The Horsell's Mouth Politics, pedantry and personal interests

Another classic blog post from Cllr Olly Wells, who seems intent on talking about anything apart from Knaphill.

This time, he’s hand-wringing about the return of foreign artefacts from British museums and having a good old Liberal self-flagellation session about the lingering wrongs of the Empire. Snore. On the bright side though, he does have a talent for the misplaced assumption. At the moment, he’s got relatives over from Taiwan.

“They have been doing a lot of sightseeing which has been good fun, but as usual
when people visit from abroad questions are raised about our imperial past which
we seem to have forgotten in the UK”

As usual!? More than 31 million people visited the UK in 2008. It seems hard to imagine that they are walking around London admiring Buckingham Palace or exploring Shakespearean Stratford overwhelming tour guides with accusatory questions about imperialism. Most tourists to Britain are just happy to see some sunshine and follow a fat woman with an umbrella.

But Cllr Wells hasn’t finished.

“The key question is should we return all the historical artefacts in the
British and other museums that we didn’t purchase or receive as gifts?”

Funny, I thought the key questions in museums were things like “how old is this?”, “what was it used for?” and “what is its historical significance?” Clearly I was wrong. The question that visitors to the V&A or the Ashmolean ought to be asking themselves is “under what circumstances was this artefact acquired and does it accord with the European Convention on Human Rights?” It all goes to show what a weird world many Lib Dems live in.

Finally, we get

“I don’t want to be seen as anti-patriotic, but it is worth noting that a
significant proportion of the world’s population appears to see us in an
imperial light, rightly or wrongly.”

Perish the thought that Cllr Wells should be viewed as unpatriotic – I didn’t know he cared – but no, it’s not worth noting because the only part of the world’s population that sees us in the light he describes are our enemies.

The problem with Liberals is they’ve spent so long worrying about what this country’s enemies believe that eventually they’ve started to think like them. It’s not good.