Out for a Penny, Out for a Pound

One of the things that always makes me cringe when I’m watching an international football match between England and Germany is the crass behaviour of many of the England fans. If they’re not singing ’10 German Bombers’, they’re making stupid references to the Nazis, or else claiming with great gusto on how “England won the war”. Not only is such behaviour extremely insensitive and childish, it is also totally at variance with an understanding of modern Germany. Virtually nobody alive in Europe’s largest economy today has any serious recollection or direct connection to the absolute horrors of Hitler’s rule. Having travelled in Germany, I’ve found the people there to be open and friendly and always keen to demonstrate their grasp of English (a tongue that is now almost as ubiquitous amongst younger Germans as their native language). Today’s German people owe us nothing in terms of reparations, for they had nothing to do with what happened across Europe between 79 and 110 years ago. Human advancement – morally, spiritually, politically and economically – is only achievable by learning the lessons of history, not by bedevilling successive generations with misplaced guilt over things they have no association with, or control over.

By the same token, our own country today owes nothing compensatory to other members of the Commonwealth over our involvement in the slave trade. However, it’s hardly surprising that the United Kingdom, cursed with a Prime Minister who’s the epitome of weakness and vacillation, is now in the sights of countries keen to scapegoat Britain for their own endemic failures since independence. I mean, why swap decades of corruption, financial mismanagement and personal aggrandisement for good governance when you can instead play racial grievance poker with a British Establishment riddled with self-guilt and national shame? At this point it is worth remembering that many former British colonies have done well (some spectacularly well) since leaving our imperial bosom. Others have fared less well. But that’s nothing to do with us. That’s to do with how those countries have managed their own affairs in the period since.

For example, let’s compare Jamaica with Singapore. I’ve chosen these two former British possessions because they gained their independence within a few years of each other in the 1960s; they had almost identical population sizes at that time; they had comparable levels of income; the only significant divergence being in the availability of natural resources (Jamaica had far more than Singapore). In the 21st Century, things could not be more different. Jamaica has an average per capita income in USD of $5,000. By contrast, Singapore has more than ten times that figure! Lee Kuan Yew’s (its first President) visionary prescription for the newly-independent Singapore was the template for success on which the city-state is now built: meritocracy, political stability, the absence of corruption, strict adherence to the rule of law, industrialisation, and the promotion of foreign trade and investment. That’s why Singapore is now one of the richest sovereign states in the world, whilst Jamaica is primarily associated with two things: Bob Marley and cannabis!!

I am not making this slur on Jamaica from a standpoint of white supremacism, for goodness sake! Jamaica is obviously not a Caucasian country, but neither is Singapore. It is overwhelmingly a mixture of Malay, Chinese and Indian peoples, with those of European ancestry representing a very small minority. Thus, a pertinent question has to be asked: Why are some races/former colonies far better at generating wealth than others (https://georank.org/economy/jamaica/singapore)? They share the commonality of imperial subjugation; they share the commonality of being historically dominated by people who are usually of European extraction; they share the commonality of slavery (Singapore being a centre of sex slavery, whereas Jamaica’s slave story was rooted in agriculture and infrastructural creation). I’ll tell you why. It’s because some former colonies were prescient enough to embrace opportunities afforded to them post-independence, whilst others languished in mires of unscrupulous dynastic rule, or indolence, or self-pity, or tribal conflict. Funnily enough, it is the exemplars of the latter who are at the forefront of demands for Britain to recompense them for their own numerous shortcomings.

Both my parents and I have been to Singapore, and my Mum and Dad visited Jamaica in 1992. My late Father, one of the most punctually-obsessed men I have ever known, spent three weeks in a state of near-permanent hypertension in Montego Bay because nothing, literally nothing, ran or arrived on time! I recall my Dad telling me about a bus trip they had booked from their hotel to see Bob Marley’s grave in the heart of St Ann’s Parish – a distance of nearly 100 miles. A bus that was supposed to leave at 9.30 actually turned up at 12.45! My Dad, red-faced and linguistically-creative with anger, was met with an insouciant shoulder shrug from the driver, who responded with a characteristically dismissive “Don’t worry, maan! Everyting gonna be alright, maan (sics)”. And they wonder why they’re now ten times poorer than the average Singaporean!?

Methinks many of these countries, who were happy to farm out hundreds of thousands of their own citizens to Britain for a better life, would be better spent examining why they’ve barely left first base in terms of living standards and development since the last British red coats disappeared over the horizon. It would be a far more productive use of their time, instead of trying to bankrupt their former colonial master with demands for a bottomless pit of reparations. For it is my contention that, even if the UK managed to find billions or trillions of dollars for the contemporary political incarnation of ‘Dreadlock Holiday’, it would only be a matter of time before the compo had disappeared without a trace and the people it was designed to satiate no better off than they are now. So no, Mr Starmer, I don’t want demands for money kicked into the long grass. I want them kicked into the farthest reaches of the universe. You don’t ask an erstwhile imperial power to leave your country in its entirety, but to simultaneously leave its cheque book behind. On yer bike, ‘maan’!

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