UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has to call a general election before the end of the year. His Conservative Party is in dead man walking territory. This month finds support for Conservatives between 19% and 26%. Labour’s worst poll this month has been 42% and their best has been 45%. They’re going to swamp the Tories and Sunak will have to resign as party leader. The 3 top contender for his job as Conservative leader are all very right-wing women.
One, Penny Mordaunt, is currently leader of the House of Commons. Previously she’s held half a dozen different cabinet portfolios— and she worked for both George W. Bush presidential campaigns... and ran unsuccessfully for prime minister twice before, beaten out by Liz Truss and Sunak. She has been loudly anti-trans, and inserts the fact that she is in the Naval Reserve into every other sentence. (She was UK Minister of Defense for, literally, two months.)
Probably the most popular of the three contenders is Kemi Badenoch, a woman of Yoruba (Nigerian) descent who is an apologist for colonialism and white privilege, as well as Minister for Business and Trade. She is considered a primary spokesperson for England’s anti-woke movement and leader of the anti-critical race theory movement. For some reason, she hates it when people call her an Uncle Tom.
And then there’s Suella Braverman, a woman of Indian descent who is overtly and aggressively fascist and anti-immigrant, the “worst” of a bad lot. “The former home secretary is now a free-speaking backbench MP with several axes to grind. She is widely seen as the unofficial leader of the right-wing of the parliamentary Tory party after being sacked by Sunak in November over an unsanctioned opinion piece about pro-Palestine protests and her explosive claim that homelessness is a lifestyle choice… There is little doubt that Braverman would command the support of a significant number of MPs on the right of the party in a leadership contest, while her hardline views on issues like immigration would likely go down well with the Conservative party membership. But while there are Conservative MPs who adore Braverman and her politics, there are others, especially those in the One Nation wing of self-described Tory moderates, who loathe her flavour of Conservatism and warn that there would be an organised ‘stop Suella’ campaign within the parliamentary party to prevent her from making it to the final two in a leadership contest.”
I asked a congressional friend mine who specializes in U.K. history and politics what he thinks about the prognosis for our British friends. He took it in another direction entirely. “So, basically, three Tim Scotts. I think that this may be a preview of where the GOP is headed, after Trump self-immolates.”
A couple of things about Kemi Badenoch’s brand of ugly conservatism: The impact of the economic benefits of British exploitation of its colonies is undeniable— unless you’re a Conservative. The access to resources— including (slave) labor— and markets, generated immense wealth from colonial trade and exploitation, which contributed to its industrialization and economic growth during the 18th and 19th centuries. Few doubt— gin, other than deluded Conservatives— that the economic gains for Great Britain came at the expense of the colonized territories, which went through protracted economic exploitation, resource depletion, forced labor and unequal trade relationships that hindered their own economic development and perpetuated poverty and dependency. On top of that, if I may add, the imposition of colonial rule generally led to cultural suppression, social stratification and the disruption of traditional societies and economies in colonized territories, as well as a perpetuation of inequalities, racial discrimination and political oppression.
Badenoch’s assertions it would be wrong to attribute the UK’s wealth and economic success to its colonial history or racial privilege contradicts the historical evidence proving without any reasonable doubt that British wealth and economic success were closely linked to the exploitation of colonies. The colonies provided a vast array of natural resources, including minerals, timber, agricultural products, and raw materials such as cotton, tea, and spices. The exploitation of these resources fueled Britain's industrial revolution and contributed to its economic growth. British merchants and companies profited from colonial trade routes, captive markets for British manufactured goods, monopolies, and tariffs, which generated significant wealth for the British economy. Kemi is forgetting that the use of forced labor, indentured servitude, and slavery provided cheap, abundant labor that benefited British businesses and industries and that British colonial administrators, investors and companies amassed significant wealth through the extraction of resources, taxation, land ownership, and financial investments in colonial ventures and that the immense profits generated from colonial enterprises contributed to Britain's economic prosperity and global influence.
Slavery, was a pernicious aspect of Britain's colonial economy, particularly in colonies where plantation agriculture was prevalent, such as the Caribbean and parts of Africa and Asia. Enslaved individuals were exploited for their labor in industries such as sugar, cotton, tobacco, and mining, among others. The transatlantic slave trade, in which millions of Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas to work on plantations, played a central role in the economic prosperity of Great Britain. British involvement in the slave trade and the use of enslaved labor contributed to the accumulation of wealth, the expansion of British commerce, and the growth of industries such as sugar refining and textile manufacturing. Kemi and her colleagues must have missed the school classes that teach that acknowledging the role of slavery in Britain's colonial economy is crucial for understanding the full extent of the exploitation and human suffering that underpinned the economic success of the British Empire.
They very aggressively do not agree that it is essential to confront this dark chapter of history and recognize its lasting legacies on societies around the world. Instead Kemi tells her audiences that “It worries me when I hear people talk about wealth and success in the UK as being down to colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever… It matters, because if people genuinely believe that the UK only grew and developed into an advanced economy because of exploitation and oppression, then the solutions they will devise will make our growth and productivity problem even worse. It matters in other countries too, because if developing nations do not understand how the west became rich, they cannot follow in its footsteps. And it matters when, as your trade secretary, I go to the World Trade Organization conference negotiating on the UK’s behalf, and some of my counterparts spend the entire time in meetings talking about colonialism, blame the west for their economic difficulties, and make demands that would make all of us— not just in this country, but around the world— poorer.”