Brexit: Here Are 5 Other Colossal Mistakes By British Elites
By Ty Duffy
Leave won the referendum. Brexit is happening. Prime minister David Cameron, who called the referendum in a not so shrewd political move, is soon to be no more. Scotland and Northern Ireland may attempt their own Brexit to remain in the EU. The rest of the world economy has been plunged into traumatic uncertainty.
This is, alas, far from the first time or the worst time the combination of latent British racism and the ineffectuality of Oxbridge-educated governing elites have wreaked havoc. Here are five other global scale screw-ups the British left us.
Great Famine of 1876-78: Extortionist British colonial rent policies and focus on export agriculture leave broad swath of Southern Indian more vulnerable to famine. Drought causes a crop failure. British officials respond by continuing grain exports, tightening social welfare expenditures, and letting laissez faire take its course. Official (low) estimates peg death total at around 5.5 million. Famines and other disasters overshadow broader British mission of stagnating Indian industrial development until well into the 20th century.
Great Famine in Ireland: Extortionist British rent and land policies and reorienting toward export agriculture leave Ireland with a profound dependent on the potato. A blight afflicts the crop for a number of years. Tories respond ineffectually. Whigs tighten social welfare and let laissez faire take its course. Around a million die. Around two million emigrate.
Partition of India: Decades of British policy inflame religious tension. Policies during World War II make that acute. Facing violence and being broke, British accelerate Indian independence timeline in 1947. India/Pakistan separation displaces 14.5 million people, forcing the largest mass migration in human history. Death toll estimates from resulting sectarian violence are as high as 1 million. Leaving princely states to decide for themselves leads to multiple India/Pakistan wars over Kashmir. Present status quo leaves the territory still disputed among three nuclear powers.
The Middle East: Britain is fighting the Ottoman Empire in World War I. British officials in the Middle East promise Arab leaders independence. British simultaneously agree to the Sykes-Picot agreement, dividing the area into European spheres of influence. A year later, the British espouse support for a permanent Jewish state in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration to secure Jewish financial support for the war effort. This creates quite the policy conundrum.
The British withdraw from Palestine in 1947, leaving it for the United Nations to sort out. The problem remains a flash point decades (and multiple wars) later. The British “leave” Iraq but leave in place a pliant, dependent monarchy and maintain control of the oil fields. Political revolutions and nationalization of the Iraq Petroleum Company eventually result in Saddam Hussein.
Apartheid: The British steadily erode race neutral policies in the Cape in the late 19th century. Following the Boer War, the British side with the white Boers over their Black African allies. Resulting Union of South Africa disenfranchises black voters from voting for the national parliament. Act lays the framework for successive laws passed over the next decades that create a brutal apartheid state. Britain finally imposes tepid sanctions in the mid 1980s.