For centuries Britain accepted all comers.
Including asylum seekers, troublemakers or those fleeing fleeing trouble at home .
Karl Marx and Napoleon III come to mind.
Karl Marx could plot in the British Museum Reading Room, drink and carouse in London
pubs, throw stones at street lights, take his daughters to Church services to further their
musical education, and serve as a St Pancras Vestryman, the equivalent of a Camden
Councillor today.
Although Jewish, he would be barred from candidature in a Labour Party led by Sir
Keir Starmer,
Some trouble, at home in France, unseated, indeed upended, the Emperor Napoleon
III, who fled to England, where he could sleep untroubled in Brighton’s Grand Hotel,
unlike Margaret Thatcher in later times. Napoleon III died in 1873 and Marx in 1883.
In 1905 The Alien Acts was passed by Parliament in London. It was designed expressly
to restrict the entry of poor Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia and other lands ruled by the
Czar. The British Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour was more frank about this than about
his major project.That was the crushing of Germany, a topic discussed for decades in Britain.which was
finding the country a trade rival.
In 1904 Balfour established the Committee of Imperial Defence, a secretive body which
included Herbert Henry Asquith a Liberal Imperialist. By 1912 a detailed timetable for the
landing of a British Expeditionary in France was prepared and two years later followed
to the letter.
The Entente Cordiale was agreed with France, vowed to avenge the defeat of 1871 and the
loss of Alsace Lorraine. An alliance with Russia, bribed with the prospect of taking Constantinople
from the Turks was also made.
These schemes all ended in tears – and sowed the seed of wars still raging and perhaps
destined to extinguish all life on earth.
When the Committee for Imperial Defence was founded Adolf Hitler was a 15 year old
in Austria.
Balfour may be the cause of more horror this past 120 years than any other man in history.
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