Tough Choices, Hard Decisions

Squeals of patriotic indignation are sounding over a video installation on display at the National Portrait Gallery, which compares Oliver Cromwell's notoriously cruel assault on Ireland with Winston Churchill's famously rigorous austerity measures in India. Defenders of Churchill's role in the Bengal famine apparently plead that he hadn't realised taking food away from people who don't have enough might potentially incline them towards a degree of unprofitable emaciation: a mathematical inexactitude which explains a good deal about the performance of many a Conservative chancellor of the exchequer. By contrast, Cromwell believed that Roman Catholics were beastly people with a beastly religion; which is certainly not something the Official Undisputed Greatest Ever Number One Greatest Briton Ever would ever have said about the Indians.