The Citizen's Guide to Apologies
The State rarely apologises for its actions but in recent times there has been a spate apologies for the misdeeds of the past.
One wonders what criteria the State applies to a public admission of wrong doing. Two critera stand out, the passage of time and the possibility of incurring a financial penalty.
The official line is that the apologies are an expression of regret for policies that are now deemed inhumane, like 'disappearing' children to the Colonies or for a failure to act appropriately in response to corporate misdeeds, as in the case of Distillers.
Bhopal
Did Union Carbide ever apologise for their criminal actions in Bhopal. No, they changed their name and hoped no one would notice. In fact, UC was snapped up by Dow Chemicals but they didn't want the Bhopal plant, that went to Everyready Industries India Ltd - remember that the next time your torch needs a battery.
The Irish Potato Famine and the Slave Trade
Soon after Tony Blair took power in 1997, he apologised to Irish people for the country's potato famine 150 years before. How far was this lunatic prepared to extend his elasticated sincerity. Ten years later he expressed sorrow for the UK's role in the slave trade, although his words fell short of the unconditional apology.
Blair also expressed much sorrow for his part for the carnage of Iraq but he never will say sorry.
50 Years After... UK Government apology to Thalidomide survivors.
Fifty years after the one of the worst disasters in medical history, hundreds of survivors of the thalidomide scandal today got an apology from the Government and a new £20 million compensation package. There are 466 thalidomiders still living with their deformities brought about by their mothers taking the drug Distaval for morning sickness in the early months of pregnancy between 1958 and 1961. Around 2000 babies were affected by the drug, half died within months of birth. Compensation was eventually paid (£28 million) to the survivors after a campaign by the The Times newspaper by Distillers, the manufacturer (now Diageo) in the 1970s.
Mike O'Brien, minister of health, told Parliament (2009):
"The Government wishes to express its sincere regret and deep sympathy for the injury and suffering endured by all those affected when expectant mothers took the drug thalidomide between 1958 and 1961."
What exactly was he apologising for, we wonder? Was it the shabby treatment victims intially received concerning compensation. Or was it the fact that when the use of Distaval was blocked in the US, due to insufficient testing, the British Government allowed its use regardless. Or was it because in 1957, the World Health Organisation had warned the UK that its lack of adequate regulation was courting disaster and the British Government ignored the warning.
Like a typical politician O'Brien apologises but doesn't actually say what for. Perhaps he's apologising on behalf of all those lazy dead buggers, the Tory lounge lizards, too busy worrying about the price of a gin and tonic to focus on the criminal activity of Distillers Biochemicals.
Interestingly, proper regulation didn't appear until the Medicines Act 1968; this was a direct result of the Thalidomide scandal.
The Transportation of British Children
Shipping children from care homes off to the Colonies was official government policy for over 60 years - the purpose, to keep up the 'white stock'.
Gordon Brown (2009) offered a formal apology to tens of thousands of British children forcibly sent to Commonwealth countries during the last century, many of whom faced abuse and a regime of unpaid labour rather than the better life they were promised.
Children were cut off from families and some falsely told they were orphans in the programme that sent 150,000 abroad between 1920 and 1967.
Officially the scheme was called the Child Migrants Programme, about 7,000 are still living in Australia, where Prime Minister Rudd had a go at apologising himself to the 'stolen generation'. Rudd was aologising to 500,000 children entertained by Australia, including aboriginal children forcibly removed from their parents.
Ed Balls, then children's secretary, famously said the child
migrant programme was "a stain on our society".
Some stains just can't be removed by Vanish.
A Long Overdue Apology - Atomic Blasts and Human Guinea Pigs.
As yet, no government has apologised to the British servicemen used as guinea pigs during nuclear testing in the 50s and 60s.
Of course, to apologise would be to acknowledge responsibility for the damage done to the soldiers health following these nuclear tests. To date only the USA has paid compensation to its serviceman. The Government here appears to be waiting until they are all dead.
The nuclear tests of this period were not a secret, in fact they were very public, designed to promote the scare mongering and prevailing cold war neurosis of the time. However, the scale and frequency of the testing was not public knowledge - in one mad month in the late 50s, up to 40 tests were carried out on Pacific Islands and in Australia, 20,000 British troops were involved.
Some testing facts:
- Of 2,500 men surveyed in 1999 30% of the men had died, mostly in their fifties.
- In their grandchildren spina bifida rates are more than 5 times the usual rate for live births in the UK.
- More than 200 skeletal abnormalities were reported.
- More than 100 veterans children reported reproductive difficulties.
The British Nuclear Test Veterans Association's slogan is "All We Seek Is Justice". Our slogan is "The Best of British Luck".
Footnote: February 25, 1952. Windscale (now Sellafield) sets up plutonium operation to supply the fission material.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment - an American Apology, not quite.
The Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began the study in 1932 and ended in 1972.. Nearly 400 poor black men with syphilis from Macon County, Ala., were enrolled in the study. For participating in the study, the men were given free medical exams, free meals and free burial insurance. They were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told they were being treated for "bad blood," a local term used to describe several illnesses, including syphilis, anemia and fatigue.
By 1947 penicillin had become the standard treatment for syphilis but the 'researchers' never used it? What on earth was going on in Tuskegee?
This socalled experiment was all about finding out about the long-term untreated affects of syphilis. The question is why did it continue when there was nolonger any need to continue with the experiment.
Revelations about the Tuskegee experiment led to a whole raft of legislation to protect human subjects.
In October 2010 it was revealed that during the 1940s in Guatemala, the project went a step further: American doctors deliberately infected prisoners, soldiers, and patients in a mental hospital with syphilis and, in some cases, gonorrhea. It transpires that a key player in this crime was none other than John Charles Cutler, a government researcher involved in Tuskegee.
President Obama let it be known that he was regretful.
Families waited 17 years for an apology
Flight ZD 576 crashed into the side of a mountain on the Scottish island in dense fog on the night of June 2, 1994. The Government apologised for blaming RAF helicopter pilots for the Chinook crash that killed 29
The Government today apologised to the families of two pilots after an independent report cleared them of blame for a 1994 helicopter crash which killed senior police, Army and MI5 intelligence officers.
Flight-Lieutenants Jonathan Tapper, 30, and Richard Cook, 28, were found guilty of gross negligence for flying too low and too fast when their Chinook crashed during a flight from Belfast to Inverness, a 1995 RAF inquiry concluded.
The pair have now been exonerated by a fresh review into the Mull of Kintyre disaster that claimed 29 lives including those of the four crew.
Cleared: Flight Lieutenants Jonathan Tapper (left) and Richard Cook have been exonerated for a 1994 helicopter crash which claimed 29 lives
Defence Secretary Liam Fox said he had now written to their relatives to apologise for the distress caused by the RAF's original findings.After an RAF board of inquiry found the most probable cause was the selection of the wrong rate of climb over the island, a report by two air marshals - Sir William Wratten and Sir John Day concluded Flt Lt Tapper and Flt Lt Cook, from Hampshire, were 'negligent to a gross degree'.
Successive defence secretaries resisted pressure to reopen the case, but in May last year, Dr Fox announced he was ordering a review of the evidence, honouring a pledge made while the Conservatives were in opposition.
Real negligence must lay elsewhere. What halfwit thought it was a good idea to put all your spies on one craft. And who at the RAF was listening when the pilot told his superiors that he felt ill-prepared to make the flight?
The Chagos Islands: Or how to disappear a whole people.
In the 1960s and 1970s the Chagos islanders or Ilois, were forced from their "paradise" homeland to make way for the US base on Diego Garcia.
The Americans wanted a launch pad in the Indian Ocean for their B-52s and elements within Wilson's government offered them the Chagos Islands, in return for a large discount on Polaris submarines. A memo from then Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart to Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1969 admitted that the payment was kept secret from Parliament and the US Congress.
One key condition was that the Chagos contained no people. The British assured the US that there were only seagulls. In truth, 1800 people lived on the islands; these people were intimidated off of the islands to live in squalor on Mauritius. As a bribe for accepting the Chagossians Mauritius was given its independence from Britain and £3 million to keep quiet.
Making the people of the islands disappear took some time and cunningly the British made the Chagos Islands disappear first, by renaming the islands the British Indian Ocean Territory, or BIOT by using an order-in-council. Orders-in-council are not public knowledge, essentially a ritual takes place involving the Queen and the Privy Council, no debate takes place, the orders are read, the Queen agrees and no one need be any the wiser.
The important thing was to maintain the fiction that the islands never had any permanent residence, since residence have rights.
A telegram sent to the UK mission at the United Nations in November 1965 summed up the problem:
"We recognise that we are in a difficult position as regards references to people at present on the detached islands.
"We know that a few were born in Diego Garcia and perhaps some of the other islands, and so were their parents before them.
"We cannot therefore assert that there are no permanent inhabitants, however much this would have been to our advantage. In these circumstances, we think it would be best to avoid all references to permanent inhabitants."
Sir Paul Gore-Booth, senior official at the Foreign Office, wrote to a diplomat in 1966: "We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours... There will be no indigenous population except seagulls..."
As the judge in the case, Mr Justice Gibbs, said: "It is clear from some of the disclosed documents that, in some quarters, the official zeal in implementing those removal policies went beyond any proper limits."
It's interesting to note that although Chagossians didn't officially exist, they were banned from returning to the islands. The British High Court has twice overturned this ban, in 2005 and 2007, but the Government continues to ignore the Court.
British Governments, from Wilson through Heath and beyond to the present have not been properly compensated the Chagossians for the loss of their homeland. Now, the cost of resettlement makes getting back home even less likely.
If nothing else, the story of the Chagos Islands tells us everything we need to know about liberal democracies like Britain and the US. Parliament and Congress kept in the dark, the public kept in the dark, for the sake of geo-political ambitions 1,800 people were disappeared without a second thought.