Nollaig Shona agus athbhliain faoi mhaise daoibhse go leir. I know it’s going to be a strange Christmas. It’s always poignant as we think of absent friends and family but this year especially we think of those who fell victim to the Pandemic. It’s very important that we do the best we can to stay safe, to keep our families and our friends safe and to follow the basic health advice and rules. 

It’s also close to the time when the British government has to make its mind up on Brexit. 

Brexit is the outworking of a little Englander mentality that harks back to the days of the Empire and those who propose this believe that by cutting themselves off from their ties with the European Union Britain can attain the power and prestige it once enjoyed as an Empire on which it was claimed that the sun never set. 

And when they were the largest Empire the world had ever seen a key tactic of British imperial strategy for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and part of the 20th century, was gunboat diplomacy. So, when the British Empire wished to extend its economic and political influence and power, or curb the desire for independence by others, without the necessity of a full scale military intervention. British gunboats would be sent in to blockade ports and threaten governments. It was the brazen use of intimidation and the threat of greater violence to achieve its objective. 

Of course the British were not alone in using this tactic. All of the European colonial powers used similar tactics. However, as the largest Empire ever in the history of humanity, and with a navy providing it with unrivalled power, the use of gunboat diplomacy allowed the British to hold hundreds of millions of people across the world in thrall to its demands and exploitation.

So as this year of 2020 fades gunboat diplomacy was resurrected by the British government.