On November 1st 1765 the British implemented the highly unpopular Stamp Acts. The intention was to force colonists to use paper manufactured, embossed and taxed in England. The tax raised on the paper was to pay for Crown Troops stationed in the colonies.
This act came into force in the same year as the equally unpopular Quartering act, which billed colonies for the housing and feeding of British Crown Troops.
To the highly independent and self reliant American colonists this looked like they were paying twice for soldiers they considered surplus to requirements. The militias considered themselves more than capable of defending themselves against any risks posed by natives or the French.
If you tell your masters that you don’t need these soldiers and your master insists you have them, it increasingly looks like the soldiers are there to enforce rather than to protect.
While the colonists grumbled about the quartering act the Stamp acts seem to have been the last straw. They sparked widespread acts of disobedience, boycotts of English goods, riots and personal assaults on tax collectors. The movement that grew up around the stamp acts adopted the slogan “no taxation without representation”.
Despite the repeal of the Stamp Act within 6 months the bond of trust between England and the Americas was broken. Within 10 years the American colonies were lost to the British Crown.
The British Parliament exhibited arrogance, demanded obedience and seemed entirely deaf to the appeals of moderate voices in the American colonies. It is an insular deafness that still exists in a nation that no longer has an empire.
It is the deafness I experienced in my own childhood, when Northern Ireland collapsed into violence under the relentless oppression of the Catholic minority by the Protestant majority. When the organs of the police state could no longer function the reaction of the British Parliament was to create a state governed by martial law. They sent in the British Army to “impose” order. Did they learn nothing from 1776? Nothing from 1921 in Ireland? Nothing from India or Kenya? Is the Westminster parliament so oblivious to the lessons of history?
It is a deafness that has resulted in the split with the EU. This time instead of alienating 13 distant American colonies the British Parliament is alienating its European neighbours and it’s own territories of Northern Ireland, Scotland and even English communities.
And who are the troops they send in to “Impose Order?” Callow youths, ignorant, uneducated and lost in a foreign land. Canon Fodder.
Anthem for Doomed Youth; by Wilfred Owen
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
the shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
and bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
and each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
-=o0o=-
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