Two final acts of stupidity from Robert Jenrick

Jenrick might have got away with claiming he is “seriously concerned that facts may have been withheld from the public” over what police said about the man charged with the killings. But he went on to say, “Across the board the hard reality of mass migration is being covered up. We need the truth – and we need to change.”

Just to be clear the suspect in this case is not an immigrant and migrants had nothing to do with these attacks. For this attempt to ride the tiger of bigotry and to use Southport as justification for stopping all immigration, Jenrick deserves to be driven out of the Tory Party. Instead he might still become its leader.

But while his faux outrage over the Southport case is only stirring up British troubles, Jenrick’s idiotic column in the Daily Mail demanding that our former colonies should be thanking us for once being part of the British Empire and abolishing slavery is causing offence on a wider scale.

Jenrick hedges his bets. We should be “honest about the crimes of colonialism”, he says (though he doesn’t discuss them very much). But Jenrick’s point is not honest. In a desperate bid to appeal to the ageing Tory members who he thinks must lap this stuff up, he rants about “universities overrun by Leftists peddling pseudo-Marxist gibberish to impressionable undergraduates” and pretends that those who point out the horrors of the Empire portray British influence as uniquely bad. 

Of course they don’t, though the way that influence was achieved is far from how Jenrick presents it – plucky Brits with stiff upper lips civilising “territories colonised by our Empire (that) were not advanced democracies. Many had been cruel, slave-trading powers.”

At least Jenrick does not use without qualification the drivel propounded by the far right on social media – that Britain should be credited for ending the slave trade, not condemned for participating in it. This leaves aside the obvious point that to abolish slavery you first have to practice it.

“In West Africa, we initially continued the barbarism of slavery. But – confronted by its cruelty – we ended it,” he writes. It only took us 250 years or so to see the light – not quite an instant moment of revelation.

What Jenrick says is just plain insulting to many of our former colonies and to the Commonwealth that we and they belong to. He seems to think that our former colonies should stop moaning and be grateful that we ruled them by force because they were savages who couldn’t govern themselves.

Furthermore, they should stop talking of reparations and instead congratulate old Blighty for giving the Empire our system of law. “Walk into almost any courtroom across the Commonwealth and you could be back in the UK. Advocates dress like British barristers and the courtrooms are modelled on the Old Bailey,” he writes, both misty-eyed and muddle-headed.

“Ultimately, we willingly gave up our imperial treasures”, Jenrick writes. Does he not know that these countries all won their independence from the UK at the earliest opportunity? That many of them did so at the point of a gun and many others would have fought us for their freedom, if we had not withdrawn at the earliest opportunity?

While marvelling at our legacy of courtroom fashion, Jenrick does not seem to grasp how colonialism held these countries back and prevented them controlling their own destinies. The former colonies have proved again and again that people love their own independence, are proud of their own countries and look upon the colonial era as a dark episode in their history.

India is the most populous country in the world and a regional superpower. It and Pakistan are nuclear powers. They and many other former colonies need to be respected when they talk about reparations.

Just look at India, which along with South Africa did not bother attending the latest Commonwealth shindig but went to meet Vladimir Putin instead. Jenrick might understand why India did that if he read The Anarchy by William Dalrymple (not a commie academic by any stretch of the imagination) about how we took over India with ruthless brutality, when it was the world’s richest country and robbed it blind, destroyed its economy, looted endlessly and created famines where once there at been plenty. We even taxed its industry to death so we could sell them our exports. 

Indians, quite rightly, believe that the UK held them back for hundreds of years to further its own prospects. They remember the mass slaughter created by our partition of the sub-continent and the Amritsar massacre, even if we don’t. They do not see the empire as a nostalgic time when the UK was a world power and brought “civilisation” to the world, why would they?

Mr Jenrick believes that “The British Empire broke the long chain of violent tyranny as we came to introduce – gradually and imperfectly – Christian values.” He might reflect that in India, what we’ve known for years as the Indian Mutiny has been called the first war of Indian independence for decades now. Does that sound like a country which shares his view of the world, that thinks it should thank us for governing them, that is grateful for the Raj?

Thanks to his party we have destroyed our relationship with Europe through Brexit (which Jenrick opposed before it won and now supports, when everyone can see it is a disaster). The US might well fall into the hands of an isolationist fascist (who Jenrick said he would vote for before deciding to remain neutral). Jenrick wants to leave the ECHR which would destroy our relationship with everyone but Russia and Belarus and now he is insulting the Commonwealth.

Kemi Badenoch will be bad in all sorts of ways, but let’s be grateful for small mercies that she looks likely to beat the truly terrible Robert Jenrick.