Borrowed Britain

Everything in the country has been taken from somewhere else

On the day I arrived in London in the last week of May, the temperature was 34°C and felt ten degrees hotter. I wish it would cool down, I said, mopping sweat. London obliged with a vengeance. The temperature dropped from 18°C to a bone-numbing 16°C .

Britain does that. Like a chameleon changing its colour, Britain changes its weather, from tropical heat to tundra cold. 

This is because the island nation doesn’t have a climate of its own but borrows it from elsewhere. It borrows its increasingly frequent heatwaves from furnace blasts via Africa, and its cold from Arctic winds and sea currents. 

Climate is not the only thing Britain has borrowed. Over the millennia Britain, long before it became Britain, largely borrowed its population from the Nordic and Germanic tribes, like the Angles, which gave England its name, derived from Angle Land.

More recently, Britain has borrowed its population from Bangladesh, and Pakistan, and India, and China, and Jamaica, and a dozen different places. 

The result is that what Britain eats is also largely borrowed from foreign climes, with chicken tikka masala, of alleged Indian provenance, long being rated as the national dish. 

If what Britain puts into its mouth is mainly imported from elsewhere, so is what it puts out of its mouth in the form of speech, with the so-called King’s English being drowned out in a medley of Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Chinese, and so on and so fourth, fifth, sixth, and more. 

As if all this borrowing were not enough, the entire wealth of Britain has also been borrowed from its former colonies and, owing to a fit of national absent-mindedness, has never been returned. 

It is estimated that from India alone, in 200 years of colonial rule, Britain took out more than $45tn, per foreign minister S Jaishankar. Could India have it back, please? Britain can keep the Kohinoor.

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