My reaction to Keir Starmer stating ( as a response to a question by Douglas Alexander) that the British Empire was a “force for good in the world”, is the same as my reaction to him supporting Israel when it began to deny food, water and electricity to the population of Gaza –horror and disgust.
I am progressive but most would not regard me as particularly left wing. If you read my memoir, you’ll know that I’ve been self-employed most of my working life and started businesses, as did my brother Ray. I believe in free enterprise although NOT monopolies – like the madness of privatising water.
Keir Starmer will alienate potential Labour voters with that statement. Most of the black voters in this country have ancestors who were victims of the horrors of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Even today, in Australia, the legacy of the racism against and the genocide of the aboriginal people has consequences. I don’t describe myself as an expert on China but my lifelong interest in Chinese history and my research for my historical novel Brushstrokes in Time gives me an understanding of how the Chinese government and people feel about the colonial period. In the UK today, drug dealing is illegal and yet the British colonial government sent gunboats to China to enforce the opium trade on the people of China,who have never forgiven or forgotten the humiliation of the Opium Wars.
My husband was born in India and experienced Partition. Shashi Tharoor, the Indian MP and author is a polemicist but he has a point when he describes the empire in India as the Colonial Holocaust. More than 35 million Indians perished in various famines –the direct result of colonial policy. Indians were allowed to die while food was exported elsewhere in the Empire and Bengali farmers were forced to grow opium and not food. The Indian dead after the suppression of the first uprising in 1857 are not numbered. We partitioned India-drew a dividing line after only a few months of deliberation. The result was the biggest ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen in which millions died. The historian Will Durant called the Raj the greatest crime the world has ever seen.
Only 400 miles from the heart of Empire, two million Irish people died or emigrated because of the potato famine. The Imperial solution hard labour for a pittance.
We shouldn’t ignore the legacy of white supremacy that justified the Empire. In 1963, aged 18, I remember thinking it strange when Patrick Gordon Walker greeted Atam in a friendly manner but ignored me. When I read Marriage of Inconvenience, I understood – that is how he and his civil servants treated Ruth Williams. Sometimes women like me and Ruth were hated more than our husbands.
I am, however, not a polemicist so I believe there were some good legacies. The most surprising one is the English language. Many ex colonies appreciate it as means to connect with world. But a force for GOOD the Empire was NOT!
