UKC

Here's Jacob Rees-Mogg defending the British use of concentration camps during the Boer War:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-47247835/jacob-rees-mogg-comments...

According to him, the death rate was comparable to Glasgow at the time.

A quick Google reveals that in the few years the war ran, 1 in 4 of the more than 115,000 inmates of the camps died. This included 24,074 children, half of the Boer child population. These figures were from a UK government commissioned report.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_concentration_camps)

There really should be a law against MPs lying to the public. But, of course, getting lying and cheating MPs to enact such a law would be a bit of a Christmas turkey ballot.

To be fair in 1900, 15% of Glasgow infants didn’t make it to their 1st birthday.

Presumably he is advocating a return to such conditions as a way of supporting our funeral industry!

I think what he was trying to say was that the people in camps were being looked after to the same degree that 'free' people in Glasgow were looking after themselves, using the death rate as a measuring stick...……….

The most depressing thing is that the Question Time audience clapped after he made out that the British Empire was doing the Boers a favour by putting them in concentration camps.  Either the BBC is loading the audience up with right wingers or there is an absolutely frightening level of nationalism verging on fascism developing in England.

If right wingers came out with this kind of revisionist denial in Germany with respect to Nazi concentration camps they'd get arrested.

Mogg's claim about Glasgow probably refers to a specific period in the history of the camps.

After Emily Hobhouse brought public attention to the horrors of the camps, confirmed by the Fawcett Commission, the civil authority took over running of the camps from Kitchener. The death rate of (white) inmates dropped to eventually 2 percent, lower than many British cities of the time.

I don't understand why any informed commentator would consider it morally acceptable to deliberately distort historical facts in such a way. I'm going to have to assume he's simply very poorly informed.

In fairness to the British the concentration camps in the Boer war were not constructed for the purpose of deliberately exterminating the inmates, the camps were built to concentrate the Boer women and children away from the farmsteads on the Veldt so that they could not support and feed the mounted Boer Commandos, but had appalling sanitation. The deaths were a national scandal and were a result of cholera and unplanned. It was gross negligence by the British. Totally unforgivable but hardly as evil as deliberate extermination. 

Unlike the Germans who constructed camps in neighbouring Namibia (then known a German South West Africa) after the Herero Wars in 1904 with the intention that the inmates would be worked as forced labour (mainly building railways on meagre rations) until they died. This followed the random execution of about 20,000 of the tribes  people - men, women and children, who having fled into the Kalahari Desert at the end of those Wars were eventually forced back into Namibia through hunger and lack of water. Far from gross negligence, their's was a policy of extermination in the camps. Some of the young soldiers who had served in the Kaiser's Army of occupation in Namibia later became senior figures in Hitler's SS

So a bit like saying not many Jews died in concentration camps. Oh yeah, after the Allies turned up. 

The Right Honourable Member for the Nineteenth Century is always going to defend the British Empire.

You would certainly be justified in making that comparison.

To summarise: What a tw*t.

He's despicable. Yet people applaud him because he appears to speak with measured gravitas. Listen to the words (and fact-check them), don't be swayed by the Etonian delivery.

I'm not sure many people around here are swayed by his delivery ! But unfortunately lots of them agree with his hard brexit bollocks. 

Well where does his reputation (in some quarters) as some kind of deep intellectual come from? I guess it comes from his delivery. He's a poor man's intellectual, a bit like Stephen Fry (except Stephen Fry is an entertainer, not a politician deliberately throwing misinformation into the public sphere in order to drive nationalist sentiment and effect a hard right coup).

I was referring more to the fact that his accent, posh and polished as it is , won't win him votes in Lancashire ! But bafflingly his xenophobic rhetoric chimes with most of the customers in my local. 

Rather unfair on Stephen Fry to compare him with that piece of shit.

It's why Sandhurst still tries to get officer cadets to talk plummy...

I suggest a live debate between Jacob Rees-Mosley and Rab C Nesbit on the finer points of Glaswegian poverty.

What makes you say that? You will hear a lot of regional and neutral accents there these days. And Sandhurst doesn't try to "get"  officer cadets to speak plummy by altering a regional or neutral accent which is already formed by the time they get there. The same goes for Dartmouth and Cranwell. 

Watch any documentary on the forces and you'll hear very few Rees- Mogg accents amongst the officers.

Don't confuse clear and articulate English with "posh". Excellent communication skills is essential for an officer. The accent is irrelevant so long as others can understand them. 

How did concentration camps even come up? Is it JRM's plan to deal with the starving plebs post Brexit?? 

I don't know if you noticed, but before the vote brexit was going to be about "global Britain, taking control and our rightful place in the world" now it's "slightly better than incarceration in concentration camp or being carpet bombed by the Luftwaffe"

Growing up in Blackwater.

Speaking to many officer cadets, who told me that was expected.

I'll admit that was 30 years ago, and that things have changed. Out of necessity.

How the goalposts shift...

I don't watch Question Time because I'm a fan of fact-based, mature debate, but I believe the question that prompted the discussion was related to Churchill's crimes and John McDonnell.

I must have missed that lesson, much to the chagrin of my southern wife...