Letters: The British Empire: good, bad or indifferent?

These letters appear in the 25th January 2016 edition of The Independent

The Governor of Pesh-Bolak Ali Muhammad surrenders to General MacPhearson during the period of British Empire rule in India. (Getty Images)

“Students should be taught the evils of the British Empire” is a slanted but useful article (23 January). They should of course be given a balanced account. The subject is important to us and to how we are seen abroad, and in particular by our former subjects.

However one piece in the article is particularly misleading. There was a terrible famine over more than one year in Bengal during the Second World War. Wheat was diverted to the Fourteenth Army, which was defending India against Japanese invasion. But only a small proportion of that army was British. Mostly Indian soldiers were fed as a result. Should the Fourteenth Army have been left to starve?

Hugh Mackay

Edinburgh

There are more abiding legacies of British colonial rule than those represented by a statue in an Oxford College. Today whenever we put tea leaves in a cup and add boiling water we are continuing to profit from the seizure by the colonialists of land which for centuries had provided a living for those from whom we took it.

Having seized the land, which, to the British appeared to be “wild”, we then offered them jobs on the tea and other plantations which we established there which we were now using for our delectation and profit. When we left, we handed back the land, not to the original families, but to those who continue to exploit it for the tea, coffee or rubber which we had planted on it.

A week ago a programme on TV drew attention to the inhuman conditions under which those who pluck the tea leaves for our breakfast tables live; conditions which no self-respecting trade union would allow to continue. Unfortunately we were less concerned about planting trade unions than tea.

Graeme Jackson

Gloucester

What a wonderful idea for a set of historians to propagate a theory that the British Empire was a “bad thing”.

The fact that a YouGov poll showed that only 40 per cent of the British think it was a good thing, while nearly all Britain’s former colonies are now, as independent states, happy to belong to the Commonwealth, suggests there is hardly a pressing need for such a campaign, but it would probably sell books, particularly abroad.

Of course it would be possible to show that the British Empire was either a “good thing” or a “bad thing” depending on choice, though bad would be much more commercial.

Indeed, there is a real danger in this area that there will be no interest in treating the matter in context, so allowing the impression to emerge that Britain was somehow unique in building an empire, and that the peoples in British colonies uniformly lived worse lives than all other people.

Here will be another opportunity for some with political axes to grind to show how much – to paraphrase W S Gilbert – they love all countries but their own.

Tony Pointon

Portsmouth

Labour’s dilemma over Corbyn

The editor’s letter “Don’t shoot me if I say Corbyn’s Labour really isn’t working” (23 January) was commendable. UK democracy needs an opposition party to whom the many will listen because it offers sensible and achievable alternatives.

Unfortunately outside of Labour’s northern or metropolitan heartlands Corbynism is a political and sociological irrelevance. The aspirational types, the lower middle class, the suburban dwellers, the middle aged, most of the elderly and increasingly the self-employed and skilled working class are not Corbyn voters and will never accept his Old Labour leftist policies, reminiscent of the bygone 1970s.

Look at the towns here on the northern side of the M25: Watford, St Albans, Welwyn-Hatfield, Stevenage and Harlow. All voted Labour two or three times under Tony Blair, but now they have respectable Tory majorities. Harlow, not a wealthy town by any means is emblematic, with a decline in Labour’s appeal from 54 per cent in 1997 to only 30 per cent last May.

Non-partisan press like yourselves remind us “it is what it is”; and with the data showing a Conservative majority likely for 10 more years, Labour remains in a grave state and needs a paper that will fight for a centre-left party, be it Labour or possibly a reborn Social Democratic Labour party with national appeal to all social groups desperate to challenge the Conservative hegemony, particularly in England.

Peter Carabine

St Albans, Hertfordshire

You may be right that Corbyn’s Labour Party isn’t working but your front page story about GE Healthcare avoiding paying tax and receiving more in tax benefits is the reason why so many of us voted for Jeremy Corbyn.

I can understand why the Tories do not do anything about this; they are on the side of big business and live by the philosophy that helping a few people become mega-rich is the way to run a society. But Labour governments of recent decades have fallen for the same ridiculous idea.

The growing number of large companies that are finding ways to avoid paying tax, encouraged and courted by politicians of all opinions except the left (and by europhiles such as Mr Junker, the president of the EU Commission – which is why I will vote to leave the EU) see themselves as outside the societies in which their customers and workers live. How long before we are in a sci-fi nightmare where the Earth is ruled by “the Company”? Meanwhile, I support Corbyn because he is the only one in this country giving us hope.

Mike Jenkins

Bromley, Kent

Google pays its taxes, just a bit

So, after a cosy chat and a cup of tea, corporate giant Google has magnanimously agreed to pay additional tax of £130m dating back to 2005, some £13m on average per year. To put this in context, in 2014 Google’s revenue in the UK was £6.5bn.

Not only is Google failing to make a fair contribution, but it is also free-riding on publicly funded infrastructure, specifically the £1.2bn the Government has invested in superfast broadband, without which, of course, its business would be impossible.

As a member of the European Parliament’s special tax committee such private deals undermine my democratic role and diminish my power to introduce fair tax rules for everybody. What we are fighting for is a system where all companies must report publicly how much they earn in each different country, so-called country-by-country reporting. This would give us the information we need to bring tax out of the shadows and force corporations, tax authorities and supine politicians to be publicly accountable.

Molly Scott Cato MEP

Green, South West England and Gibraltar

Brussels

No prizes for second cities

Change the measure and you change the country’s second city (letters, 22, 23 January). Glasgow also has a buzz about parts of it and I expect could surpass Birmingham and Manchester by some criteria.

What is perhaps the more important point is the ever-growing gap between any of the above and the metropolis. There’s more activity going on in almost any street within London’s congestion charging zone, and many districts beyond that exhibit more of a big-city feel than any of the second-city contenders.

Looking out from the roof garden of the new Birmingham city library I could see only one tower crane (over New Street station) and saw a report of a sale of a block of land containing several large commercial buildings close to the new Paradise Circus in Birmingham’s central business district with a price tag that would barely pay for a single flat in One Hyde Park. The gulf is huge, with ever more business, media, entertainment and cultural life gravitating to London.

Internationally, do our second rung of cities compare with Lyons, Barcelona, Hamburg or Milan in big-city feel?

Max Beran

East Hagbourne, Oxfordshire (with second residence in Birmingham)

I remember the late Brian Redhead commenting on Birmingham’s claim to be Britain’s second city: “In Manchester, we always assumed it was London.”

Cheryl Winepress

Lund, East Yorkshire

What could a man like Litvinenko expect?

Why all this indignation over the demise of the spy Alexander Litvinenko? He was a traitor to Russia and a double-agent. What did people expect would happen? It is a shame past British governments did not apply the same robust policy to Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt.

David Skinner

Hornchurch, Essex

Don’t tax sugar, just limit it

The answer to sugar related illnesses and the cost to the NHS is to limit by law the amount of sugar that food manufacturers can put in their products.

Angela Pettit

Winkfield, Berkshire