Great Britain

The United Kingdom (UK)—which includes the constituent countries of England, Scotland, and Wales along with the territory of Northern Ireland—is a stable democracy that regularly holds free elections and hosts a vibrant media sector. While the government generally enforces robust protections for political rights and civil liberties, recent years have featured new restrictions on the right to protest as well as rising Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment.

Henry VIII, had been adulterating the English shilling, the basic coin ..., by replacing 40 percent of the silver in the coin with base metals—a clever way, so he thought, to increase the government’s income without raising taxes ... Queen Elizabeth ... called in all the adulterated shillings her father had minted, melted them down, removed all the base metal, and minted pure silver shillings to replace the "bad money." The English shilling became the most sought-after coinage in international commerce and put Britain on the road to become the superpower of the world for centuries to come.

Casting further doubt on the efficacy of gun control, the United Kingdom in 1997 passed a total ban on the private possession of handguns following a high-profile public shooting in Scotland and all but eliminated every other form of gun ownership. This is the precise "antidote" desired by gun-control supporters elsewhere. Six years later, "peaceful" Britain now has the highest overall crime rate in the Western world, and violent crime is skyrocketing. Gang wars and drive-by shootings are increasing. Such is the wisdom of gun control.

Everyone agrees that in the 100 years between 1750 and 1850 there took place in Great Britain profound economic changes. It was the age of the Industrial Revolution, complete with a cascade of technical innovations, a vast increase in industrial production, a renaissance of world trade, and a rapid growth of urban populations. Where historians and other observers clash is in the interpretation of these great changes ... The enemies of freedom—of capitalism—have successfully cast this matter as an irrefutable indictment of the capitalist system as it was emerging in 19th-century Britain.

Protectionists within his own party, the Tories, cried out in opposition and Peel tendered his resignation to Queen Victoria. She refused to accept it ... The British parliamentary session of 1869 was largely and successfully devoted to Irish disestablishment: that is, to removing the Anglican Church as the state church ... In 1874 elections, Gladstone's Liberal Party lost decisively—another political victim of the "Irish Question." ... Meanwhile, in Britain, the costs of the Boer War in South Africa and a declining economy made the Tories unpopular and brought the Liberals to power in 1906.

Soon, a constitutional crisis in Britain would present [de Valera] with an opportunity: King Edward abdicated his throne and was succeeded by George VI ... To the British, Northern Ireland ceased to be a burning issue. One historian estimated that, in 1964 and 1965, the House of Commons devoted less that one-fifth of 1 percent of its time to discussing Ulster ... Eddie McAteer declared in the spring of 1972,

I am not anti-British, but I do complain that the British mind seems incapable of realizing that other countries would wish to deprive themselves of the services of British rule ...

[In the World War II] Great Britain again resorted to price ceilings for a few vital commodities and had to run the whole gamut proceeding further and further until it had substituted all-around planning of the country's whole economy for economic freedom. When the war came to an end, Great Britain was a socialist commonwealth. It is noteworthy to remember that British socialism was not an achievement of Mr. Attlee's Labor Government, but of the war cabinet of Mr. Winston Churchill. What the Labor Party did was ... retaining socialism as it had developed during the war in the post-war period.

What would the militia of Britain be, if the English militia obeyed the government of England, if the Scotch militia obeyed the government of Scotland, and if the Welsh militia obeyed the government of Wales! Suppose an invasion, would those three governments (if they agreed at all) be able, with all their respective forces, to operate against the enemy so effectually as the single government of Great-Britain would? ... [L]et those four ... constituent parts ... be under four independent governments, and it is easy to perceive how soon they would each dwindle into comparative insignificance.

The history of Great Britain is the one with which we are in general the best acquainted, and it gives us many useful lessons ... Although it seems obvious to common sense that the people of such an island should be but one nation, yet we find that they were for ages divided into three, and that those three were almost constantly embroiled in quarrels and wars with one another. Notwithstanding their true interest with respect to the continental nations was really the same, yet by the arts and policy and practices of those nations, their mutual jealousies were perpetually kept inflamed ...

For Bush's recent visit to London, the White House demanded that British police ban all protest marches, close down the center of the city, and impose a "virtual three day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil disruption of the visit by anti-war protesters," according to Britain's Evening Standard. But instead of a "free speech zone"—as such areas are labeled in the U.S.—the Bush administration demanded an "exclusion zone" to protect Bush from protesters' messages.

Ireland at the turn of the 20th century was poised for change. Most of Ireland's inhabitants wanted to alter in some respect the nature of their relationship with Great Britain, which had been interfering in Irish affairs for more than 700 years ... Since the 1880s, Liberal governments had been introducing "home rule" legislation in the House of Commons in hopes of placating separatist sentiments in Ireland ... The Liberal Party was wary of going head to head with empire-minded voters in England or radical Protestants in northeast Ireland.

In [1858] Bright spoke at a banquet ... [H]e surveyed Britain's foreign policy since the Glorious Revolution ...

... We have that which some people call a great advantage—the National Debt—a debt which is now so large ... We have that, moreover, which is a standing wonder to all foreigners who consider our condition—an amount of apparently immovable pauperism, which to strangers is wholly irreconcileable with the fact that we, as a nation, produce more of what should make us all comfortable than is produced by any other nation of similar numbers on the face of the globe ...

In his book Adolf Hitler, John Toland points out,

Churchill had once paid a grudging compliment to the Führer in a letter to the Times: "I have always said that I hoped if Great Britain were beaten in a war we should find a Hitler who would lead us back to our rightful place among nations."

A reminder of [the mutual admiration] dark secret recently surfaced on the Internet in the form of a nice review of Hitler's mountaintop home, published as late as 1938 by a prominent British magazine named Homes & Gardens.

The exchange of American destroyers for British bases ... in September, 1940 ... The secret American-British staff talks ... in January-March, 1941 ... The British Isles were not invaded in 1940, at the height of Hitler's military success on the Continent. They were much more secure against invasion in 1941. Contrast the scare predications ... about the impending invasion of Britain in the first months of 1941, with the testimony of Winston Churchill, as set down in his memoirs: "I did not regard invasion as a serious danger in April, 1941, since proper preparations had been made against it."

Although the British were hardly altruistic angels toward the Indians, they posed a less urgent threat than the Americans. Given this and such British policies as the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which forbade white settlers from moving into the Indian Reserve west of the Appalachian Mountains, it is no surprise the Indians mostly fought for England in the American Revolution ... In 1778, the British empire sent the Carlisle Commission to America to negotiate a truce, offering a qualified independence of the sort that would have eventually amounted to commonwealth status.

The government of Great Britain wanted to disrupt the Ottoman Empire's ability to help Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire in [World War I]. So the British dispatched personnel, most famously T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), to persuade the Arab leaders to revolt against the Turks, in return for which they would gain their independence in (roughly) the Levant (what today is Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Syria), Mesopotamia (Iraq), and the Arabian Peninsula ... The British officials, however, never intended to honor this promise to let the Arabs go their own way at the war's end.

In Great Britain, the lesson had been learned as a result of the British government's financing of the war against Napoleon. The Bank of England, a private corporation, had been born in 1694 out of the British government's need for cheap loans ... [L]ater, the bank was given extensive monopoly rights covering banking and note-issuing activities within England, with its monopoly power reinforced by an act of Parliament in 1742 ... Between 1797 and 1814, commodity prices in general in Britain had about doubled and the value of the British paper pound had depreciated by about 30 percent ...

The British pound in the mid-1920s was overvalued vis-à-vis gold and the U.S. dollar, causing British products to appear relatively overpriced in world markets. As a result, Great Britain experienced imports chronically in excess of exports accompanied by persistent balance-of-payments deficits and outflows of gold reserves. Had the Fed deflated the U.S. money supply, thus lowering U.S. prices even more relative to British prices as Timberlake claims was its intention, it would have exacerbated, and not resolved, Great Britain's gold drain.

Any president is treated like royalty in the United States. To see this, compare the treatment of the prime minister of Britain. Look at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and No. 10 Downing Street ... Great Britain's government is a parliamentary system under a monarchy. Thus the head of state and the head of government are different people ... The Parliament's vigorous questioning of the prime minister is the most public manifestation of this feature ... Elected officials grill the chief executive, who is one of their own, and he must answer ... But they would not think of grilling the queen.

"The Fourth Estate," as a nickname for the press, is anecdotally attributed to Edmund Burke, when the House of Commons was opened up to press reporting in the 18th century ... [In the United States the] collusion between the Fourth Estate and the other three is a lot like what happened between the original Three Estates in 19th century Britain: the Whig landed aristocracy and old-money mercantilists were silent partners who financed much of the industrial revolution, and the new upstart industrial capitalists were cemented into the old ruling class establishment with titles of nobility.

[England's] foreign policy in the Middle East can be summed up as follows: Whatever the U.S. government does, the British government supports and joins. Thus, the British government participated in President Bush's recent war on Iraq—a war against a sovereign and independent country that never attacked the United States or England or even threatened to do so ... The terrorist retaliations are rooted in anger and hatred not for American and English "freedom and values," as President Bush and Prime Minister Blair maintain, but instead in anger and hatred for U.S. and British foreign policy.

[C]onsider ... the British pound sterling. Long before Great Britain ever had such a thing as a pound coin, the pound sterling had served as its principal accounting unit. On the other hand, the gold "guinea," which for most of its existence was worth 21 shillings, or one pound and 1 shilling, was an actual coin that circulated, along with fractional counterparts, in Great Britain between 1663 and 1814 (when it gave way to sovereigns). Yet it saw only very limited use—in contracts between "gentlemen"—as an accounting unit. Yet who doubts that guineas were British "money"?

Great Britain claims the island ... "In 1965, after years of secret negotiations, Britain agreed to separate Chagos from colonial Mauritius (contravening UN decolonization rules) to create a new colony, the British Indian Ocean Territory. In a secret 1966 agreement, Britain gave U.S. officials base rights on Diego Garcia." But it [also] "agreed to take those 'administrative measures' necessary to remove the nearly 2,000 Chagossians in exchange for $14 million in secret U.S. payments." The British kept their end of the bargain. In 1968, Britain began blocking the return of Chagossians ...

After all the privatizations of the Thatcher years, the British-maintained school system is one of the two largest industries that still remain under state ownership and control. (The other is the National Health Service.) Both are effectively monopolistic and therefore liable to all the notorious faults of monopolies, particularly those run by the government. State education in Britain is not strictly speaking a monopoly because the private provision of educational services is permitted and exists on a relatively small scale.

Timberlake: ... British policymakers called for returning the pound to its pre-war value of $4.865 ... The pre-war parity could not be reached unless (1) the British price level was brought down from its wartime level to something near its pre-war value, or (2) the price level of Britain's major trading partner, the United States, increased by approximately the same amount ... The ongoing attempt to raise the gold value of the pound resulted in this constant pressure to lower money prices, which had a depressive effect on employment, income, and output.