Record set straight
THANKS are due to Joseph O’Neill (Viewpoints, September 17) for drawing attention to my letter.
I’m sorry however that my points seem to have been lost. Although he contended it was a summary of Britain’s role in world history, I think that is too complimentary, though as he says, we do ‘have a chance to learn from it’.
A moment’s reflection would suggest that conflict in the Middle East did not ‘begin with Britain’s decolonisation there after the Second World War’. Quite apart from the fact that colonisation as such (unlike French and Belgium) wasn’t our policy there (and much more limited in places like Rhodesia and Kenya), there’s the quandary of the Balfour Declaration, repeated Russian and Turkish expansionism and crusades, quite apart from ancient conflicts. Likewise I don’t believe we are to blame for the ‘entire legacy of slavery’, recent events in the USA suggest some see problems elsewhere.
And Wilberforce did have something to do with abolition, as indeed did his friend Thomas Clarkson who raised thousands of signatures in what is now Manchester Cathedral. But so did Black voices, so a vision of ‘our doing it for them’ is inaccurate.
Moreover it’s not exactly ‘the British people’ who maintain the injustices, crises and problems through ‘the shady world of business machinations, impoverished Colombian coal miners’ etc.
Most of us don’t know about it. But it is a system buttressed by power and law in our country that is largely responsible for what goes on over our heads and through boardrooms and the computers in our cities.
It’s because I am proud to be British, with a father who fought Nazism and was wounded doing so, I take exception to our country being besmirched by sleaze, bullying and injustices being practiced and hidden here.
Mr. O’Neill is right; It’s not all our fault and never has been. But there’s more than enough dirt to dig out. That’s why I support the Trade Justice Movement. People interested in these issues, which aren’t just history, might like to look them up on tjm.org.uk
Penny Schrivener, New Brunswick