The record of what you do is more important than what you actually do

 

Lying about our history? Now that's something Britain excels at

Protesters may be toppling statues, but millions of records about the end of empire and the slave trade were destroyed by the state by Ian Cobain in The Guardian


 

Members of the Devon Regiment assisting police in searching homes for Mau Mau rebels, Karoibangi, Kenya, circa 1954. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images


It was inevitable that some would insist that ripping the statue of slave trader Edward Colston from its plinth and disposing of it in a harbour in Bristol was an act of historical revisionism; that others would argue that its removal was long overdue, and that the act itself was history in the making. After more statues were removed across the United States and Europe, Boris Johnson weighed in, arguing that “to tear [these statues] down would be to lie about our history”.

But lying about our history – and particularly about our late-colonial history – has been a habit of the British state for decades.

In 2013 I discovered that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had been unlawfully concealing 1.2m historical files at a highly secure government compound at Hanslope Park, north of London.

Those files contained millions upon millions of pages of records stretching back to 1662, spanning the slave trade, the Boer wars, two world wars, the cold war and the UK’s entry into the European Common Market. More than 20,000 files concerned the withdrawal from empire.

There were so many of them that they took up 15 miles of floor-to-ceiling shelving at a specially built repository that a Foreign Office minister had opened in a private ceremony in 1992. Their retention was in breach of the Public Records Acts, and they had effectively been held beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.

The FCO was not alone: at two warehouses in the English midlands, the UK’s Ministry of Defence was at the same time unlawfully hoarding 66,000 historical files, including many about the conflict in Northern Ireland.

When the files concerned with the withdrawal from empire began to be transferred to the UK’s National Archives – where they should have been for years, and where historians and members of the public could finally examine them – it became clear that enormous amounts of documentation had been destroyed during the process of decolonisation.

Helpfully perhaps, colonial officials had completed “destruction certificates”, in which they declared that they had disposed of sensitive papers, and many of these certificates had survived within the secret archive.

Beginning in India in 1947, government officials had incinerated material that would in any way embarrass Her Majesty’s government, her armed forces, or her colonial civil servants. At the end of that year, an Observer correspondent noted large palls of smoke appearing over government offices in Jerusalem.

As decolonisation gathered pace, British officials developed a series of parallel file registries in the colonies: one that was to be handed over to post-independence governments, and one that contained papers that were to be steadily destroyed or flown back to London.

As a consequence, newly independent governments found themselves attempting to administer their territories on the basis of an incomplete record of what had happened before.

In Uganda in March 1961, colonial officials gave this process a new name: Operation Legacy. Before long the term spread to neighbouring colonies, where only “British subjects of European descent” were to be involved in the weeding and destruction of documents, a process that was overseen by police special branch officers. A new security classification, the “W” or “Watch series”, was introduced, and sensitive papers were stamped with a red letter W.

Subsequently, there was the “Guard series” of papers stamped with a letter “G”. These could be shared with officials from Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, but whenever this happened “the information should be accompanied by an oral warning that it must not be communicated to the Americans”. The Americans, it seems to have been assumed, were likely to be less forgiving of the sins of empire.

In May that year the colonial secretary, Iain Macleod, issued instructions that the documents to be destroyed or smuggled back to London should include anything that might embarrass HMG; embarrass her military, police or public servants; that might compromise sources of intelligence; or which could be used “unethically” by post-independence governments.

By “unethically”, Macleod appears to mean that he did not wish to see the governments of newly independent nations expose, or threaten to expose, some of the more challenging aspects of the end of empire. There was certainly plenty to hide: the torture and murder of rebels in Kenya; the brutal suppression of insurgencies in Cyprus and later Aden; massacres in Malaya; the toppling of a democratically elected government in British Guiana.

Instructions were also issued on the means by which papers should be destroyed: when they were burned, “the waste should be reduced to ash and the ashes broken up”. In Kenya, officials were informed that “it is permissible, as an alternative to destruction by fire, for documents to packed in weighed crates and dumped in very deep and current-free waters at maximum practicable distance from the coast”.

Operation Legacy was, as one colonial official admitted, “an orgy of destruction”, and it was carried out across the globe between the late 1940s and the early 70s.

The operation – and its attempts to conceal and manipulate history in an attempt to sculpt an official narrative – speaks of a certain jitteriness on the part of the British state, as if it feared that interpretations of the past that were based upon its own records would find it difficult to celebrate the “greatness” of British history.

It seems likely that uncertainty about the imperial mission also played a part in the commissioning of Colston’s statue. It was erected in 1895, a full 174 years after his death, at a time when the British were anxious about their rapidly expanded empire. The first Boer war had ended badly for them, exposing the physical weakness of soldiers recruited from urban slums; the United States was emerging as an industrial force; and Germany appeared to be challenging the Royal Navy’s maritime dominance.

The answer, it seems, was the erection of statues, up and down the United Kingdom, of early “heroes” of empire – even slave traders – as an inspiring example to the adventurers and imperialists to come.

Now that’s an act of act of historical revisionism.

Why landlords should pass a fitting person test and criminal record checks

Penny Anderson in The Guardian


Being a landlord is a privilege, and it shouldn’t be available to everybody: with the power they have over their tenants should come a sense of responsibility

 

‘Owners misunderstand, ignore or forget legal requirement to issue proper notices to quit, or the need for prior warning of inspection visits.’ Photograph: Alamy


There are more private landlords than ever. Many are reasonable. Some are even excellent, but letting property is largely unrestricted.

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has highlighted the failure of his predecessor Boris Johnson to sign up 100,000 landlords to his much vaunted London Rental Standard, which aims to help landlords with things such as having a gas safety check every year, and the laws around deposits and fire safety. After two years in operation, the scheme had attracted fewer than 2,000 landlords in addition to the 13,300 it inherited.

The files reveal that officials warned the mayor at the outset that his target was unattainable and that it would take “more than 50 years to accredit a sufficient number of landlords to meet the target”. Another note read: “We simply don’t have the resources to proactively enforce the London Rental Standard, which leaves us with an unacceptable reputational risk.” Johnson’s betrayal of renters in the capital after all the promises made is embarrassing for him, but a disaster for tenants. There is no doubt that the job needs doing.

Dilettante amateur property investors often know little about basic good practice, the law or simply what’s best for everyone when it comes to running their business in a civilised, humane fashion – and yes, it is a business, with the potential for profit and loss. They might be reluctant or “forced” rentiers (a term I prefer to landlord), with the family home in negative equity, compelled to rent it out if they want to move on. Outside London this is still a reality, and with the predicted house-price crash on Brexit, that practice may become more widespread.

This situation fuels the likelihood that tenants will be turfed out as soon as possible when the building increases in value. Remember that all tenants live under the threat of just two months’ notice when their initial assured shorthold tenancy rolls over. There is no security for renters.

There are recurring issues, such as owners who do not understand the concept of reasonable wear and tear expecting their properties to remain pristine and unmarked, even when the low-quality carpets and sofas they chose were threadbare to begin with. This in turn propagates the now traditional unlawful deposit retention/deduction battle, which can see mundane events – the simple act of using the sofa perhaps – cited as justification for the retention of hundreds of pounds, obliging tenants to fight for, and rarely succeed in getting, the return of hard-earned money paid up-front.

‘There are recurring issues, such as owners not understanding the concept of reasonable wear and tear, even when the low-quality carpets and sofas they chose were threadbare to begin with.’ Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

There are the problems of legal management. Owners misunderstand, ignore or forget the legal requirement to issue proper notices to quit, or the need for prior warning of inspection visits, using the power of thought or suggestion instead. Some owners I have rented from imagine they can let themselves in whenever they see fit.

Let’s be reasonable. We know that property doesn’t manage itself, and can be costly to maintain. The obligation to repair causes tension once owners, even the best-intentioned ones, grow acquainted with the expense of emergency out-of-hours plumbing.

Some owners – through indolence or meanness – would rather let the place rot; a friend’s landlord knowingly allows water from the leaky tiles to be absorbed by cavity wall insulation. Ultimately, his roof will cave in, but he doesn’t seem to care – either about the tenant or the ultimate expense. Other owners issue “revenge” notices – where tenants are forced out for insisting on damage being made good. Tenants who stand up for their rights are frequently viewed as troublemakers.

Tenants are not angelic. Some give as good as they get in the owner-tenant relationship. But the balance of power between the two is clearly in the landlord’s favour. Isn’t it time for power with more responsibility?

A requirement for landlord training would allow neophyte property moguls to escape being bogged down in pointless, petty battles with tenants. They also would learn about both the availability (and wisdom) of landlord insurance and the pros and cons of letting agents, who charge up to 15% of income and often do very little to earn it.

Being a landlord is a profitable privilege, but it isn’t one that should be automatically available to everybody. It should be earned by those who prove themselves knowledgeable and capable, having passed both a “fitting person” test and a criminal records check. Don’t forget: landlords possess keys to their tenants’ homes, and need to understand obligations. Owners would also benefit from better safeguards and more clarity because both would improve their relationships with tenants, and contented tenants stay longer in their properties.

The rentier economy marches on and will continue to do so, because set against the decline in pensions and increasing job insecurity, property is regarded as a solid guarantee against poverty. The fact that people make money from renting isn’t a problem. Nor is the fact that these transactions occur in the private sector. What’s missing and badly needed is the idea of responsibility.

Those who benefited from Thatcherism must admit that others suffered

No one could bring in change of the speed and size that Thatcher did and not expect any flaws or problems to emerge

• 
• • Deborah Orr
  • The Guardian, Friday 19 April 2013 19.00 BST

Margaret Thatcher changed the UK, but not in quite the way she might have envisaged, writes Deborah Orr. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Margaret Thatcher's funeral was absolutely perfect, especially if, like me, you're a keen student of irony. The magnitude of the occasion paid testament to Thatcher's significance as a leader. She really did change Britain, and that was acknowledged. Yet the fact that she went out in a blaze of public subsidy, union flag draped over her coffin, paid testament to the fact that she did not change the nation in quite the way she might have envisaged. Thatcher sought to maintain the state's political power, but devolve its economic responsibility. Her body was wheeled through the streets in a nation where political power has been devolved, while Westminster continues to struggle to work out how to manage its economic responsibilities effectively.

It's important never to forget the three words that became synonymous with Thatcher's election victory in 1979: "Labour isn't working". This, of course, referred to the dole queues that had been growing ever longer in Britain during the 1970s. When Thatcher came to power, around a million people were unemployed, and the Conservative argument appeared to be that this was the fault of the government.

Punitive taxation of the wealthy, too much effort to please insatiable unions and state ownership of industries with high profit-making potential were diagnosed as the reasons why jobs were disappearing. Much of this was swept away, never to return (unless you count a brief recent period in which the higher rate of taxation went up to 50%). Yet these changes didn't stop the spread of mass unemployment. On the contrary, they accelerated it. Those changes – all on the sacred Thatcherite list of innovations that brought economic renewal to Britain – did not arrest the problem that Thatcher herself had singled out as the most visible symptom of Britain's ailments. Far from it.

Nevertheless, economic renewal, of a sort, did come. Released from the burden of high taxation, the better-off suddenly had much more money to spend. The 1980s became the designer decade, as the rich began consuming conspicuously – and "lifestyle" became important. Yet, those who had lost their jobs were in no position to start fashion lines, open restaurants or market such ventures in the burgeoning and quickly commercialising media. In the south-east, some found employment in the exploding financial services industry, either as a part of it, or as workers servicing the wealthy individuals it was creating. If you had the skills, talent or geographical propinquity, you were in luck. But this wasn't economic renewal. It was economic reinvention. The significance of this cannot be overstated. Thatcher completely reconfigured Britain's economic model. She did change Britain. Crucially, however, those who were made unemployed by the hugely accelerated decline of old industries were, in millions of individual cases, unable to gain employment in the new industries.

The appalling dereliction of the Conservatives was not in failing to foresee this problem. It was in failing to recognise that this painful disconnect between the country's population and the country's economy had occurred. The unemployed, rather than being viewed sympathetically, as people whose futures had been disrupted by economic forces far beyond their control, were viewed contemptuously, as too stubborn and lazy to adapt – the pathetic architects of their own misfortune.

How can it be that Thatcher and Thatcherism are wholly responsible for the positive aspects of Britain's economic transformation – as evinced by the fact that her death was an historic event – and not responsible for the negative aspects? How can intelligent adults persuade themselves that unemployment is the result of welfare dependency, when it was unemployment that came first? The idea, in Thatcher's Britain, was that those millions would start to find themselves jobs, once they were desperate enough. The feckless would not be provided with subsidised housing, decent state education or reliable health services. That would get them off their bums.

Supporters of Thatcher, keepers of her flame, insist that Britain's current economic woes are the fault of Labour. Yet, neither Blair's long government nor Brown's short one sought to change the trajectory of the new economy that Thatcher had wrought. All they did was try to ameliorate the abject condition into which those displaced by it had fallen, like a bunch of trendy vicars.

So Labour spent the money generated by the new model on administering to the casualties of the old model's passing. I'd have liked to have seen Labour win intellectual arguments; I'd have liked to have seen Labour persuading the beneficiaries of this new model that their prosperity had been paid for in terrible, lasting human consequences, that could only be addressed with the understanding and co-operation of the winners. Instead, all Labour did was illustrate how expensive it is to hide decline, even as they let it continue. Manufacturing shrank more under Labour than it did under the Tories. Inequality increased. At no point was a sober assessment of what had gone right under Thatcherism – and what had gone wrong – ever agreed, let alone acted upon.

This week it was confirmed that the number of unemployed people in Britain stands at 2.56 million. (I dread to think how large this figure would be, in comparison to 1979, if the figures were still calculated in the same way.) These statistics are an embarrassment and a difficulty for the government. But they are far more consequential for the people behind the statistics.

Osborne wept at Thatcher's funeral. I doubt his tears were for all of the people he had failed to provide jobs for, having promised that pruning the public sector would cause jobs to sprout in the private sector, just as pruning dead wood off a rose causes blooms to multiply. And that's the real tragedy of Thatcherism. Its successes remain too contested for its enthusiasts, even now, to get off the defensive and admit that it wasn't all good.

I hope that the funeral, despite all its contradictions and ironies, can be seen by Thatcherism's supporters as an acknowledgement, however muted and grudging, that she brought about change so fundamental that it would be ludicrous to argue that it was somehow puny enough to be derailed by Blair and Brown.

You don't starve people into becoming entrepreneurs. You don't even starve them into being upstanding citizens. You just starve them into submission. Welfare dependency is submission to an economic model that shrugs at mass unemployment and says it's a fact of life. That model is Thatcherism, and a recognition of all aspects of its enormous legacy is long overdue.

Thatcherism left Britain politically, economically and regionally divided, a state that was meant to be proud that it stood for something in the world again, even as Thatcherism warned that the state was the enemy of freedom and not to be relied upon. No one could bring in change of the shape, speed and size that Thatcher did, and not expect any flaws or problems to emerge. To say that she's responsible for the country's recent triumphs, but not for any of its woes, defies all logic.