The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire

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Newsinger can as little account for Labour’s absolute commitment to defending the colonial empire in 1945-51 as he can for its earlier opposition to Irish self-determination. Although he cites the fabulous profits the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company made in this post-war period (p165), he misses out Bevin’s key concern when he quotes the Labour Foreign Secretary as saying that ‘the Middle East was an area of “cardinal importance...second only to the United Kingdom itself”’ (p167). Let Bevin himself explain: The routine brutality of colonial rule is brought out in David Smiley’s account of his experiences as a young officer in Palestine: ‘The first man was seized by two Arab policemen and held upside down while his feet were placed between a rifle and its sling. He was then kept in this position while policemen took it in turns to beat the soles of his feet with a leather belt. The second man talked after the the application of a lighted cigarette to his testicles, but the third seemed to be the leader and was more truculent. In a flash the Arab segeant flew at him and hit him in the face until both his eyes were closed, blood flowing, and a number of teeth were spewed out onto the floor.’ The EU model represents a rejig of traditional notions of separation of powers – a political tradition that is old an ancient, from the Spartan Dyarchy to the Roman Republic (and are prevalent in other political cultures around the world). Brexit too is a bourach. The northern English looking at their potholed roads and smashed high streets, or good trains that go south to London and shite trains that run East-West are rightly angry and nostalgic for a 60s, 70s and 80s when it wasn’t like this.

Nairn’s analysis of the history of Ireland, north and south, remains pertinent, but transformed. A northern industrial society organised in defence of “the great industrial triangle of the Mersey, the Clyde and the Lagan” versus an agricultural society trying to modernise the old administrative city-state of Dublin. On 7 March 1951 the pro-British prime minister General Ali Razmara was assassinated to great popular delight. Confronted with a militant nationalist movement and fearful for his throne, the Shah reluctantly bowed to popular pressure and on April 29 appointed Mussadiq as prime minister. On 1 May 1951 Mussadiq signed a bill nationalising the oil industry. The rebel leader Nazir Khan was hanged. He was surrounded by “soldiers who were stuffing him with pork . . . well flogged and his person exposed, which he fought against manfully. He died game . . . One of the most remarkable sights I ever in my life beheld: no less than 20 men all hanging naked on one tree . . . A number of women killed while clinging to and trying to hide their delinquent husbands. Other women died when they refused to leave a house that was set on fire.” Close your eyes and you might believe Hugh MacDiarmid was writing of the Brexiteers, the British nationalists: From 1938 into 1939 the Great Rebellion was relentlessly ground down. Villages were bombed. One RAF squadron alone dropped 768 20lb and 29 112lb bombs and fired over 62,000 rounds in operations against rebel targets. Thousands of Palestinians were interned without trial, harsh collective punishments were imposed on whole communities, routine use was made of Arab hostages as human shields, and ID cards were introduced.The American political system, however reluctantly and belatedly, called Nixon to account. The British political system has signally failed with regard to Blair. The invasion of Iraq began on March 2003. Its catastrophic consequences for the Middle East have been well documented. Written constitutions can be easily consulted and appealed to. They’re also difficult to tamper with. They set clear limits on the powers of the respective offices of government. However, they can also be difficult to amend. They can enshrine inequalities in their language and/or the cultural presuppositions on which their articles depend. Palestine: The Palestinian Arabs, Christian and Muslim, despite being an overwhelming majority of the population (93%), found themselves relegated to the status of ‘existing non-Jewish communities,’ and their civil rights did not include being consulted about their country being given away. One other confusing thing for me is can you have an unwritten constitution? You ether have one which by definition must be written down to be of any use, or you don’t. The UK has no constitution just a series of precedents that are drawn on to (supposedly) help consistency and fairness.

Hoveman, Rob (20 August 2003). "Socialist Workers Party: For "reliable comrades" only". Weekly Worker. No.492 . Retrieved 26 May 2018. The Mau Mau revolt did not extend to the whole of Kenya. It was largely confined to the Kikuyu, Embru and Meru, and geographically restricted to the Central Province. Nevertheless, the revolutionary cause had the support of the overwhelming majority of the Kikuyu. The simple reason for this was that the Labour government was determined to incrase the exploitation of Malaya. Malayan rubber was the British Empire’s biggest dollar earner, bringing in 200 million dollars. By 1950 Malayan tin and rubber were earning 350 million dollars. I think you are confused about the nature of codified constitutions, which generally form important restraints on executive, legislative and judicial powers, so that ad hoc laws cannot legally be passed that infringe the rights, liberties, protections and duties which the Constitution species, typically in clear and concise language that can often straightforwardly be used in the courts of law and public opinion. It was of course Europe as well as the UN which helped establish such constraints in the UK, but after Brexit these are being broken and the hounds of hell released.Another officer wrote of “Hundreds of sepoys dead or dying, many on fire . . .a suffocating, burning, smouldering mass.” He saw 64 prisoners lined up and ‘bayoneted.” Queen Victoria was, of course, absolutely delighted. Gladstone benefited financially from the invasion of Egypt. He had a substantial investment in the Egyptian debt and this appreciated in value once the country had been occupied.

In the December 1964 general election the PPP increased its share of the vote. But a combination of proportional representation, massive American financial subsidies and electoral fraud brought the US client Forbes Burnham to power. Forbes Burnham subsequently maintained himself in power by corruption, electroal fraud on a massive scale, gangster violence and the encouragement of race hatred.Sudan, Battle of Omdurman, September 1898: On this occasion the Sudanese conveniently launched a frontal assault on the invading army and were massacred in a display of overwhelming firepower. Modern rifles, machine guns and artillery destroyed the Sudanese army before it even got close enough to the British to begin inflicting casualties. One NCO described the slaughter as ‘dreadful.’ The constitution of a state is just the way in which it’s organised. This can be codified (‘written’) or not (‘unwritten’). The organisation of nearly all modern states is codified; only those of Israel, New Zealand, and the UK is not. The UK constitution exists only as a loose and more or less indeterminate collection of conventions, customs, laws, precedents, and treaties. Climate movements must think beyond extraction and exploitation to start building a just future, say Sebastian Ordoñez Muñoz and Hamza Hamouchene Written largely as a response to the revisionists and apologists for empires whose writings attempted to sanitize the invasion of Iraq, the book remains essential reading, particularly so in this year of Jubilympics. John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Allen Lane, 2012), xi, 6–7.

Judith Brown and William Roger Louis, eds., The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).Republican John Mitchell: ‘How families, when all eaten up and no hope left, took their last look at the sun, built up their cottage doors, that none might see them die or her their groans, and were found weeks afterwards skeletons on their hearths. How every one of those years, ’46, ’47 and ’48, Ireland was exporting to England food to the value of 15 million pounds sterling.’ Today, as Kenyans take to the streets to protest their neoliberal government’s mishandling of Covid-19, we urge them to continue to rehabilitate the image of the Kimathi. We urge them to read Durrani’s text and re-learn about the Mau Mau’s radical claims for land redistribution, for more than ever the politics of the Mau Mau is needed again in Kenya.