Tony Milne

Many thanks to all who helped me prepare for my poster presentation at the Social History Society Annual Conference, as well as to all who saw, read and commented on it.  I received useful insights on the message, its communication (in French and Spanish as well as in English) and academic presentations.  As a result, I will spend more time tightening the communication part, before starting to write more works (The Great British Bible that I have already promised).

My latest book almost made it to the top 100 history books.  Many thanks to all my readers for your support.  Please do remember to give me some feedback, and to review on Amazon.

This month sees the publication of The River of Gold.  Following the theme that taxation is the major driver of human society, this work looks at how the taxation of trade along and across rivers has affected our civilisation.

Riverside cities became the capitals of tax territories, then of tax empires.  Obvious examples are the Mesopotamian empires, Egypt on the Nile, the Indus valley civilisation and the Chinese empire.  Not so obvious is why greater rivers like the Amazon, the Congo and even the Mississippi-Missouri failed to develop world-conquering empires.  Smaller navigable rivers and sea-lanes were essential elements in the development of the Greek and Roman, the Danish and British, and the French empires.

Until now, the importance of rivers as the primary source of tax revenues lay hidden beneath a tax taboo.  This book uncovers startling truths behind the Trojan War and the Ring of the Nibelung, the Lorelei and Britain’s tax heritage.  Most surprisingly, it reveals the true purpose of bridges.

Deserts and mountains provide good traps for taxation, and these tax locations also became the centres of tax territories. Today, the greatest value of goods is transmitted as electrons or photons, and the future empires will belong to the tax-collector who learns to attack that river of gold connectors.

The River of Gold is part of the author’s work in establishing a theory of human evolution based on taxation.  He proposes that the murderous mammalian instinct to murder or exclude a strange male was replaced by a simple taxation of homage, a 10% contribution and help in improvement.  The full story is contained in The Tax Man, available soon.

Well, the No-Brexit Deal is on the table, and only the No-Deal Brexit is left as an alternative.  The British who voted for Brexit, like the hapless Dominic Raab, can be forgiven for knowing nothing about the importance to Britain of international trade, but the politicians at Westminster should be experts at negotiation and they cannot be forgiven for entering the negotiation with the EU in the worst possible way.

Negotiations are won by preparation, preparation and preparation.  In a complex relationship like that with our neighbours, the detail is important.  A simple contract between two businesses for a million-pound affair can run to hundreds of pages; that between 28 countries in a billion-Euro relationship involves hundreds of contracts covering dozens of subjects.  A detailed understanding of the current contractual terms on all of these, and a detailed plan for the desired outcome, is necessary for any claim to success.  Leadership is essential to ensure that there is a clear and detailed objective; everybody on the negotiating team must be united behind the chief negotiator, and that negotiator must have authority.

Brexit started off badly; only 52% of the population supported it, and clearly 48% did not.  This was not a mandate for Brexit, but for civil war.  Although some claim that this is sufficient to force Brexit, it is a disaster for negotiation.  4% of the British population can change their minds during the negotiation, or during the process of ratification, or ones its horrors are unleashed.  Without a mandate, nobody can negotiate successfully, and the Brexiters did not have it.

Leadership is also missing.  Those who led the charge for Brexit disappeared as soon as it became necessary to lead.  Gove and Farage and Johnson refused to lead, leaving Rees-Mogg, who is congenitally unelectable, and knows it, as the sole remainer.  Without a strong leader desirous of Brexit, Brexit is not going to happen.

Ignorance of the contractual problems has stunned Brexit voters.  Their leaders had no knowledge of the contractual commitments Britain had already made, the £40 Billion divorce bill, and foolishly claim that “we don’t need to pay if we don’t want to”.  Any negotiation will founder when one party claims that they can ignore the contents of previously negotiated agreements.  While threatening to walk away is an established negotiating technique, it can only be used the side that doesn’t care.  If Britain wants to exit, then it must care: walking away is not an option.  Europe can refuse to negotiate, or at least refuse to accede to British demands, but so far it has done everything possible to keep the negotiations moving forward.

The detail of the myriad agreements on everything from fishing quotas to security is also ignored.  Perhaps the civil servants, those unelected heroes of the Brexit process who have done most of the work, had some inkling of the scale of the problem, but they were never asked by the public whether they thought a divorce was possible.

We have now arrived at the point where a democratic hung parliament is asked to approve the negotiated agreement.  All the work done so far may have been for nothing.

Theresa May realises that Brexit is a disaster, and the only way to keep her job and prevent is to offer a no-Brexit deal in the hope that in two years’ time people will realise it for what it is.  If she can survive that long, they may be grateful, but at the moment they are comparing her to Neville Chamberlain.  But the EU is not Nazi Germany, and Juncker is not Hitler.  Nor is Rees-Mogg Churchill.  In 1939, Britain was the equal-most powerful country in the world, and Germany was an economic basket case.  Today, Europe is six times richer than Britain.  Will the Americans come to rescue us once more ?

Those who complain that May’s deal is not good enough will attempt to kill it in the hope of getting something better.  May cannot survive then.  Whoever wants to replace her has not yet learnt that in this divorce, Britain is not the woman, with a legal advantage, but one of 28 unruly children, perhaps the most unruly, if also fairly charming at times.  Those countries who remain will grant Britain nothing, and if Italy, Greece, Hungary and Poland, along with the Catalans, will provide some moral support, the internal organisation of the EU ensures that the deal cannot get better.  If Britain leaves the customs union, then there will be no trade relationship until a new one is put in place at some undetermined time in the future.

The final point of negotiation is one of timing.  Never enter into a negotiation with a deadline.  By triggering Article 50 with its two-year deadline, Britain gave itself an artificial deadline when it still had no clear and detailed idea of what it wanted.  If it had spent the last two years arguing internally about what it wanted, it could then have triggered with a strong mandate for success.

Negotiation without a mandate, without authority, without leadership, without a detailed knowledge of the contract and a detailed idea of a new relationship is preparing for a disaster.  Brexiters will never get what they ask for, although as their preferred activity is to criticise the EU for all their problems then they presumably can blame Brussels once they have finished blaming Theresa May.

The ideal Brexit stocking filler is flying off the shelves and is now in the top 500 best-selling English history books.  Many thanks to all who bought a copy.  If you’ve already read it, how about providing some critical or not-so critical feedback in a customer review.  I’ll send a free copy of one of my other books to the first five new reviews of Myth of England or another work.

It’s not every year that Remembrance Day falls on a Sunday, so 2018 is a special year.  The heads of state of Russia, the United States, Germany and France remembered the fallen of the Great War, which ended 100 years ago today, in a celebration in Paris.

Except that the war did not end 100 years ago today.  Russia, France the United States and Britain continued to fight long after 11 November 1918.

My grandfather, Jack Milne, fought in the Great War.  He joined up, aged 15, at the start of the war, along with millions of other Scotsmen, Englishmen and Germans.  They volunteered knowing that they might have to kill foreigners.  Unlike the French, they volunteered willingly, seduced by the marketing of the war, and the actions of their women, mothers, sisters and daughters, who sold themselves for a uniform or the king’s shilling.

Although my great-grandmother complained at the Army’s kidnapping of a boy, the Army kept him until they could legally send him to the front aged 17, just in time for third Ypres: Passchendaele.  In the Royal Signals attached to the 51^st Highland Division, he somehow survived the German Offensive of 1918 which saw entire battalions of his Aberdonian friends wiped out.  He did suffer horses shot out from under him, saw his comrades blown up, and experienced life in the trenches for a year and a half, as well as the joy of victory at Cambrai and the Allied Offensive later that year.

When he was finally granted a medal for his participation, it stated simply “The Great War for Civilisation 1914-1919”.

1919, not 1918.  How quickly we forget.  There was no mistake on the medal, nor in the war.  .

The Great War did not end with the Armistice between England and Germany, between France and Germany in 1918.  Whatever minor disagreement had led to the carnage on the Western Front, the twenty million dead, the German, British and Russian heads of state were cousins; along with the republican French and American, their economic and social systems were closely aligned.  While the war threatened only the death of millions of civilians and cannon-fodder, the leaders were happy for it to continue, but not all civilians and cannon-fodder were happy with the war.

Throughout the Great War for Civilisation, organisations in Britain, Germany, Russia and elsewhere refused to accept the general conviction that the war was a good thing, that fighting each other was the best way to resolve political problems, or that “the other guys” were the baddies.  They attacked the media, the press barons, the politicians, and the industrialists, especially the merchants of death, the financiers, the steel barons, the nickel barons, the shipbuilders and the ammunition manufacturers, the gun salesmen and the generals.

Only in Russia did these complainers manage to achieve anything solid, with the democratisation of the Russian state and, eventually, the overthrow of the ruling class.  When a similar revolution after the Armistice caused the downfall of the German monarchy, it seemed as if the European civilisation itself was threatened.  In fact, only the aristocratic ruling class and its minions were threatened.  In Germany, the short-lived revolution brought about a middle-class government, heavily in debt to the Allied powers.  In Russia, the middle-class democracy disappeared under a wave of proletarian dictatorship.

The aristocracy and businessmen in western Europe and America saw communist Russia as more of a threat to their existence than the commercial challenge of imperial Germany.  They invaded Siberia, north-west Russia from the White Sea and the Baltic, and the Crimea.  For another year, the British remained in Russia.  Over five hundred British troops were killed, along with a couple of thousand Russians, by this pointless intervention.  Britain and America finally pulled out in 1919.

If our leaders can ignore history so blatantly, those who volunteered in 1914 and those who remember them but cannot be bothered to read their medals, should not.  The only reasons that twenty million men, women and children died in the Great War was that millions of young men volunteered to fight; millions of young women encouraged them to do so; millions of tax-payers funded their fighting; millions of workers built them guns and bullets; and thousands of politicians and military officers led them to the front.  The war achieved nothing, apart from these deaths, except the vast impoverishment of Europe, and of its bankers in the United States.

Instead of remembering the dead of the Great War, perhaps we could remember instead the thousands who are dying today, who we could save by simply refusing to fight, by refusing to fund the violence, by refusing to vote for our politicians, by refusing to support the armed action by countries that are our allies.  In the last twenty years, British soldiers, funded by British tax-payers, have helped to kill a million men, women and children in Islamic countries, all in actions that are illegal under the Atlantic Charter, the founding document of the United Nations.  These actions are also economically wasteful, ethnically divisive and politically charged, as they are primarily responsible for the current migration of Muslims into Europe.

A hundred years is long enough for most of the actors of the Great War to have died.  We can build our own memories, false though they may be, in a sort of Hollywood fantasy.  But it’s a shame we don’t remember the truth of those times, as we ignore the shame of today.