Does any erstwhile Conservative voter anywhere really believe that David Cameron is fit to be British Prime Minister?

Here, along with deputy chief prefect Nick Clegg (who claims that Britain has a real problem with its history “worse than Germany’s”) is the supreme moralist, in an astonishing attack made on his own country, maintaining on Monday 4^th April before a Pakistani audience, that Britain is “responsible” for the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan, “as with so many of the world’s problems”.

The Basic Facts of Indian Independence

The facts are easily ascertainable if Cameron could be bothered to read them up, or even be advised by someone who has.  It was the dearest wish, indeed expectation early on, by all British officials who served in the Indian Empire, that it should be handed over intact to a successor Indian federal government which made provision for its many different cultures.  Building on the 1919 Act, all the institutions of government created by the Government of India Act 1935 were designed to do this.  The 1935 Act, which was preceded by 10 years of consultation with just about every group and community in the Indian Empire, was predicated on this expectation.  But Muhammad Ali Jinnah, as head of the Moslem League, insisted on a new country, Pakistan, being formed from predominantly Muslim provinces (the name itself was dreamed up by Jinnah and his friends at Cambridge in 1933), completely independent of the new state of India.  And so it happened, at enormous cost (around one million lives in the Punjab alone) and a continuing dispute over the political destination of Kashmir (Indian Prime Minister Nehru’s home province).  The great majority of the people in Kashmir were Muslim and naturally wanted to join Pakistan, which became its immediate geographical neighbour.  Nehru and Kashmir’s Hindu ruler, Hari Singh, insisted it join the new India.

Britain has had absolutely nothing to do with the whipping up of inter-communal hatred which was the root cause of this tragedy.  Instead as independence approached in 1947 some 50,000 British troops found themselves trying to maintain order in that vast country while literally millions of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, tore each other apart in a frenzy of hate which is something many of the survivors are ashamed of (or should be).  In 1947-49, 1965 and 1971 (when Bangladesh split from Pakistan), India and Pakistan went to war with each other.  Certainly Cameron should be ashamed of himself for this latest gaffe coming on top of his accusation last year that Pakistan exports terrorism and his admonition to the British people that they should approach India “in a spirit of humility” (why, one may ask).

Apologising for Britain is now a habit of 40s-something Prime Ministers

First we had former Prime Minister Blair’s “deep sorrow” at Britain’s role in the African slave trade (in which everyone else and the Africans themselves participated), but no acknowledgement of Britain’s truly great role in suppressing it by means of the Royal Navy anti-slavery patrols maintained for over one hundred years up to 1914.  Now we have Cameron’s latest outburst which is all too typical of his naïve schoolboy approach to our country’s domestic affairs and international relationships.  Like his fellow prefect, Nick Clegg, his utterances are, at once, spur of the moment, unresearched, desperate to please whatever audience he is addressing (unless it’s English and middle-class), purchasing a few moments of applause from foreign audiences with British taxpayers’ money, prideless and ignorant of Britain’s history, uncomprehending of the immense complexity of human affairs, utterly unworthy of the post he currently holds.  Now (April 5^th) to compound the damage he is doing to our country by more liberal breast-beating, his government has announced that all 8,000 files on the last years of British rule in around 37 former colonies will be opened up to public scrutiny.  This will benefit only would-be historians trawling for dirt, and human rights lawyers avid for claims to pursue against British taxpayers, even though thousands of millions of pounds of aid has been paid to these territories since they gained independence and assumed responsibility for claims relating to the colonial and post colonial jurisdictions.  Still what does Cameron care, so long as he thinks he is seen to be “doing the right thing” in the eyes of the salons of Westminster, Nairobi and Islamabad.

The cobbler should see to his last

As our post of March 30 says, now that he is back in London, he should apply himself (with all due “humility”) to making sure that the Metropolitan Police can protect Central London from atrocious rioting and remove Brian Hawes’s squalid camp in Parliament Square before the day of the forthcoming Royal Wedding which, in case he has forgotten in his welter of breast-beating moralism, is to be held on 29^th April – just 3 weeks on Friday.

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