We know what Putin is Like

In recent years it has been clear that Vladimir Putin seeks to return Russia to what he perceives as it’s glorious past whether that be the Soviet Union or the Empire of Peter the Great. We know the following about Putin:

• He believes that Ukraine is part of Russia
• He believes that the Baltic States should be part of Russia
• He is unhappy with former Soviet Union countries being part of the EU and NATO
• He murders and imprisons any formidable internal political opponents
• He organises the murder of Russians abroad – Salisbury poisoning being just one example

He is a man who only understands the use of power, force and intimidation. He views his opponents as weak unless they respond in kind.

We also know that President of Xi of China wants to incorporate Taiwan into China and is taking preparatory military steps to do so.

I am no military expert or strategic statesman, but I perceive we have four choices:

Choice One: Hope the Ukrainians bog Putin down

We do no more than we are currently doing to support Ukraine and in a matter of time Kyiv falls and Putin instals a puppet Russian new government.  Guerrilla warfare and resistance then dominates the following years, which requires Putin’s attention and in time Russia might withdraw.

This will make further expansion by Putin less likely; and also give President Xi pause for thought.

Choice Two: Putin holds and contains Ukraine

We do no more than we are currently doing to support Ukraine and in a matter of time Kyiv falls and Putin instals a puppet Russian new government.  In this scenario, Ukrainian resistance is broken, and Russian power is consolidated. A puppet Ukrainian government functions relatively normally and the country is in ‘peace’.

This makes further expansion by Putin more likely with the Baltic states next to be invaded. I believe that Putin would then gamble correctly, in my opinion, that the West will allow this to happen to avoid World War Three. He might then move on to Moldova and then Romania.

China will annex Taiwan

Choice Three: we have a no-fly zone within a week and are at war with Russia

The west, in choices three and four, decide that the only way to stop Putin is through force. The issue between the two options is only one of timing.

Choice three is that world community decide to create a no-fly zone over Ukraine in the coming week, recognise that we are at war with Putin and ignore his threats about nuclear weapons. We also stop all energy supplies coming from Russia.

Such a choice will have enormous implications for the way of life in many European countries especially the energy supply embargo. Emergency gas and oil supplies for countries, who rely on Russia, will have to be organised and day to day life in many countries will have to severely regulated and energy rationed. This change to our way of life will be greater than anything that happened during Covid.

Choice Four: We prepare for war with Russia

The analysis is the same as above, but we use the next two to three years to prepare for war. We make countries energy self-sufficient, without needing Russia; we rebuild our armed forces and then liberate Ukraine and end the Putin regime at a time of our choosing. During this time, we use all economic, diplomatic and political channels to try to influence  internal change in Russia to get rid of Putin.

But we announce Choice Four now.

Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia are just some of the countries in recent decades where civil war and genocide has left populations either dead, destitute or living in refugee camps.

Other countries wring their hands and protest about how dreadful this is but it’s usually only the United States of America, sometimes supported by a few allies who take action. And alas for them it often ends in tears and recriminations.

I believe that it is right for foreign countries to try to stop events like the genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda and the slaughter accompanying the disintegration of Yugoslavia. I think it’s right to overthrow tyrants who kill their own population, invade neighbours and threaten world peace.

I believe the world needs a police force to undertake this role of our behalf. And that police force should emanate out of the United Nations.

Prior to the US / UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 there was much talk about getting the UN to authorise such a policing role.  But to achieve that the Security Council would need to agree. And here we come to the stumbling block of vetoes from either China and /or Russia. We’d had many vetoes prior to Iraq and we’ve have had many since.

And yet the vast majority of other countries in the world do want to stop genocide and catastrophic civils wars. They don’t want to tolerate tyrants who invade other countries and threaten world peace. The vast majority of governments in the world are liberal democracies with populations who want peace not war, prosperity not famine.

So why do we lack the imagination to create new ways of working at the United Nations that recognise that for different reasons that China and Russia are out of step with the cultures of the rest of the world?

If Russia and China want to veto specific UN actions, why don’t the other nations in the General Assembly discuss it and if they think intervention is appropriate, with say over 2/3rds agreeing, they themselves establish an intervention force.

Ideally UN rules should be changed to enable this to happen so that the force can operate under UN auspices.

But if such a change of rules can be vetoed by China or Russia then such a force still should be organised. Those countries, voting in overwhelming numbers for such an intervention, should then establish whatever was necessary and create a command and accountability structure (outside UN structures) which harnessed the commitment and support of virtually the whole world.

With that moral authority, the world collectively would at last be speaking again. Populations would support their own governments, knowing that they were part of an initiative supported by virtually the whole world.

And a useful by product may well be to make China and Russia think again about whether they want to be so out of step with everyone else.

Following “The West’s” evacuation from Kabul in September last year little has been said about the plight of the Afghanistani people. Instead, I perceive politicians talking about two things. First, we have seen many politicians posturing about what has been have characterised as ‘our’ shameful exit from Afghanistan and second many have expressed their fears that the Taliban will return to the medieval ways that characterised their last period of power twenty-one years ago.

This is despite the fact that the Taliban themselves said, at the time of the transfer of power, that they would be different, emphasising that a new generation of Taliban leaders were now in leadership positions and that they would treat women differently to what had happened in the past.

Shouldn’t we also recognise that we had been an occupying power in Afghanistan for over twenty years? And whilst many progressive achievements were accomplished, of which we can be proud, shouldn’t we also recognise that the lightning speed of the virtually bloodless take over of Afghanistan by the Taliban in the late summer of 2021 tells us that the Afghanistani people had tired of having foreign troops patrolling their streets and wanted us out.

And what did the West do immediately after evacuating from Kabul. All economic aid was STOPPED COMPLETELY. Supposedly on the basis of waiting til the Taliban had been in power a sufficient time to be enable us to decide whether the Taliban were an acceptable partner to receive aid.

The loss of this economic aid to one of the world’s poorest countries has been devastating. The economy has ground to a halt with the result that hunger and famine are affecting the MAJORITY (some say over 90%) of the population.

I believe it is completely unacceptable for western countries to invade, occupy, and then, when leaving a country, with which they’ve had a relationship for over twenty years, to then pull the plug on all economic aid, on which that country completely relies.

I’m ashamed to be a citizen of a country that does this.

It is a staggering statistic that obesity reduces life expectancy by an average of 3 to 10 years, depending on how severe it is. During the Covid crisis people with a BMI count of between 35-40 had an increased risk of death by 40%; if the BMI count was over 40 there was an increased risk of death by 90%.

It is well-known in the NHS that obesity increases one’s risk of developing many potentially serious health conditions, including:

Type 2 Diabetes; coronary heart disease; asthma; bowel cancer; breast cancer; womb cancer; gallstones; gastro-oesophageal disease; osteoarthritis; sleep apnoea; liver disease; kidney disease

In addition, day to day obesity reduces one’s quality of life by:

Breathlessness; increased sweating; snoring; difficulty doing physical exercise; often feeling very tired; joint and back pain; low confidence and self-esteem; feeling isolated.

In 2017 a parliamentary report stated that 28.7% of adults in England and Wales are obese (15% in 1993) and an additional 35.6% are overweight.

The number of severely obese adults is forecast to double by 2035.

Despite the risks to life expectancy, isn’t it staggering that the cover of the February issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine celebrated being overweight, with photos of overweight individuals? And with a headline: ‘This is Healthy’

How can one say it’s healthy to be obese and therefore have lower life expectancy and be susceptible to all the problems described above?

Surely what we need is a government who treats this as a national crisis and vows to dramatically improve the quality of life of well over half our population who are overweight. There have been numerous reports about the causes and the possible remedies. Why on earth doesn’t our government take a lead on this and give it a top priority?

Having listened to Five Live and BBC News re Covid over the last week you’d be forgiven for thinking that Covid still provides cause for profoundly serious concern in the UK.

And having just returned from a holiday in Majorca I’ve been amazed by the number of educated and intelligent people who are still gripped by fear of this disease despite them being fit, healthy, long ago double-vaccinated and having no underlying health condition.

This, I believe, is the result of the way media coverage of Covid has continued in the same vein since the darkest days of this epidemic with little recognition and understanding of the changed landscape caused by the vaccination programme.

Everything I’ve read points to overwhelming evidence that those who have been fully vaccinated along with the young have little to fear from the virus.

I recognise that vaccination is not 100% protective and sadly that some vulnerable people with underlying health conditions and / or obesity will still sadly die.

My views are reinforced despite news reports which have focused on 50,000 new daily cases, which spreads fear, as does the ill-thought through Test and Trace Pinging System.

What is not being given the same prominence is the following:

• Of those cases only 4,457 were in hospital last week.
• Only 611 were in intensive care.
• The time Covid patients spend in hospital has HALVED to five days from previous lockdowns.
• The number dying from Covid is down from 1% of cases in previous lockdowns to less than 1 in 1000.

What the media do need to keep an eye on, I believe, is whether the vaccination programme is failing. Therefore what, I think we need is an analysis of those in hospital with Covid.

• What are the numbers of patients in hospital DUE to Covid and what are the numbers who are in hospital for another condition but have coincidentally tested positive for Covid?
• What proportion of patients in hospital DUE to Covid are unvaccinated?
• What proportion of patients in hospital DUE to Covid are single vaccinated?
• What proportion of patients in hospital DUE to Covid are double vaccinated and of those what proportion have a serious underlying health condition and / or are obese?

If the vaccination programme is not delivering the improvement that I believe is self-evident then policy will need to change but in the interim I see no reason whatsoever why we cannot have an immediate end to self-isolation for anyone who comes into contact with a positive case provided they have been double-vaccinated or are under 18.

After nearly a decade when it’s been hard to find anyone in politics or the media who articulates what I believe (!), there are now some examples coming to the fore.

One such, is a piece by Matthew Syed in the Sunday Times in May this year.

He wrote:

The British People ‘distrust those who tarnish British history and spend their time engaging in public self-flagellation, for they know that in the broad sweep of things this nation has been a force for good in the world. They are also right to distrust the “ my truth versus your truth” vapidity that has become endemic in the Labour Party’s youth wing – the idea that “lived experience” counts for more than objective reality.

They are right to distrust cancel culture. The social-media-obsessed left believes that the culture wars are an all-or-nothing fight to the death and that it is therefore obligatory to eviscerate opponents for minor heresies. Most right-minded people, on the other hand, wish to eradicate racism and other forms of discrimination, but in a way that leads to reconciliation, not hatred. The concept of forgiveness is central to western tradition and by implication the British psyche.

They are also right to have fears about globalisation. Economists like to say that free exchange increases the welfare of those who partake in it. And there is no doubt that the era of globalisation has increased prosperity, not least in China, where hundreds of millions have been taken out of poverty. What the advocates of trade theory somewhat overlooked is that globalisation also creates losers in rich nations, whose jobs are offshored, something that happened in the American rust belt and the British industrial north. These people were ignored and in many cases, derided.

In particular they are right about the importance of the nation state. History shows that the redistribution of wealth – upon which working class communities depend – is not easy without violence or revolution. This is why the creation of the British welfare state was a seminal event, a vast transfer of power and income achieved through the ballot box.

Yet this could never have happened without a massive sense of national solidarity – for why else would people consent to share what they have earned? This is something the internationalist left have never grasped: social bonds and social justice are two sides of the same coin’

The puzzle is why such views get so little prominence, given my strong belief that a significant majority of our electorate agree with them!

After Covid we have an opportunity as a society to discuss and debate what we collectively believe should be the values that underpin a Britain in the 21^st century.

• Do we want those who care for the most disadvantaged and vulnerable in our society to be paid and remunerated properly?
• Do we want to build houses in large numbers to enable young people to have a realistic expectation of owning their own home?
• Do want the put in place a social care system that looks after old people nearing the end of their lives?
• Do we want to create a society that enables young people to become more prosperous than their parents, rather than be poorer?
• Do we a want to build strong alliances with other democracies in order to encourage liberty, freedom and prosperity for those who do not have it?
• Do we want to encourage in public life a spirit of optimism, inclusiveness and compassion – with the better off wanting to help those not so fortunate?   

In the 1970’s the average pay of a CEO in the UK was no more than 30 times that of the average worker in his / her organisation.

In 2017 it was 144 times higher and in the USA it was 300 times

As I wrote in a previous post: ‘the winners of globalisation did not compensate the losers. Rather neoliberal globalisation brought an unabated increase in inequality. Almost all the gains went to those at the top, whilst real disposable household incomes declined in all English regions apart from London from 2003 onwards. From 2004 the wages of the bottom half of society began stagnating, and for the bottom third they fell.

In the three years after 2010, British workers suffered the fourth worst fall in wages out of 27 EU nations – an average fall of 5.5%. Whilst according to Sunday Times 2014 Rich List the fortune of the wealthiest 1000 Britons had doubled in just five years.

This has created a society in which the majority feel that their stake in society has been diminished and that they are viewed with disdain by the successful elite. A corrosive cocktail.

If we are to create a society in which everyone regardless of status can gain esteem and personal recognition from work, then we need to address this issue.

My suggestion is that governments by law demand that companies and organisations report annually not only their CEO’s pay but also the total payroll cost of all their employees, including all people who work for their organisation as contractors. (Many of them might well have originally been employees but were contracted out so that their pay, terms and conditions could be diminished in order to boost the short-term profitability of the company which would then flow through to increased pay for the CEO).

Governments should also introduce tax arrangements for CEOs and other senior managers on a graduated sliding scale based on the % of the gap between the CEO’s TOTAL remuneration and that of the average worker.

As an example, to illustrate the principle rather than suggesting what should be the final figures.

If a CEO’s salary is 40 times that of the average worker his tax rate should be at his / her current rate.

If a CEO’s salary is 150 times that of the average worker, the income above 40 times that of the average worker’s salary should be taxed at 95%

The leadership teams of organisations then have an incentive to increase the pay of their entire workforce not just themselves.

Prior to the 1980’s most political parties in western democracies aspired to create opportunities to enable people to achieve leadership positions in public life reflecting their talents, efforts, moral and civic values. (Their merit)

The 1980’s, I believe, changed the way we defined and understood merit as a concept and this in turn has had a profound effect on our politics and social cohesion.

Merit in the past, whether in the writings of the US Founding Fathers, Confucius, Plato and other republican thinkers over the ages, all linked the merits – relevant to governing – to include moral and civic virtue.

However, in the 1980s Reagan and Thatcher argued that government was the problem and that markets were the solution. This market thinking, which was also embraced by centre left parties, welcomed a market friendly version of globalisation and the growing financialisation of the economy.

In this globalised and market focused culture, the link between moral judgement and merit was severed. In the domain of the economy, the value of peoples’ contributions became measured by the market value of the goods and services that they sold and the common good became defined by GDP . With the accompanying corollary that the rich are rich because they are more deserving.

This new meritocratic ethic celebrated freedom – the ability to control your own destiny by dint of hard work – and therefore you deserve it.

If I am responsible for having accrued a handsome share of worldly goods – income and wealth, power & prestige – I must deserve them. Success is a sign of virtue. My affluence is due.

The flip side of this is that the more we view ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the less likely we are to care for the fate of those less fortunate than ourselves. If my success is my own doing, their failure must be their fault.

This logic can make this new style meritocracy corrosive of commonality.

Another consequence of this, I believe, is that the way we value work has changed.

Pope John Paul II wrote, and I agree,  that through work man “achieves fulfilment as a human being and indeed in a sense becomes ‘more a human being’”.

With merit and value being accorded to those 10% in the expert and professional classes who captured most from the economic gains of globalisation, those whose wage and job prospects were devastated have been made to feel that their fate was something they too deserved.

Before discussing how this became the new normal, some statistics are illuminating.

In the United States:

• The richest 1% take in more than the combined earnings of the entire bottom half of the population.
• Arising out of globalisation the richest 10% captured most of the gains, and the bottom half received virtually none.
• Medium income has stagnated for nearly 40 years.
• The people who produced lost their ability to demand a share in what they made, whilst the people who owned were taking more and more.
• In the decades since WWII, Americans could expect their children would do better economically than they had. Today this is not the case. Of children born in the 1980s only half surpassed their parents’ earnings
• Of those born on the bottom rung only around 4-7% rise to the top and only about a third reach the middle rung
• In the late 1970s CEO’s of major American companies made 30 times more than the average worker; in 2014 they made 300 times more.
• The median income of American males has been stagnant, in real terms for half a century.
• Although per capita income has increased 85% since 1979, white men without a four-year college degree make less in real terms than they did then.
• Finance industry’s share of GDP has tripled since 1950s.
• By 2008 this industry claimed more than 30% of corporate profits.
• Its employees make 70% more than comparably qualified workers in other industries.

 In the United Kingdom:

• The share of household income going to the richest 1% has tripled in the past three decades
• The ratio of CEO pay to average staff pay: Persimmon: 956%; Carnival: 422%; Reckitt: 419%.
• The average CEO in 2017 was paid 144 times the salary of a median full-time worker. In 1998 it was 47 times and in the 1970s 30.
• On current trends the average British family will have 15% less cash coming in, in 2020 than it had in 2008

So globalisation produced clear winners but did they did nothing to compensate the losers.

Rather neoliberal globalisation brought an unabated increase in inequality. Almost all the gains went to those at the top because the idea that the money we make reflects the value of our social contribution has become so deeply embedded, that it echoes throughout our public culture.

The Flaw in The Meritocratic Route to Success

Liberals, in the past decade, have extolled that education and particularly higher education is the route to create opportunity and hence a more meritocratic society. They have focused on affirmative action for women and blacks and speak of ‘white privilege’ – but have ignored the struggle of white men, particularly in the USA, to win honour and recognition in a meritocratic order that has scant regard for the skills they offer. As a result, liberals have done nothing to mitigate the discrimination arising from income inequality.

They ignored these fundamental numbers:

• Only a third of American adults graduate from college.
• In the UK that figure is 50%

Then, by insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent life they unconsciously demean and undermine the dignity and self-esteem of those who have not been to college.

So, I believe, did resentment grow of the meritocratic elite – the experts and the professional classes – who celebrated market driven globalisation, reaped the benefits, and consigned working people to the discipline of foreign competition.

Even worse the elites seemed to identify more with global elites than with their fellow citizens.

And another side effect of believing that one’s success is all due to one’s own talents and efforts and that those less successful deserve their fate, is that you can become disdainful.

Recent surveys in the United States and Europe, show that disdain for the poorly educated is more pronounced, or at least more readily acknowledged, than prejudice against other disfavoured groups among the educated elite. This challenges the notion that educated elites are morally more enlightened than people with less education.

• Elites are unembarrassed by their prejudice. They may denounce racism and sexism but are unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less well-educated.
• Elites dislike those with lesser education more than they dislike poor people or members of the working class, because they consider poverty and class status to be, at least in part, due to factors beyond one’s control. By contrast, they consider low educational achievement to represent a failure of individual effort.

Disdain whether conscious or unconscious has permeated much of political discourse in recent years.

• The language of ‘smart’ versus ‘dumb’ decisions; letting smart people (experts) decide things, rather than allowing citizens to debate and decide what policies to enact.
• Obama believed that decisions in the White House should be based on fact. He worried less about breaking up large concentrations of economic power or awakening in the public a keener sense of the common good.
• Hilary Clinton said infamously that half of Donald Trump supporters were ‘basket of deplorables’.
• Working class fathers on sitcoms like Archie Bunker or Homer Simpson are depicted as mostly buffoons. Media surveys have shown that televisions’ working-class blue-collar dads are depicted as ineffectual and dumb, the butt of jokes, often dominated by their more competent and sensible wives.
• Elites are known to disparage the working class with phrases in common parlance like ‘trailer trash’ and ‘chavs’
• Obama himself was disparaging about people who ’cling to guns or religion’

Building a politics around the idea that a college degree is a condition of dignified work and social esteem, has a corrosive effect on democratic life. It devalues the contribution of those without a diploma, fuels prejudice against less-educated members of society, effectively excludes most working people from representative government and provokes political backlash.

I believe that we need to return to the words of Pope John Paul II above:

“through work man “achieves fulfilment as a human being and indeed in a sense becomes ‘more a human being’”.

Martin Luther King wrote ‘One day our society will come to respect the sanitation workers if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage is in the final analysis as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labour has dignity.’

Robert Kennedy, in a similar vein said: “Fellowship., community, shared patriotism – these essential values of our civilisation do not come from just buying and consuming goods together. They come instead from dignified employment at decent pay, the kind of employment that lets a man say to say his community, to his family, to his country and most important to himself, ‘I helped to build this country. I am a participant in its great public endeavours’.”

I believe that populist anger, particularly in the US and the UK is about this loss of recognition and esteem. Only a political agenda that acknowledges this injury and seeks to renew the dignity of work can speak effectively to the discontent that despoils our politics.

This post inadequately summarises the key themes from Michael Sandel’s Book ‘The Tyranny of Merit; which articulates, much better than I ever can, the beliefs I have had for over thirty years! It’s great at last to read someone who does speak for me!

As a student in the 1970s, when I campaigned against racism,  I expected that in my lifetime I would see it reduce significantly.

Now, nearly 50 years later, I am surprised that the progress we have achieved, as a country, is much less than I anticipated. Whilst I believe that we have made some progress, the scale of racism that persists disappoints me.

So, let’s start with what, I perceive, to be the successes. The overt, in your face, racism of the past I think has reduced. In those days, many immigrant families feared for physical attacks in the streets, many white parents forbad their children from playing with non-white friends from school. A survey in the 60s, had 50% of white respondents saying they would move to a new house if a black person moved next door and the language of the day was often intemperate, uneducated and coarse. Bernard Manning infamously went on Mrs Merton and talked about ‘there being no Pakis at Dunkirk’ (Pakistan hadn’t been invented in 1940 and Manning clearly knew nothing about the thousands of Indians fighting for the British Army in WWII).

I believe that Britain is now a more tolerant and pluralist country. We take a more positive view of immigration. In 2011, 64% of Britons viewed immigration negatively; in 2019 only 26% thought that.

Disapproval of interracial marriage has dropped away. In the 1950s, only 5% of people approved of interracial marriage; now that figure is over 80%. Over recent decades, the UK has hospitably welcomed peoples of all nationalities and creeds to our shores. London is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world.  Citizens of other countries admire British values of tolerance, diversity and inclusion. So, I believe, there are things to be proud of in the way we are evolving a pluralist, multicultural society.

However, the scars of racism and prejudice, whether conscious or unconscious, persist, as the powerful testimonies of many successful black people have shown over the last year, as an example listen to Michael Holding talking about ’Black Lives Matter’ and his experiences – https://youtu.be/MaJfif0Dq8Q

The statistics are also sobering.

A 2020 You Gov Poll reported that:

• 2/3rds of BAME Britons have had a racial slur directly used against them.
• ¾ have been asked ‘where they really come from?’
• 50% have experienced racism in the street and nearly as big a percentage have experienced it at work
• 84% of BAME Britons believe that racism exists in the country today (virtually the same as 30 years ago when the number was 86%)
• 29% have been stopped and questioned on the street by various authorities.

People from a BAME background also:

• Are significantly underrepresented at senior levels of companies, professions and even the NHS. For instance, only 7% of directors of top Companies are from BAME backgrounds against a percentage of over 14% BAME people in the UK population.
• Since 2010 there has been a 49% increase in the number of ethnic minority 16-24 year olds. who were long term unemployed – while in the same period there had been a fall of 2% in long term unemployment among white people in the same age category
• Black graduates are paid an average of 23.1% less than similarly qualified white graduates.
• Health inequalities affecting BAME Britons has long been recognised, but the COVID epidemic has given it sharper focus with people of Bangladeshi ethnicity having around twice the risk of death than people of White British ethnicity during the first wave. People of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Other Asian, Caribbean and Other Black ethnicity had between 10% and 50% higher risk of death when compared to White British.
• We still have far too many young black men being killed by other young black men.

So, what needs to happen now.

I’ve pondered this question hard, particularly since I perceive that over the last 50 years, we’ve had in power governments which have had generally good intentions in this area. But little progress seems to have been made.

As a practical start the Government and other authorities could implement the majority of the recommendations of the following reviews:

• The Lammy Review on the Criminal Justice System
• The Timpson review on School Exclusions
• The McGregor-Smith review on Employment and the Workplace

But to tackle what I think may be an underlying cause of racism in our country perhaps we need to radically overhaul what we teach our children at school, particularly with respect to our history?

When I was growing up, I was taught mainly about the Romans, the Tudors, the Stuarts and the two World Wars. I learnt about how we as a country had stood out ‘alone’ against the tyranny of Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese.  I learnt that the British Empire had been the largest empire the world had ever know and in my geography atlases much of the world was still coloured pink. I was taught about William Wilberforce and how Parliament abolished slavery.

Consequently, the sense of British exceptionalism, which has been a continuing theme of public and political discourse for my whole life, seemed perfectly natural.

With respect to those ‘pink’ countries I also learnt that most of them were poor third world countries and we, through the Commonwealth, were ‘looking after them and helping them develop’.

That was my educational inheritance.  And alas, it seems, based on the experiences of my children and of my friends’ grandchildren, that their educational inheritance isn’t much different.

Over the last decade I have been fortunate enough to travel the world and to have had the time to read more extensively. It seems embarrassing to admit, but in this process, I have ‘discovered’ the following:

• India in 1700 was the richest country in the world; accounting for 27% of the world’s economy.
  • The palaces and temples of India built during this period were far grander, more opulent and luxurious than anything similar in Europe at the time.
  • India was a far greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any other European or Asian country at the time.
  • India’s textile goods were famous throughout the world.
  •  India’s plentiful supply of jewelry and precious stones generated huge wealth for the country.
• When the British left India in the mid-20^th century, we left an impoverished third world country having systematically repatriated, over two centuries, vast sums of wealth and natural resources, in the process destroying native Indian commerce, industry and agriculture.
• With this extraordinary wealth, the British Empire helped establish the City of London as one of the world’s main financial centres and explains how some of our richest families, institutions and cities became so prosperous.
• Another source of British wealth was of course the slave trade with the accompanying sugar and cotton industries in the West Indies and America.
  • Over 10 million enslaved Africans were transported in brutal unsanitary, overcrowded conditions, across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th century. 3.4 million of these were transported by British companies. It was the second of three stages of the so-called triangular trade, in which arms, textiles, and wine were shipped from Europe to Africa, slaves from Africa to the Americas, and sugar and coffee from the Americas to Europe. It was a profitable business.
  • The British economy was transformed by the Atlantic slave trade. In 1700, 80 per cent of British trade went to Europe from ports on the east and south coasts. By 1800, 60 per cent of British trade went to Africa and America, sailing from the three main west coast ports – Glasgow, Liverpool and Bristol.

I do not think it right to say that our imperial history was an unremitting saga of brutality, conquest and racism. Many ethnic minorities have settled in Britain because they embraced the best of British values and saw Britain as a home, they wanted to make their own.

However understanding history, I believe, plays an important component role in any national psyche. So its content is important.

It is interesting to contrast how the Germans have used the teaching of history since the end of the Second World War. Neil McGregor, former Director of the British Museum wrote: ‘What is remarkable about German history as a whole is that Germans use their history to think about the future; whereas the British tend to use their history to comfort themselves’.

I believe that, if we are to combat today’s racism, we need to acknowledge that much of the wealth of our country was derived from past actions. We also need to acknowledge that a wilful white supremacy of past centuries informs our society today.

Just as the Germans recognised the horrors of the Nazis, to forge a better tomorrow, so I think we could change, much more fundamentally, conscious and unconscious racist attitudes today, if we understood our history better.

Hurray! Since my last post, Oxford University has today announced the opening of a new Research Institute dedicated to tackling resistance to antibiotics.

Remember that this already causes 1.5 millions deaths a year worldwide and unless something is done about the overuse and misuse of antibiotics it is estimated that this will cause 10 million excess deaths per year within 30 years.

The University’s Vice Chancellor said that the Covid pandemic has shown the ‘high cost of ignoring something that is likely to head our way’.

So a huge welcome to this investment from Ineos and to Oxford University for speaking for me!