A Very British Apology

Few things are more Britishly hypocritical than an exclusionary apology, and the Archbishop of Canterbury has duly descended to the occasion with an ostentatious self-prostration over one of our Amritsar massacres. A century ago British troops fired on unarmed protestors; the Government admitted to three hundred and seventy-nine fatalities and twelve hundred wounded, and Winston Churchill, despite his belief in the beastliness of Indians, was moved to condemn the business as somehow atypical of the British Empire. With a similar degree of moral courage, the Archbishop apologised not in the name of common humanity, common decency or common sense, but in the name of his vicious little god, whose liberal attitude to genocide is only too well known. Although Daveybloke and Tumbledown Tessie, one casually racist and the other obsessively racist, both stopped carefully short of apologising for the atrocity, neither of them managed to be quite so brazenly crass as that.