Meddling officials to blame for floods
Let’s not take a lesson from US on slavery
THE NEW YORK Metropolitan Museum of Art is mounting a multi-gallery exhibition to underline the “exploitative” nature of the long-departed British Empire, on the grounds it profited from slavery.
Of all people, the Yankees have no room to talk. They abolished slavery 50 years after us and it took a vicious civil war to do it.
Moreover, after we had done it, we sent the Royal Navy into the Middle Passage to intercept foreign slave ships, board them and free the slaves, thus risking war. That was how Sierra Leone was founded.
For the record, we did more than that. Here are five examples.
We exported democracy worldwide. Not a single people or territory we ever took over and exploited practised democracy but that was what we left behind. Much of it was abolished shortly after we were gone. America’s black population had to whistle in the wind for it for a couple more centuries in the Deep South.
We preached Christianity worldwide. Unlike Islam we did not force conversion but we offered it. Many millions converted.Today Christians are being persecuted worldwide.
We built railways everywhere, where before there had been exhausting journeys on foot, donkey or camel. South America, India, Cape Town to Cairo – the list goes on and on. That interconnectivity brought eventual prosperity to millions, now billions.
We practised an incorrupt civil service and left behind that tradition. Today it is extremely rare to find a single surviving example.
We discovered the habit of drinking coffee and tea and of using cotton as a mass clothing fabric. Today entire economies flourish on coffee, tea and cotton.
In the American South the economy depended on cotton which we bought and turned into cloth, exported worldwide. And who harvested American cotton? Black slaves.
On balance, I shall resist the temptation to fly the Atlantic to see the MoMa’s exhibition.
And I doubt the Victoria and Albert Museum will mount an exhibition on what the Yankees did to the American Indians. But the word genocide would fit.
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AS OUR row with the EU leadership intensifies, after the Greek demand for the repatriation of the Elgin Marbles, France weighs in. Can they have back the body of the leader they rejected, Napoleon III. So far as I am concerned, by all means yes. With one proviso. Would they like to exhume and send back, at their expense, the close-to 50,000 British Tommies and fliers who died setting them free in 1944?
NO SECRET that this country has been experiencing rainfall of biblical proportions and that this has caused very widespread flooding of roads and towns, with consequent misery for everyone affected, many of whom are not even insured.
Historical statistics reveal we have had rains like this before. Yet I do not recall ever reading of such devastation. Letters reach me with a story that ought to become the subject of a rapid Government inquiry. It need not take for ever as most (under a civil servant or retired judge) do. An investigative reporter could wrap it up in six months, for possible action to be instigated by next year.
What the letter writers say, and there are several of them, is that it was not always so, until sweeping bureaucratic changes were made to our land management. Most of my correspondents were themselves workers for very local draining boards whose members knew their own local environment down to the last details.They were all adamant that if the flood plains, streams, sluices, rivers and overflows were drained and dredged during the summer months, they coped with the winter rains. Huge quantities of silt, sludge and weed were taken out and dumped so that the rainwater could run free to join the major estuaries and the sea.
Then Government handed much of the work over to the Environment Agency, another quango presided over at huge salary by (surprise me) a knight of the realm. New orders were issued. Drainage and dredging should stop – ostensibly to protect the wildlife – meaning the voles who burrow and nest in river banks. So the sludge, silt and weed built up.
When the truly torrential rains came the flood plains, streams, sluices and rivers could not cope. The voles have died – drowned in their nests. And for those living on the plains and near the riverbanks – utter misery. Two and two usually make four and it is never coincidental.