Big balls
Sir: Peregrine Worsthorne writes of the British Empire, 'Terrible wrongs were done, not on the scale of the Holocaust but getting on that way' (As I was saying, 11 April). To what exactly is he referring?
The slave trade and slavery in general? British guilt was shared by Americans, French, Danes, Dutch, Spaniards, Por- tuguese, Arabs, Turks and those African rulers who sold their subjects and their pris- oners into slavery. And Britain did far more than any other country to put an end to it.
Amritsar? Bloody Sunday in Derry? Con- centration camps for Boer women and chil- dren? All very deplorable, and certainly we should be, and in varying degrees are, ashamed of them. But to describe them as `not on the scale of the Holocaust but get- ting on that way' is the biggest balls I have ever read in all my born days.
I write as one who served the Empire, and whose family and wife's family did like- wise; and who sees in it far more of which to be proud than to be ashamed.
Ballymackey, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary
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