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BOOMERANG: Kojo Koram’s documentary shows how empire made today’s unequal Britain [1]

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Date: 2023-05

Lenin’s famous quote that “there are weeks where decades happen” would be a suitable epitaph for the tombstone of the Liz Truss premiership.

As commentators focus on her obvious personal limitations as a politician to explain her spectacular failure, the truth is far broader than one person being out of her depth. Truss and her reckless experimental budget unleashed the full weight of decades of British post-imperial economic ideologies, which collapsed upon the hapless prime minister and washed her out of office in record time.

Britain’s stagnant growth and productivity, spiralling wealth inequality and disappearing industries are long-standing issues that not only predate Truss, but connect all the way back to the dramatic changes that Britain’s economy has undertaken over the past century.

We often talk about Britain as the birthplace of industrial capitalism as though industrialisation occurred via immaculate conception on this sacred island. In fact, the industrialisation of Britain is a story that spans the four corners of the global map, stretching from the manufacture of cotton in India to the extraction of gold in Guinea and the cultivation of sugar in Jamaica.

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Similarly, we talk about Britain’s deindustrialisation as if it was solely a domestic story, a tale of Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill, the National Union of Mineworkers and the Institute of Economic Affairs, the locking of doors of factories in the north whilst erecting new skyscrapers in Canary Wharf. But the deindustrialisation of Britain, like its industrialisation, is part of a global story, one that is intimately connected to the challenge that decolonisation posed to the global capitalist world during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

In recent years, decolonisation has come to mean statue wars, curriculum debates and tedious media storms about cancel culture and political correctness. Almost entirely erased is the extent to which the actual era of formal decolonisation was a profound disruption in the given structure of capitalist production and exchange.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/boomerang-john-barnes-kojo-koram-dalia-gebrial-clive-lewis-empire/

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