The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire Read Free Page A

campaign of “hearts and minds” (and anti-terrorist patrols by Gurkhas, native headhunters, and British troops) in Malaya. Britain defeats the murderous Mau-Mau cult before granting independence to Kenya. In 1982, Britain shows that imperial retreat has its limits by defeating Argentine aggression in the Falkland Islands.

    But before we do that, let’s imagine what life would be like today if the Empire were still largely intact; let’s think of the way things could have been.

Chapter 2

    MR. POTTER’S EMPIRE
    T ransport yourself to the flat of Algernon Braithwaite-Burke Potter in Knightsbridge SW3 London. Still dressed in his pajamas (another Hindi word), he has enjoyed a rather long night on the town. He has put the kettle on for tea and is stooping to pick up the post and the papers scattered on the floor just beneath the mail slot.
    At his home in the country he has help, but here in his London flat he is the consummate self-sufficient bachelor. He is used to making sacrifices and saying to himself: “There’s a war on, after all.” He isn’t quite sure where, but there is always a small war on somewhere—the price one pays for the benefits of the greater Pax Anglicana.
    Mr. Potter tosses the post aside on the breakfast table and unfolds the papers— The Times and The Telegraph , and out of noblesse oblige, to know what the lower orders are thinking or, more accurately, to know what page three girl they’re ogling, The Sun (which he does not receive in the country; he doesn’t want to scandalize the servants). He prefers his papers ironed to crisp folds in the morning, but without help he has to make do.
    The Telegraph holds pride of place. Let’s see: on the front page, British Palestine. How tiresome. It must have seemed awfully clever, no doubt, in 1945, when Winston came up with the wheeze of offering guaranteed jobs and free housing allotments for skilled laborers in uniform—who were
promised early release from the service—if they agreed to emigrate to “the New Jerusalem,” Palestine, which Churchill reorganized as a self-governing dominion. The offer was extended to coal miners in Wales, longshoremen in Liverpool, and low-wage workers in Scotland who were promised settlements on the sunny Mediterranean coast of Palestine (“live in the Holy Land while holidaying at the seaside”). In short order, there was an amazing exodus of some three million likely Labour voters—demobbed soldiers, colliery workers, and Glaswegian slum dwellers—who came off the voting rolls in Britain and put a Labour government in power in Jerusalem, a government pledged to nationalizing industries that Palestine did not yet have.
    By that bit of electoral legerdemain, wily Winston ensured a skin-of-the-teeth Conservative victory in 1945, foiled Labour’s plans to grant India independence, and stifled the development of socialism at home. But oh at what a cost! An endless parade of newspaper stories about Palestine grinding to a halt, with national strikes by Arab taxi drivers; or about skinheads refusing to attend the World Cup (to be played in Jerusalem) unless the authorities lifted the ban on alcohol and pork pies (“Let them eat falafel,” said Mordecai Gizzo, the chairman of the Palestinian Football Association); or about Zionists trying to annex the Gaza Strip out of the hands of admittedly frightful retirees from Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds. Who was it that said the British Empire was a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes? He certainly got that wrong! Dreadful.
    Oh dear, what else is going on? Let’s see, in Iraq, the Anglo-American authorities had arrested one Saddam Hussein, mob boss of the Baathist syndicate involved in narcotics, prostitution, and pornography. Fed up with his recidivism, they had turned him over to a local tribal council . . . and apparently the less said about that the better.
    In