A few hundred years ago, a gang of fiendishly clever engineers in Shropshire came up with an invention which turned the course of history. Basically everything that could line up, lined up.
Their new creation was a new amalgam of metals which changed the game in a big way. Using the new metallic mix, they were able to manufacture extra large cooking pots which wouldn't break apart when subjected to intense heat. These pots made it suddenly possible to knock up a bubbling stew for fifty plus diners on a roaring camp fire.
OK. Does't seem like such a big deal, right? I mean a cooking pot is hardly Apollo 11 or the Iphone.
Patience dear reader, patience.
So here's what everything lining up looked like.
In the years before the Shropshire boys made their metallic breakthrough, a couple of big things had happened.
Number one. The European nations had discovered a bunch of islands in the sun in the 'New World' which were perfectly suited to growing sugar cane. Sugar was right up there with gold as a way to get seriously rich. Europe was collectively developing a sweet tooth and we couldn't get enough of the sweet stuff.
But there were all kinds of problems to overcome. The islands in the sun were pretty much uninhabited. So there was no labour force and growing, harvesting and processing sugar cane was seriously labour intensive. To start with, the wannabe sugar barons reached for an old play book. They lobbied the King and said come on Jimmy, help us out here. We need a bunch of slaves to harvest sugar and we'll cut you in with a nice fat slice of the action if you can provide us with some warm bodies in shackles.
Unsurprisingly England was at war with Ireland and Scotland at the time and England was winning. Victory in battle meant claiming a bunch of the defeated army's soldiers as spoils of war. Lots of these Scottish and Irish soldiers were duly sold off into slavery and stuck on ships bound for the Caribbean. A new word was coined.
Transportation was called 'being Barbadoed'.
So. Sorted then.
Well, actually no.
The Scots and the Irish found working out in the burning sun to be a tad problematic. They started dropping like flies. Shirking bastards. No work in them. A lousy return on investment.
So the sugar boys started looking around for a plan B.
And they found one.
The Europeans at this time had made another game changing discovery. A new place called West Africa where tribal chiefs were more than happy to trade slaves in return for the kind of European goodies they couldn't buy at home. Early trials in the sugar fields were more than encouraging. These black fellas couldn't half put in a shift under the burning sun. In fact they worked like niggers. They offered a hell of a return on capital.
But filling a ship with slaves wasn't easy. In the early days, a few shiny beads were enough to light up the eyes of a chief with a bunch of slaves to trade. But this honeymoon period soon passed and the bar kept on getting higher.
And in the these early days, the English mainly came second best to the French, Spanish and Portuguese when it came to closing the deal. They really didn't anything much to offer.
Until the Shropshire engineers did their thing.
And absolutely everything changed.
The new cooking bowls were forged in Ironbridge.
Which is on the River Severn.
Which meant it was easy to sail the pots down to Bristol.
Which was a busy port ready and capable of loading up those pots and shipping them down to West Africa.
And the chiefs couldn't get enough of the new cooking pots. I mean they REALLY couldn't get enough of them. All of a sudden the French, Spanish and Portuguese had nothing to compete with the indestructible Ironbridge pots which were soon an absolutely must have item for any self respecting West African chief.
And within a few short years England became the top dog in the slavery game.
Millions of Africans were shipped across the Atlantic. Vast fortunes were made. Great oceans of cash were desperate to find a home. I mean, come on. There are only so many National Trust ready country piles you can build. So the oceans of cash enabled the creation of a banking sector which over the years morphed into the City of London. And the spare cash became venture capital which poured into a whole bunch of new inventions like spinning wheels and steam trains.
As in the first Industrial Revolution, which in turn provided the ships and artillery pieces and bayonets to enable plucky little Britain to go forth and conquer a quarter of the world.
So. Like I said. Those 'must have' metal pots were one hell of a game changer and countless millions of people paid a heavy price for three hundred long years.
And the memory of how it all started wasn't lost on the Lords and Masters in London. If you can find the right trinket, you can get the natives to do pretty much anything you want them to do. They will dance to any tune you play them.
Three hundred years of Empire saw endless variations on this particular theme. Probably the most successful was the 'opium for tea' scam we pulled on the Chinese. It was pretty simple really. You grow a bunch of poppies in India and turn them into smokeable opium. Then you punt it out to the Chinese. Cheap as chips. Affordable to one and all. Then, once you have got tens of millions of them well and truly hooked, you jack the price up a few hundred percent and of course like any group of hopeless addicts, they will do literally anything for their next fix. Like selling tea for less than cost. Like granting a 150 year lease on the island of Hong Kong.
But all good things come to an end.
The twentieth century saw the end of the time of trinkets. Most of the one time suckers found they were more than capable of making their own trinkets. They decided enough was enough and the British Empire imploded.
And now here we are. London is down to a miserable handful of colonies. Dreams of Empire might still be strong, but the ability to go forth and conquer has completely disappeared.
To make matter s worse, the natives in the London's money spinning colony are getting increasingly uppity. The people of Scotland are preparing to join the club of sixty countries who have freed themselves from London Rule. It is a club upon which the sun never sets.
The membership form is all filled in and sponsors have been found.
And the lords and masters in London are scrambling to find a way to stop it.
The days when London new exactly the right trinkets and baubles to settle uppity natives are long gone.
But old habits die hard.
And so it was last week when London's Clown King took to the airwaves to offer us something shiny as a bribe to stay in the shrunken Empire.
As shiny baubles go it was pretty crap. A tunnel from Stranraer to Northern Ireland.
Aye right.
I mean, come on.
Does anyone seriously think it will ever happen?
And does anyone actually want it?
Does the Clown King seriously think we are so tragically gullible? Maybe he actually does? Or maybe it is just yet another desperate ploy to dodge the bullets of a bad news day?
But here's the thing which makes this possibly the worst bauble the Empire has ever tried to peddle.
Talk of a tunnel means some engineering realities. As in what are the conditions on the bed of the Irish Sea like?
And these pesky questions shine a light on some pretty ugly secrets which London would do well to keep hidden as far as possible from the public view.
You see at the end of both of the twentieth century's world wars, Britain was left with a whole bunch of nasty munitions to deal with.
We're talking the worst of stuff here. Volatile high explosive. Shells stuffed with chemical weapons. The sort of stuff you want well away from where you live. I mean seriously, not the kind of tackle you would want anywhere near the Cotswolds.
Well this is the reason you have colonies, right?
They offer the perfect place to get rid of your toxic waste. And a few miles off the Galloway coast is a geological feature which goes by the name Beaufort's Dyke.
Thirty miles long, two miles wide and 1000 feet deep. The perfect place to dump all your toxic, poisonous shit. Out of sight and out of mind, right?
Colonies have their uses and thousands of tonnes of nastiness was duly tipped into Beaufort's Dyke.
And in the 50's they tossed in a bunch of cement wrapped nuclear waste. Just for luck I guess.
And now the Clown King is proposing digging a tunnel through this particular Devil's brew.
Aye right.
As baubles go, this has to be the least shiny ever presented as a hopeful bribe. As baubles go, this is utterly pathetic.
As is the Clown King.
As is the shriveled excuse of an Empire he rules.
Enough already!
