Not to be out-done by Starmer’s display
of his imperialist credentials, one of the would-be leaders of the Tories went even
further yesterday by saying that
former colonies do not only not deserve any compensation for the exploitation
of their resources and the enslavement of their peoples, but they should
actually be grateful for having been colonised in the first place. Ever willing
to add comedy to arrogance, Sirjake added
that “they should be paying us”. Perhaps it isn’t completely surprising
that people who believe that taking a substantial economic hit in order to gain
the illusory ‘freedoms’ of Brexit should also believe that having their
resources and people systematically extracted and exploited is a small price to
pay for the delights of an English-based law system and the imposition of
Christian values.
The thing is, though, it’s not for ‘us’ to decide whether it
was a good bargain or not. The only people who can decide whether what they got
outweighs what was taken from them are the peoples who were colonised. It’s
possible, of course, that some of them really do believe that they got the best
end of the deal – one could argue that the earliest English colony of all,
Wales, contains plenty who think that there are net benefits from being ruled
from elsewhere. It is, however, clearly not the perception of most of the
former colonies, and no amount of criticising their ingratitude is going to
change that.
And even if it were to be true that, by some sudden strange
Damascene conversion, all the former colonies were to agree with the proposition
that colonisation had been a good thing, it doesn’t alter the fact that any
benefits from colonisation were more accidental than intentional. Colonisation
took place with the express intent of gaining access, by force, to resources,
and as a process, it made some of the colonisers very rich indeed. Much of the
wealth of the UK’s biggest cities came from the exploitation of colonial
possessions. It really doesn’t matter how enlightened some (but certainly not
all) of the colonisers were or whether the legacy they left was good or bad:
nothing can alter the underlying intention of accumulation of wealth by expropriation
of resources. The people seeking to rewrite history here are those who seek to
deny that basic truth.
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