52 Times Britain was a Bellend: The History You Didn’t Get Taught At School

by James Felton

If at the end of Superman, Superman flew in and defeated Lex Luthor – thus saving Earth – and then turned around and started twatting orphans with his super-strength alien fists, I guarantee there would be at least a few articles written along the lines of, ‘ok bravo for saving the planet, but I think we need to talk about how Superman was a bit of a mixed bag.’ Well, Churchill – one of Britain’s greatest heroes, who stood up to Hitler and won (with the help of many allies) – also caused the death of three million people in India*, and we should probably acknowledge that a bit.

One of the few pleasures of following politics in modern Britain is saying, ‘Well at least we aren’t as bad as Trump, that guy has lost it.’ Especially when he brings up his border wall, thinking that nobody in Mexico has heard of ladders or planes.

The government paid out £20 million to 3,000 slave-owners (worth around £2,300,000,000 in today’s money) whilst around 800,000 slaves received a pat on the back and a ‘go on then, off you fuck’, which you’d have difficulty trading for food. £20 million at the time, to put it lightly, was a buttload of money. The government borrowed this money (40 per cent of their national budget) to pay off slave owners, and we paid it off only 182 years later in 2015.

When we went around the world, we saw people who weren’t adhering to our own repressed view of sexuality and decided that had to stop. It’s like going to a foreign country on purpose and then complaining about how foreign it is when you arrive, which to be fair to the Victorians is an activity we still do.

Essentially a big part of why homosexuality was outlawed in these countries was because we were worried we might like it.

There can’t be many things more distressing than learning a loved one has taken their own life. Unless, of course, someone then came round and announced they were going to take that loved one and ram a stake through their heart at midnight and dump them in a pit at a crossroads in a big pile of assorted executed murderers. Which is what we did in England right up until 1822.