The reality was that in Kenya flogging, torture, mutilation, rape and summarary execution of the suspects and prisoners were everyday occurrences. The extent of the violence was successfully covered up at the time. The British proceeded to pour reinforcements into Surabaya. Against ferocious opposition, British and Indian troops fought their way into the city. They were assisted by a tremendous artillery and naval bombardment that devastated large areas and killed many civilians. Two cruisers and three destroyers shelled the city. Bodies of men, horses, cats and dogs, lay in the gutter. Shiraz Durrani, Mau Mau: The Revolutionary, Anti-Imperialist force from Kenya, 1948-1963 (Nairobi: 2018), Vita Books. As Emanuel Shinwell, the minister of defence, put it when advocating a military response: ‘We must in no circumstances throw up the sponge not only because of the direct consequences of the loss of Persian oil, but because of the effect which a diplomatic defeat in Persia would have on our prestige and on our whole position through the Middle East. The next thing might be an attempt to nationalise the Suez Canal.” In the UK in A Changing Europe Brexit Tory former minister Owen Paterson describes the Brexit trap the UK is caught in perfectly: “It was a decisive sovereign moment when Parliament, which was elected as a sovereign body, said it would give sovereign power, for a day, to the people to decide this massive question.”

The Break Up of Britain (boldly sans question mark) was a tremendous act of brush clearing, under the jungle of 1970s politics there were the ruins of an c waiting to be put on show in its crumbling glory. Most of the book is taken up fighting demons who have long since left the world – the deterministic primacy of class – a view shared between the children of the 2 nd , 3 rd and 4 th internationals equally. Newsinger is a member of the Socialist Workers Party, [3] speaking at their Marxism Festival in 2014 [4] and participated in meetings for the Socialist Alliance. [5] Education [ edit ] India: Protesters decided to proceed with an anti-Rowlatt rally on the afternoon of 13 April at the Jalianwalla Bagh, an enclosed space. The meeting was banned but they decided to defy it. General Reginald Dwyer decided to make an example of them. He marched a detachment of Gurkhas to the rally any without any warning opened fire on 20 to 25 thousand people peacefully listening to speeches. The troops continued firing for over ten minutes. By the time they finished the bodies were piled ten to 12 deep around the exits. Elsewhere in Punjab there was ‘violent brutal repression’ with shootings and floggings, villages bombed from the air and the imposition of collective punishments. The British had succesffuly defeated the Great Revolt by the spring of 1939. By the end of the conflict some 5000 rebels had been killed. The Zionists proceeded to establish the state of Israel, driving out some 700,000 Palestinians in the process. . Whole cities and small hamlets were bombed out of existence in one of the worst crimes of the post-1945 era. The war cost the lives of between 500,000 and 1 million South Korean civilians and of 1.5 million North Korean soldiers and civilians. British governments stood ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with their American ally throughout the slaughter.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).

Anyway, according to Wikipedia, the forces had roughly equivalent artillery, and the Egyptians were armed with breech-loading rifles. If I had to guess the reason for many British imperial victories, I would guess that their classical military officer training borrowed from Julius Caesar, who saw no reason to keep his word to barbarians. Likewise, racist British imperial ideologies would have had no hesitation in fighting dirty against ‘savages’ with the impudence to defend their own lands against British aggression. And like the imperial Romans, they were happy to sacrifice as many of their colonial troops as necessary to achieve victory. Interestly, in devoting a whole chapter to the British invasion of Egypt, John Newsinger in The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire (2nd edition, 2013) writes that the House of Commons voted massively for the invasion which ended in the massacre at Tel-el-Kebir, Queen Victoria and Gladstone (who benefited financially) congratulated themselves, but contemporary critics called it a bondholder’s war, apparently vindicated by later research, though the Suez Canal was a strategic element. Newsinger is a book reviewer for Race & Class and the New Left Review. [1] He is also author of numerous books and articles, as well as studies of science fiction and of the cinema. He teaches on both undergraduate and postgraduate courses. [2] Lenin was very precise about what was required of anti-imperialists, arguing that the ‘fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism’. In other words, such Labour members would have to break with and fight openly against the imperialist and racist party to which they belong. Instead, the anti-American standpoint Newsinger sets out continues to tie the working class to the middle class and bourgeoisie, and hence to the Labour Party: it is a defence of opportunism. Celebration was short-lived, however. Almost immediately the empire was plunged into crisis. The British found themselves confronting revolutionary outbreaks in Ireland, Egypt, India, Mesopotamia and China.We seek to be a space for debate on the left, a resource for movements for social justice, and a home for open-minded anti-capitalists. The flippant conclusion obscures the fact that Labour could and did get it right – from the standpoint of imperialism. Critically, Labour refused to recognise the Dail Eireann in 1918 to which the mass of Irish people had given their allegiance; it objected to the British use of force not out of concern for the victims but because it might turn them towards revolution. Labour favoured self-determination only if a subsequent Irish constitution ‘afforded protection to minorities’ and prevented ‘Ireland from becoming a military or naval menace to Great Britain’ which together conceded the need for partition and a continued occupation. (see David Reed, Ireland, the Key to the British Revolution, 1984) In Scotland the task of separating political from national rights has begun with voting rights being granted to all legal residents (including asylum seekers) – setting a new bar as the UK regresses and pulls political rights from EU citizens. Following the ISIS outrages in Beirut and Paris, John Pilger updates this prescient essay on the root causes of terrorism and what we can do about it. In 1811 a planter, Arthur Hodge, was hanged for having tortured and murdered perhaps as many as 60 of his slaves – men, women and children ‘ on Tortola in the Virgin Islands. The white community rallied to his support, outraged that one of their members should be executed for killing slaves.

Anyhow: the salient question is not whether or not we in Scotland should have a written constitution, but is rather whether or not we should have a constitution that organises our public decision-making in such ways that minimise the risk of tyranny. Weakening government as much as it can possibly be weakened without losing its capacity to function as the governance of our public affairs is one way of minimising that risk.Suez Canal: On 21 February 1945 British troops in Cairo opened fire on demonstrators, killing more than 20 people. This provoked protests and demonstrations throughout the country. In Alexandria there were serious clashes that left two British soldiers and 17 Egyptians dead. John Newsinger presents his book The blood never dried: A people’s history of the British Empire, as a riposte to contemporary apologists for imperialism such as Niall Ferguson. His own argument, however, is far more dangerous for the anti-war movement, as it seeks to justify a continued alliance with the Labour Party through its left wing. This is the strategy of the SWP, of which Newsinger is a member. As well as the tens of thousands interned without trial (the best estimate is that over 160,000 people were interned during the course of the emergency), even more were imprisoned for emergency offences. Between 1952 and 1958 over 34,000 women were imprisoned for Mau Mau offences, and the number of men imprisoned was probably ten times that figure. ‘At least one in four Kikuyu adult males was imprisoned or detained by the British colonial administration.’

Newsinger rejects this. He complains ‘if only the rebels had waited’ (p102) and although he concedes that ‘Lenin provided the starting point for any analysis of the Easter Rising’, he adds that ‘he [Lenin] lamented the fact “that they rose prematurely, when the European revolt of the proletariat had not yet matured”’ (p102) without referring to Lenin’s subsequent comments. Elsewhere Newsinger has described the Rising as ‘a classic instance of a putsch’ which Connolly should have opposed (Newsinger, Rebel City – Larkin, Connolly and the Dublin Labour Movement). He also refers to a report the Labour Party issued in January 1921 that in his view:

China: General strikes were called in Canton and Hong Kong. When demonstrators approached the Shameen concession area of Canton they were machined gunned by British troops, with over 50 people killed. The official British figure for rebels killed in action was 11,503, but the real number was much higher. Some estimates go as high as 50,000, and this is much closer to the truth. Only 12 European soldiers and 51 European police were killed. This disparity is a product of the overwhelming superiority in firepower that the British possessed and their readiness to use it. Lenin welcomed the Rising, condemned those who called it a putsch, and used it to expose the doctrinaire concept of a ‘pure’ social revolution. Against those who argued that it was ‘premature’ he said: Even while the Confrontation was still under way, the British collaborated with the generals in a massacre that cost the lives of over 500,000 men, women and children, many of them slaughtered with the utmost bruality. Harold Wilson’s Labour government was complicit in what has been described as ‘one of the worst mass killings of the 20th century. 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.’