then what is the position of Scotland in regard the proposed style and title?

The right honourable Gentleman the Prime Minister, dealing with the Coronation Oath, in a statement to the House on 25^th February, said that the change to which he was referring was introduced “as a result of the act of Union with Scotland. Then he went on to point out that in the Oath Scottish religion was preserved as a right guaranteed under the Act of Union. But the right hon. Gentleman did not tell the whole story. There were more than Scottish religious rights defended as the result of the Act of Union. As a result of that Act, Scotland and England ceased to be independent countries. The Act of Union was not a merging of Scot-land into England. We are not a satellite of England. I am no Nationalist – I want to make that perfectly clear – but the Act of Union did away with England and Scotland as independent units. It substituted a new name, a new flag and a new Great Seal.

These are the things which have been consistently ignored, not merely in the attitude of England – and I forgive them for that – but time and again in this House. People look on us as taking a rather narrow attitude, but our attitude is defended by a treaty which established that Act of Union between two equals, not between one who was dependent and another who was a great Power.

Welsh member, Cledwyn Hughes, for Anglesey, reminded him there were three great nations in the Union.

It became clear that little consultation had taken place with any of the three other members of the Union and all consideration of the event was based solely on what suited England and conformed to English history and heritage or a cobbled-up version of that.  

A.C. Manuel, MP for Central Ayrshire –

At election time, the Prime Minister always likes to go to Scotland …to parade at huge meetings in big football stadiums…give pledges…he doesn’t appear to have consulted on this.

The second reading of the Bill took place on 11 March. Viscount Swinton prattled on about how inclusive the monarchy was and how it was based on what was contained in Bagehot’s English Constitution. The tunnel vision was and still is, stark.

There was ridicule over Scots getting hot under the collar about the royal title from people who openly admitted they knew little about Scottish history.

“Lawlessness and violence” that greeted the appearance of pillar boxes bearing ER II in Scotland was condemned. Representing the Scottish National Party’s view was Lord Saltoun though he was not a member. He explained that people in Scotland were angry at the country continued in being sidelined and not taken as an equal partner in the Union. He suggested that when Prince Charles (then a baby) came to reign he could choose a Scottish title such as David III or Robert IV, to demonstrate the UK was an equal union.   

On the 15^th April Commons debate on Royal Style and Title, Lieut.-Colonel Elliot asked the Prime Minister whether,

. . . in advising the Sovereign to assume the title of Elizabeth II, he took into consideration the desirability of adopting the principle of using whichever numeral in the English or Scottish lines of Kings and Queens happens to be the higher.”

Notice what he did there? The principle he referred to had never taken Scottish monarchs into account – didn’t happen with James VI then I (by which he is universally known) and with Edward VII it was never contemplated he would be known as Edward I of the UK. Westminster’s love of tradition was/is its love of English tradition. It can’t handle unions because of something it calls the importance of its sovereignty. England doesn’t do compromise. Don’t mention the EU and Brexit.

The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was quick to share out responsibility for this obvious stitch up, with the Accession Council. The Accession Council is a group comprising privy counsellors, members of the Lords, the Lord Mayor of London, aldermen of the City of London, high commissioners of Commonwealth realms and assorted civil servants – top heavy with south east England interests. Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland – less so. This was their speel back in the day –

WE, therefore, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of this Realm, being here assisted with these His late Majesty’s Privy Council, with representatives of other Members of the Commonwealth, with other Principal Gentlemen of Quality, with the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Citizens of London, do now hereby with one voice and Consent of Tongue and Heart publish and proclaim that the High and Mighty Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary is now, by the death of our late Sovereign of happy memory, become Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of this Realm and of all Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, to whom Her lieges do acknowledge all Faith and constant Obedience with hearty and humble Affection, beseeching God by whom Kings and Queens do reign, to bless the Royal Princess Elizabeth the Second with long and happy Years to reign over us.

There was unease among many Scots at having a right royal rug pulled out from under them. Churchill (despised by much of Scotland for very good reasons and the feeling probably mutual) toyed with Scots when he suggested that a future monarch might choose a regnal number that represented past Scottish monarchs, such as a Robert.  

. . . thereby emphasising that our Royal Family traces its descent through the English royal line from William the Conqueror and beyond, and through the Scottish Royal line from Robert the Bruce and Malcolm Canmore and still further back.

Still further back! All those references to tracing monarchs back to 1066 England and all that is just an arbitrary stab into the past. It is meaningless gibberish in terms of tradition. Why not go back to the 10^th  or the 9^th century? Why the reference to the Norman Conquest? Why not a reference to the great Kenneth MacAlpin? We know why – a) it was likely Churchill, schooled in ancient and European histories knew next to nothing about Scotland and b) MacAlpin wasn’t English. Of course neither was William the Conqueror but back then people arriving in boats from France were able to settle in England, especially when equipped with a mighty bow and plenty of arrows. It’s pretty hilarious that accepted English constitutional rigmarolling stems from a French takeover of the land previously run by Denmark, Norway and rump England? Plenty shared sovereignty back then.

Churchill was pressed to to formalise his remark about considering Scottish monarchs in the future but he declined to have any such policy written down because it was all just so much hot air. He was at it. What about the difficulties in issuing Scottish currency given this was the first Elizabeth of Scotland? he was asked. Nothing.

As usual Wales was omitted from the conversation. A Welsh MP, Gower, piped up,

. . . what course will be followed if a future British monarch should bear the name Llewellyn?”

The PM prevaricated. As he did on many concerns of the union of equals.

Sir William Darling, MP for South Edinburgh, handed into the Commons police what looked like a bomb but was a machine gun cartridge sent to him by someone from Glasgow in response to a speech he made in support of the title Queen Elizabeth II. A Darling doesn’t change its spots.

Nobody listened to Scottish or Welsh objections over the monarch’s title but irritation over the high-handed behaviour of the Westminster clique has never faded which might help explain the greater support for republicanism in Scotland and Wales than in England. Will Charlie do a Robert? We’ll soon know. Oh, and the Queen got to keep her choice of title but the ER II post boxes got the heave-ho out of Scotland to be replaced by ones bearing the Scottish Crown. They tried it on again with an ER II post box in Dunoon in 2018. Still at it.

Let us end with a song, once very popular in Scottish folksong circles.

The Scottish Breakaway (Coronation Coronach)

_{Chorus:
Nae Liz the Twa, nae Lilibet the One
Nae Liz will ever dae
We’ll mak’ oor land Republican
In a Scottish breakaway}

_{Noo Scotland hasnae got a King
And she hasnae got a Queen
How can ye hae the Second Liz
When the First yin’s never been}

_{Her man he’s cried the Duke o’ Edinburgh
He’s wan o’ the kiltie Greeks
Och dinnae blaw ma kilt awa’
For it’s Lizzie wears the breeks}

_{He’s a handsome man and he looks like Don Juan
He’s beloved by the weaker sex
But it disnae really matter at a’
‘Cause it’s Lizzie that signs the cheques}

_{Noo her sister Meg’s got a bonny pair o’ legs
But she didnae want a German or a Greek
Poor aul’ Peter was her choice but he didnae suit the boys
So they sellt him up the creek}

_{But Meg was fly an’ she beat them by an’ by
Wi’ Tony hyphenated Armstrong
Behind the pomp and play the question o’ the day
Wis, Who did Suzie Wong}

_{Sae here’s tae the lion, the bonnie rampant lion,
An’ a lang streitch tae his paw
Gie a Hampden roar an’ it’s oot the door
Ta-ta tae Chairlie’s maw}

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillar_Box_War

Books on a shelf: a random miscellany blog number 6 – Facts, facts, big balloon, hard times, Ibn Khaldun to Charles Dickens

Books on a shelf Week 6

Hullo again. I have four books for you this time around. Next up along the shelf is Yves Lacoste’s Ibn Khaldun: The birth of History and The Past of the Third World.

Ibn Khaldun was an eminent Arab historian born into a wealthy Andalusian family in Tunis in 1332. He died in Cairo in 1406 and between these two dates he was an eminent diplomat, a distinguished soldier during a period of near-incessant wars and one of the greatest thinkers the world has ever known. Never heard of him? You’re not alone. We in the west inhabit a strange cocoon existence blissfully ignorant of so much that is important in terms of people, events and inventions outside of our cocoon – assuming whoever is out there simply isn’t as smart as us.

Who hasn’t heard of sociology – the study of society? No-one reading this, I would guess. And the person behind sociology was? … the French philosopher Comte is frequently named as the mind behind the social science but while he never used the term, sociology, it was the diplomat and soldier, Khaldun, whose work on civilisation and economics who created the groundwork for sociology a long time before Comte.

It has also been said of Ibn Khaldun that he was the father of History with a capital H. While his interests were mainly confined to North Africa his influence extended way beyond there. And in any case North Africa even during Khaldun’s time was no backwater but an area where extensive trading took place that –

… stretched from the Mediterranean coast to India, China and Japan and which also took in the eastern coasts of Africa and the Western Sudan.

Christian merchants met the Maghrebian traders who brought gold across the Sahara from the Sudan.”

I should mention the author of this book on Khaldun, Yves Lacoste, a French Moroccan geographer and geopolitician. He attracted criticism from the USA for calling out its bombing campaigns intended to cause widespread flooding with subsequent civilian deaths during the Vietnam War. In this book he settles some myths about Arab invasions of the Maghreb (northwest Africa) which emerged through historians’ misreading of Khaldun’s works.  

Such was Khaldun’s reputation that Tamerlane, the fearsome 14^th century Turco-Mongol nomadic conqueror and emperor, asked him to become his historiographer and adviser.

In the 14^th century the greatest political entity in the world stretched from the Danube to Annam. It was made up of the various Mongol principalities that had emerged from the empire forged a century earlier by Ghenghis Khan.”

Khaldun’s adopted Egypt enjoyed great prosperity from its pivotal role in the mercantile economy that went along with widespread trade between Asia and Europe. It also had a highly productive agricultural sector.  

… the Ottoman Turks drove Byzantines and crusaders out of Asia Minor and invaded Thrace, Serbia and Bulgaria.”

We can watch that happening in Netflix’s Resurrection – Ertugrul in real-time – or so it seems.

Noyan the Mongol leader and Ertugrul the Turkish bey

The Balkans remained under Turkish rule for 400 years. A tumultuous period of great political rivalries and frequent wars to establish political states – the Mongols driven out of China by the Ming dynasty which lasted into the 17^th century; in India Mongols frequently battled Turkish Muslims and Hindus; Seljukian Turks resisted repeated onslaught from the Crusaders (Mongols killed one Caliph by rolling him up in a rug and riding their horses over him for they feared if they simply bludgeoned him to death and his blood touched the earth it would be offended.)

Hard Times. I could go on. Brutal and fascinating this period certainly is. And unfamiliar to many of us. And you’ll note I confined myself to history, not sociology. And while I might dip into the book again I’m more than content to pick up my Turkish history from Resurrection – Ertugrul.

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Did I mention Hard Times? Hang on in there for first up is Charles Dickens’ The Uncommercial Traveller, The Lamplighter to be read at Dusk, Sunday under three Heads, The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.

Opening this fine illustrated copy from 1906 I learn it contains a collection of literary sketches and reminiscences written by Dickens between 1860 and 1861, initially for his journal, All the Year Round. They comprise the writer’s impressions of life as found on his travels locally and internationally. Here was a man with itchy feet who was constantly on the road. It opens with a hint of mystery over who the person is that is being described. It is, of course, Dickens himself.

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Portsmouth. During his boyhood he came to know poverty and suffering; famously his father was jailed for debt when Dickens was twelve and the child taken out of school and sent to work at a boot-blacking factory to contribute to the family’s income. The privations suffered by his own family made him sensitive to that of others – and there were plenty others in Britain in the nineteenth century.

That said and however magnificent a writer Dickens was, and he was, his works express many of the prejudices of his time. There are racist asides and assumptions that grate with today’s readers (vast majority of) as well as much that is acutely observed and pertinent. I don’t dismiss or excuse his racism on grounds that British society was so steeped in it when Dickens was alive for not everyone then was racist so he is responsible for his own bigotry but neither will I reproduce passages that I regard as offensive to all good people.

I will quote the first few lines of the book –

Allow me to introduce myself – first negatively.

No landlord is my friend and brother, no chambermaid loves me, no waiter worships me, no boots admires and envies me. No round of beef or tongue or ham is expressly cooked for me, no pigeon pie is especially made for me, no hotel-advertisement is personally addressed to me — I am both a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on the road.”

Dickens visits a workhouse in London’s east end where he encounters –

… two old ladies in a condition of feeble dignity, which was surely the very last and lowest reduction of self-complacency to be found in this wonderful humanity of ours. They were evidently jealous of each other, and passed their whole time (as some people do, whose fires are not grated) in mentally disparaging each other, and contemptuously watching their neighbours. …they would fly at one another’s caps”

There he finds a young woman also incarcerated who is evidently depressed and who will never mix with outside society. Who will never be someone –

…who is courted, and caressed, and loved, and has a husband, and bears children, and lives in a home, and who never knows what it is to have this lashing and tearing coming upon her?”

There were many babies here, and more than one handsome young mother. There were ugly young mothers also, and sullen young mothers, and callous young mothers.”

He saw people who were forced to pick oakum.  Picking oakum involved inmates of workhouses (or prisons) splitting heavy tarry ropes, the sort used onboard wooden ships, to reclaim the oakum by hitting each strand with a heavy mallet. The oakum was then sold for caulking wooden ships, timber buildings, plumbing and so on.  

At Liverpool docks Dickens encountered Poor Mercantile Jack and the celebrated entertainer

Mr Banjo Bones, looking very hideous with his blackened face and limp sugar-loaf hat; beside him, sipping rum-and-water, Mrs Banjo Bones …”

Let’s move on.

Time and his wife from The Uncommercial Traveller

*

Hard Times is set in the fictional Coketown in the north of England. This is a town where everyone is expected to work – everyone that isn’t rich that is – so that children must do their bit to add a few pennies to the abysmally low family incomes of the time. It’s not pretty and it’s not kind. This is brutal England where the very lifeblood and breath of the poor is sucked out for profit. There’s Josiah Bounderby – bumptious and lying scoundrel quick to take advantage of the vulnerable. And Gradgrind – facts, facts, Gradgrind. Hard Times – what it says on the cover is what we get.

The novel opens with my favourite Dicken’s lines that reflect the dullest of minds –

Now, what I want is, Facts.  Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.  Facts alone are wanted in life.  Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.  You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.  This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children.  Stick to Facts, sir!’

The speaker is Gradgrind the school board superintendent.

In this life we want nothing but facts, sir. Nothing but facts!”

Then there is Bounderby –

A man made out of a coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him. A man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes open, and lift his eyebrows up. A man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty. A man who was the Bully of humility.”

Tucked inside at page 51!! I found a note from my dentist – three dentists and three addresses ago, in 1994. It’s an actual written letter, begads, when patients were written to and not texted. On the back, because I don’t believe in wastage, is a phone number for Port Meirion that I can only think had something to do with arranging a visit there during my one and only Welsh holiday. You know the place where that weird TV series, The Prisoner starring Patrick McGoohan and a muckle white balloon, was set. Nowadays we employ a muckle white balloon as prime minister. And because I really don’t believe in waste on the paper is a list, quite a long list for fruit and veg. It’s so long I suspect it covered two weeks – or two months? and directions to the holding off the South Deeside Road where the organic veg box scheme was run from. And then the note became a bookmark.

The Dickens Picture Book says it all on the volume’s spine. Inside are 466 pages stuffed with 600 black and white illustrations from many familiar Dickens’ stories and characters. The author, J. A. Hammerton, a Scot, liked to create bold brushstroke narratives for publication – histories and geographies and so on. There’s also lots to read in it about all things Dickens – on the man, himself and his attitude towards his illustrators, the most famous, probably, being Boz, as well as the low-down on many Dickens’ novels.

Hammerton collaborated with Arthur Mee in producing the Children’s Encyclopedia early in the 20th century and he was behind the big-selling Harmsworth’s Universal Encyclopedia.

Harry Furniss was a hugely successful illustrator and caricaturist. Born to a Scottish mother and English father in Ireland he regarded himself as English. He contributed to the Illustrated London News, The Graphic and Punch as well as illustrating books for some of the 19th century’s major British writers, Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

Time, then, to draw this blog to a close. We’re getting there – to the end of the shelf. A couple of weeks should do it. A couple of weeks and how many more cases of government corruption? Lots and lots, I expect.What would Dickens have made of today’s Westminster bunch? A great deal – puncturing pomposity, exposing hypocrisy and sheer evil, I expect. He would have relished getting his pen stuck into them – today’s Bounderbys and Gradgrinds.

Take care till next time.

Books on a shelf: a random miscellany blog number 5 – Men-Lizards, Serge and Men in Prison and pathetic women

Books on a shelf Week 5

Last time I left you to carry on reading H. G. Wells’ Kipps. Finished it. Life teaches Kipps some hard lessons, as might be expected of an uncultured ‘little person’ finding fortune smiling down on him, if only briefly. Mrs Kipps’ socialist brother and his wife named their child Master Walt Whitman Pornick who is

a cheerful young gentleman of one and a half, who was given a spoon to hammer on the table with to keep him quiet…

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I really don’t know the reason why but so many books on this shelf have some association with the 1940s – the majority are second-hand but that can’t explain it. Possibly there is no explanation beyond coincidence for the house is choc-a-block with books as I repeatedly explain and they surely can’t all fall into this category – I know they don’t.

First published in Prague in 1936 Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts is a satire on the ruthless exploitation of colonies by European imperial powers. As well as historical examples Čapek was living through a time when this was still very much to the fore – European countries pillaging resources of militarily weaker nations and exploiting native populations for cheap labour. Czechoslovakia was threatened by German chauvinistic nationalism and their was not dissimilar behaviour by Britain (England) and France so the author has plenty material to hand to work from. In War with the Newts he exposes and ridicules the crushing ruthlessness of colonialism and needless to say his novel fell foul of Nazi censorship.

Captain van Toch recognises the value in exploiting Sumatra’s giant newts – for they are intelligent and skilful creatures. All goes to plan for a time but the plan has a flaw – the very intelligence that attracted him to exploit the newts means they are capable of out-smarting  their human enslavers. Like all the best exploited creatures – they rise up against their tyrants.

War with the Newts has a complex and innovative structure and is divided into three books. Book one examines the ‘Strange Behaviour of Captain van Toch’ – a man who casts a cynical eye over his fellow humans – or are they human? This Dutch ship’s captain is savagely racist and xenophobic. When informed the native Bataks are devils, Toch retorts –  

Man, there aren’t any devils. And if there were, they would look like Europeans. That thing must have been some kind of fish or something.

Eventually we discover more about the Men-Lizards from the Pacific Ocean through scientific study and reports written about them which, it is claimed, will not be read by many outside the scientific elite. A case is made for exploiting the newt population similar to all justification used by imperial powers. First overpower through armed superiority then denigrate the native population to create an impression of providing benefits instead of taking advantage of them. The pseudo-science used to justify capitalising on the newts makes up the second book within the novel. The final book introduces the war of the title.

A cleverly constructed piece of fiction that is not so far-fetched as the title may suggest for it is really about European powers in the 1920s and 1930s riven by racism, social divisions and ambitious militarism.  

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Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler is short; a novella. Schnitzler died in 1931, five years before War with the Newts was published. Born in Austria in 1862, Schnitzler’s family name was Zimmermann (as in Bob Dylan’s family name.) He was an author-dramatist who gained a reputation for his openly sexual works – which impressed fellow-Austrian, the psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. The explicit nature of his writing led to accusations of him being a pornographer – this was certainly the opinion of another fellow-compatriot, Adolf Hitler, who as Germany’s chancellor, dismissed Schnitzler’s books as Jewish filth (not Austrian filth) banned and had them burned.

Dream Story aka Rhapsody was written in 1926. The protagonist, Dr Fridolin, attempts to deal with his wife’s sexual fantasies about another man while he puts himself about a bit. If this sounds familiar it may be because Stanley Kubrick’s film, Eyes Wide Shut, is based on the novella. I haven’t seen the film but understand that Nicole Kidman plays the doctor’s wife as a woman confident of her own sexuality unlike Albertine in the novella who is a bit of an innocent in these matters – impassive as her husband makes love to her – well, has sex with her. You can see how this ties in with Freud’s view of women; women were inferior in all ways to men and men were anatomically superior to women inducing their penis envy. In their dreams.  

At first she gently raised her hand as if to prevent him, but he seized it and held it in his own, both questioning her and pleading with her as he looked up, so she nodded her consent and he began.

She lay there quietly, her hands behind her neck, and remained silent a long time after Fridolin had finished.

It makes for uncomfortable reading for today’s women to be confronted by such obvious misogyny. Women now, as then surely, were not the vulnerable submissive creatures Schnitzler and Freud fantasised about – their women docile as a means to an end. Will I read all 98 ½ pages of the book? I doubt it.

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Victor Serge’s Conquered City is one of a trilogy of novels that includes, Men In Prison and Birth of Our Power. George Orwell described Serge’s writing as –

A special class of literature that has arisen out of the European political struggle …

Serge’s biographer, Susan Weissman, Professor Politics at Saint Mary’s College of California wrote of him –

Victor Serge is one of the most compelling figures to have emerged from the history of the Soviet Union. A lucid observer and a great writer, his is the story of a course set on hope, a pursuit of truth, dignity and human justice set against some of the most momentous events of the twentieth century.

Forty years before Alexander Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the USSR because his writing was critical of the state, Serge was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and deported. He travelled to Brussels (where he was born to Russian émigrés who fled Tsarist Russia) then to France. Forever hounded by the communist state he refused to stop criticising it and was constantly slandered as a result. From one persecution to another he also fled the Nazis and his final years were spent in Mexico where he died in 1947 at the age of just 56.

As Victor Livovich Kibalchich he left Brussels for France where as a youth he joined a French anarchist organisation and edited its magazine. He escaped the guillotine in 1912, unlike three of his comrades, but was jailed for five years for his political activities. Briefly in Spain on his release from jail he arrived in the newly established Soviet Union in 1919 where he became acquainted with the American journalist and communist, John Reed. Reed covered the October Revolution in Petrograd (later Leningrad and now St Petersburg) and wrote the book Ten Days That Shook the World. He died in 1920 of typhus, unable to get medicine because of a blockade against the Bolshevik government. He was thirty-two.

Conquered City is set during the civil war, the Terror that followed the Russian Revolution – terror inflicted by both Reds and Whites in 1919-20. Set in Petrograd in 1919 the story opens on a chilly night with frost clinging to all the familiar statuary and elegant buildings in that city, beautifully described. This is a political novel – how could it not be? – set when and where it is but it is no dour piece of writing. Far from it.  

A little girl in a red beret still went every morning to the ballet school to learn the arts of toe dancing and leaping. The hurricane will pass, no? but the dance will remain; and the child has talent. When the weather permitted, she would read Anderson’s fairy tales on the way, wondering why no magic carpet ever appeared over the bleak house tops. She also read, and carefully repeated when she got home, the penciled notices posted at the Communal Store; “The Third Category will receive two herrings for coupon No. 23 on the ration card …” How sad life is without flying carpets!

There is a lecturer whose monotone voice “fell like a fine rain” and who “was afraid of himself and searched the audience for some enemy face in order to surrender to it.”

I am now reading the entire novel.

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Our copy of Birth of Our Power has the feel of a book never opened, far less read, though my other half assures me he has read all three. Let’s take a peek at book two.

As with Conquered City, Birth of Our Power is set during revolutionary upheaval not only in Russia but also in France and Spain and not during the better-known Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 but the brutal period of the barbarous Great War when revolution broke out in Russia and Spain.

Spain entered the twentieth century, after its stunning defeat by the United States in 1898, as a backward, corrupt, priest – and soldier -ridden monarchy.

Translator, Richard Greeman, New York, 1966.

Recent events in Catalonia have demonstrated Spain continues in that tradition of cruel repression of its citizens which can be traced as far back as the Inquisitions that began in the 15^th century. Serge’s hope was that eventually Spaniards might be freed from the iron clad fists of governments that tortured and murdered so many of them, if not in the period in which the novel was set then in the near future. I feel he would be sorely disappointed with how that country has turned out.  

The guardia civilis went forth on horseback, in rectangular formations, black on black horses, shoulders square under their black capes, towering over the crowd with their tricornered hats and their stiff heads, as impassable as painted wooden figures. Their vigilant eyes searched into the corners of alleys, into dark doorways, into tightly pressed groups, into anything that might hide deadly aggression, bullet or bomb, the sudden great stride of death over frightened heads towards the tense horsemen riding towards their fate. Theirs, ours!

The Spanish revolt of 1917 ran out of steam but in Russia revolution succeeded, though at a terrible price.

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Finally, Men in Prison – it is 1914 – a political activist has been sentenced to a term in prison where brutality mirrors the savagery of outside society.

I know of no other writer with whom Serge can be usefully compared … The truth for Serge was something to be undergone.

John Berger, art critic, poet, painter.

Though he shared many of their aims, Serge was always wary of the Bolsheviks – of their authoritarianism and openly criticised their abuses. He had friends who suffered terribly under the pitiless hand of the Cheka (the Bolsheviks’ political police) while Serge, himself, was imprisoned, deported and constantly slandered by the Soviet state.

Of his novel, Men in Prison, Serge wrote –

Everything in this book is fictional and everything is true.

Chapters come thick and fast: The Lockup —Yet Life Goes On —Capital Punishment —The Will To Live —The Years —Dying — Surviving —More Deaths —About To Be Discharged —

Three gray straw mattresses on crude cots – gray with filth, spattered with all sorts of stains, stinking of dust, old straw, sleeping animality –The mattresses and the drinking cup are apparently never cleaned. After the first hour, I wanted a drink. I was clumsy enough to shake the jug, and a greenish slime rose to the surface where wisps of straw, odd leaves, hair, bits of threat, and a broken match were floating.

Serge used his own prison experiences to paint his vivid descriptions of life in Soviet jails. He writes so well but the material is by its nature harrowing to read.

This blog post should have been up days ago but one or two passages from Serge’s books stuck in my head though unfortunately not sufficiently to quote him and, of course, I didn’t write them down at the time of reading. There was a comment about hope which struck me as the sort of clever statement I fancied pinching to use on social media. Again, I failed and now am doubting the remark was Serge’s at all. Note to self – always write down references and don’t chuck the scrap of paper into the recycling before reading it again.

Finally on Serge a word about his translator, the American Marxist, Richard Greeman, now 81, whose whole life has been spent in left politics as a writer, lecturer and, of course, translator. He was befriended by Serge’s son, the painter Vlady, an encounter that led to him translating Serge’s novels, including this trilogy.

Finally, finally – I’ve become so fascinated with Serge during this preliminary encounter with him and a his writings that once I finish Conquered City I intend reading Susan Weissman’s biography of the man. People who are brave enough to stand up to rotten regimes deserve attention.

Till next time, stay safe.