Stout Chaps Doing Fine Things

Still on his Indian tour, Daveybloke has been having a bit of a burble about the glories of Empire. Visiting the scene of the Amritsar massacre, he declined to issue a formal apology because the massacre occurred before he was born. Apparently Daveybloke believes he is visiting India in a purely personal capacity, and not as a representative of the one and indivisible United Kingdom; either that or, as befits a semi-royal Regency wastrel, Daveybloke simply regards the United Kingdom as the property of himself and his chums, rather than as anything to which he might owe a duty, even of example. Anyway, Daveybloke signed the book of condolence for the three hundred and seventy-nine incidences of collateral damage, and put the wogs in their place by quoting the mendacious orotundery of Winston Churchill, who took the Abu Ghraib approach that the whole thing was an isolated incident "of an entirely different order from any of those tragical occurrences" which go under the rubrics of police action, peacekeeping, maintaining order, democratisation and so forth.

It may seem odd for the originator of the Big Society thingy to refuse an empty gesture, especially of a sort that was pioneered by the Reverend Blair himself; but Daveybloke is far more worried about the barbarian hordes on his own back benches than he is about the reactions of a few Indians. One can only imagine the reaction from the wogs-begin-at-Brussels brigade to any hint that the Gove-Ferguson™ model of history, with its brave white capitalists bringing civilisation to the natives, might not be quite the thing any more. Instead, Daveybloke burbled that when it comes to Empire we should "learn from the bad and cherish the good". Yes, a lot of innocent people died, but we did, after all, build some jolly fine railways; and, quite apart from the Koh-i-Noor diamond (we're not giving it back, in case you were wondering), the present Government certainly cherishes such famous subcontinental treasures as poverty, corruption and caste.