This little island country with very little sunshine these days, once ruled an empire upon which the sun never set with a civil service employing less than 4,000 bureaucrats.
There is really no more that I need to say about how great a nation the Brits once were. Because by contrast, today, we cannot run the NHS with an army of over 750,000 bureaucrats (most of whom have no medical training).
It is true that we had the world's most effective military machine for most of the period from Nelson to Churchill. But one needs much more than an effective military machine to maintain a worldwide empire for 2 centuries.
The British Raj in India employed one soldier for every 100,000 Indians and even at that ratio, the British administrators we so bored and so unbelievably financially successful that they had to invent a game that lasted the whole week, to give themselves something to do.
A Nigerian minicab driver once put it like this to me. I came to this country because of British justice. You people have no idea how fortunate you are. In my country there is only money. There is no justice whatsoever. The litigant with the most money wins every time. That is the only criterion for every judge.
I was so fortunate to be born in the UK in the late 50s. Because I saw the best of the post colonial British spirit first hand which I would define from my experience and from I was taught to be as follows.
1. An even handed sense of fair play
2. An acceptance and rejoicing in and respect for all the different cultures in the world
3. A sense of justice especially by supporting the underdog.
4. A sense of public duty to one's institution and one's nation.
5. A joy in serving people of all nations.
6. A sense of duty to serve people.
7. An unquestioning adherence to free speech and free thought absolutism
8. The axiom that scientific truth is more important than academic career and more generally principle is more important than career.
9. Doing the right thing was far more important than getting the right money.
10. Ultimate professionalism was the goal. Extraordinary competence with total disdain for all types of corruption was its manifestation.
11. A great sense of humour, which permeated all decision making.
12. A belief that it was the duty of every British citizen to improve his nation and the world.
13. A belief in the authority of the individual.
14. However it suffered from some elitism and from pervasive classism. It was not fully meritocratic at the higher levels in its heyday.
So more concisely it was duty, service, professionalism, humour, justice, truth, fair play, freedom of expression and supporting the underdog.
These were the fruitages of the British spirit in the 60s and the 70s and before. I think we learned a lot from all the nations of the world and I think we taught them what we knew.
I spoke to a Ghanaian recently who explained his nation's view of the British as educators. His father was at pains to explain to him that knowledge was more powerful than money. He learned that from us. And he was right. Money will die. Knowledge will not. He did not view us as enslavers because his entire nation was based on one tribe conquering and enslaving another before we arrived. He was proud of the fact that even without guns, his nation defeated the British 4 times before we worked out how to win at battle. His ancestors saw the power of our superior scientific knowledge and developed a hunger for it which still survives today. I have found Africans to be humble open minded open hearted and keen to cooperate with the British. They just regard us as another tribe, which used to have better scientific technical engineering and medical understanding than them.
I write this article to preserve my recollections of a nation which taught me how to think gracefully, deeply and freely and how to be impartial and fair in my judgements and decisions and why the measure of a man is the extent of his service to others, not the extent of service to himself. A nation which showed me the beauty of nature and the beauty of man's attempts to understand it. A nation which put principle before money and that not only paid for my education through scholarships and state paid course fees from grammar school to PhD and would have paid beyond that, but in addition to that actually paid me personally in the form of student GRANTS to receive such a fantastic education. Therefore I will not see this great nation that freely trusted me with all the knowledge I could ever want, trashed by anti scientific, anti professional, anti British globalist sellouts masquerading as one or other branch of the uniparty who are an insult to the great name and reputation of Britain which has been an inspiration to mankind worldwide for generations.
You cannot manage a worldwide empire with 4,000 civil servants unless you have huge trust in the individual. Not a century ago this nation trusted a handful of men to run an entire province in India (having very little ability to communicate with them by today's standards). Today no man or woman is trusted to remain hydrated in hot weather (not that we ever have any of that) without a health warning from Transport Against Londoners.
In 1880 Thomas Crapper invented the U bend and the floating ballcock valve and popularised (but did not invent) the flushing toilet being the first to display one in his showroom. In 2024 our rivers and seas are full of crap from corruptly regulated water companies.
In the last 809 years this nation has produced:
Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton and King John: The Magna Carta in 1215: The first declaration of human rights in the UK.
John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, King James: Gave us the bible beautifully and pretty faithfully translated into English. This lead to the British people becoming literate in order that they could read the word of God.
Sir Isaac Newton: Newtonian mechanics, Gravitation, Optics, Calculus
William Shakespeare: Used the English language in the most powerful imaginative and captivating manner with questions and metaphors almost as good as those found in the Holy Scriptures which were the platform for his eloquence.
William Wordsworth: Poems of such captivating beauty as would shame the scribblings of this old mathematician.
Horatio Nelson: Defeated all maritime opponents of the British Empire
James Clerk Maxwell: Deduced the beautiful equations of Electromagnetism from which one can deduce that the speed of light is a constant.
Charles Babbage: Invented the programmable computer.
Alan Turing: Advanced computing software and hardware and pretty much invented computer hacking!
Sir Tim Berners Lee: Invented html and the world wide web (the internet).
Charles Darwin: Postulated the incorrect but brilliant theory of evolution
J. J. Thomson: Discovered the electron.
Ernest Rutherford: Postulated in 1912 with Niels Bohr, the Rutherford Bohr model of the atom, with electrons (determining chemistry) revolving around a nucleus (which was to determine nuclear physics). He then split the Nitrogen Atom (7
protons and 7 neutrons) into a proton and a residual element by firing alpha particles at it. The residual element would have to have been Carbon (6 protons and 6 neutrons) - but that would also have involved splitting off a neutron
particle which was unknown and therefore undetectable at that time. He did this on 1917October10 at Manchester University. But this is not regarded as splitting the atom because Rutherford failed to identify Carbon as the end result (the
periodic table was not known at that time and a few atoms of Carbon are not easy to find in an engineering lab). Rutherford did detect an ejected proton however. So he did in fact split the Nitrogen atom. Then in 1932April14 Cockcroft
and Walton (working under Rutherford at the Cavendish labs in Cambridge) were credited with being the first to split the atom having fired a proton beam at a Lithium atom (3 protons and 4 neutrons) and produced 2 Helium atoms (2 protons
and 2 neutrons each).
Paul Dirac: Predicted the existence of antimatter from the Dirac Equation of Quantum Mechanics and invented the Dirac delta function in Mathematics
Sir Alexander Flemming: Discovered Penicillin.
Crick and Watson: Discovered the molecular structure of the 4 base DNA code
Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Helped his father build the first tunnel under a navigable river (the Thames). Built the first propeller driven iron hulled ocean going ship, the SS Great Britain, the Great Western Railway and the Clifton
suspension Bridge
John Logie Baird: Invented the TV and the colour TV
William Cullen: Invented the Fridge
Winston Churchill: Defeated Hitler with a lot of help from the commonwealth and the USA. Constructed many famous and beloved one line quotations
Robert William Thomson: Invented the pneumatic tyre and the fountain pen.
Michael Faraday: Discovered electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis
Thomas Crapper: Invented the U bend and the floating ballcock valve and popularised the flushing toilet
The Beatles: Wrote and performed positive melodic pop songs which delighted billions of people and will have helped many people recover from emotional and mental trauma.
William Wilberforce: Lead the abolition of the slave trade in the British Parliament.
Joseph Mallord William Turner: Famous landscape and seascape paintings
John Constable: Famous landscapes such as the Hay Wain
Gilbert and Sullivan: Famous for comical musical operas such as HMS Pinafore and the Pirates of Penzance
John Loudon McAdam and Edgar Purnell Hooley: McAdam invented compacted stone macadam in the early 19th century and Hooley added tar to make Tarmac in 1902.
Umpteen entertaining pop artists and groups from the Beatles and the Stones onwards: Worldwide hits.
Who could not be proud of sharing their nationality with such creative people? And who could not be ashamed at those who attempt to invalidate such a creative group and their historic achievements for personal political power in the coming digital 4th Reich?
Britain achieved most of these things because we were encouraged to think and express ourselves freely and openly without fear of having our jobs or our liberty removed for failing to conform to some legally enforced political social(ist) orthodoxy. Had social(ist) credit scores been in force in the days of these luminaries, mankind would have seen precious few of their contributions. Censorship and control freak invalidation stifles creativity and happiness along with it.
Science and art and all creativity flourishes in a society which worships truth. It dies in a society which censors truth and replaces it with politics, which is the art of deception and has become the appropriation of votes and power through slander, through media bias, through fake news, through fake votes and through fake candidates.
For a more humour take on the above - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFmpTRLhcWE