The foreign secretary William Hague claims Britain needs to shed it’s guilt over the empire. It is no longer an issue, he said reclining on a plush leather chair while an African cleaner swept under his feet. The “old grudges” were dying out, he claimed, stabbing a pin into a Robert Mugabe doll.
I’d like to take Hague seriously, only he went on to claim that Britain was the “centre of the world”. Just like the old days when it ruled the waves, eh? It’s a long time since Britons thought they were at the centre of the world. Then maps were invented.
It’s easy to call for an end to “post colonial guilt” sitting in an opulent oak panelled office. In the same building where FCO officials gave orders to shoot the natives. And they didn’t feel any guilt either.
Hague was on Desert Island Disks recently. He said he was particularly fond of Arrested Development.
His other tunes were No Don’t Stop the Carnival, and YMCA. I could have recommended a good tune. Bob Marley’s Chase Them Crazy Baldhead Out of Town.
When Hague was leader of the Conservatives he said we had 24 hours to Save the Pound. Luckily within 24 hours someone stopped his special advisor visiting his hotel room.
Still, at least we should be grateful he didn’t turn up to the Notting Hill Carnival this year wearing shorts and a safari shirt. Never mind Kenya’s death camps for the Masai warriors, those fashion crimes are really something to feel guilty about.
As a citizen of England’s second oldest colony (after Wales), and arguably the one upon which the greatest amount of, and most irremediable, damage was visited at their sundry Majesties’ pleasures, I heartily concur.
A cetain type of person in England is never done clapping themselves on the back about the supposed wholly beneficial influence of the Empire on its former subject peoples. Those who remain unconviced of this self-serving and tendentious claptrap are characterised as ingrates and sore-heads, whose sense of hurt, loss and unresolved injustice can safely be labelled as “grudges”.
All very useful to Mr Hague, no doubt. However, if I may use an analogy – hearing one’s own confession, granting oneself absolution, and airily eschewing any form of penance, all without the least hint of contrition, is a sure sign, I think, of a limited personal political capacity, evidence for which in Hague’s case, abounds elsewhere.
Hague lives up to the Tory party tradition of “The Stupid Party”! What I want our politicos to do is stop looking back, and start doing something constructive about the future!
Where you’ve been, where you are now, and how you got there will suggest how you might get to where you need to go, with the application of ability and intelligence. Or, to put it another way, those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat its mistakes. Is Mr Hague in this category, one wonders.