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by James McCall.

The June 23rd vote in favour of Britain’s exit from the European Union, continues to have its rippling effect.

First, there was the announcement by Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron that he would resign, giving rise to the race to replace him. Many thought that one of the front-runners was Boris Johnson who, went counter to the Prime Minister and campaigned for Britain’s exit.

Then, on June 30th, Boris Johnson announced that he will not seek the leadership of the Conservative Party. Whatever was his reason is as yet unclear, but now that he has succeeded in getting Britons to vote to leave the EU, he has opted out of the race to replace David Cameron.

Another party that has been having some internal upheaval, is Labour. Its leader, Jeremy Corbin, campaigned for Britain to remain in the EU. Since the vote, he fired his shadow Foreign Secretary, which was followed by the resignations of another few shadow cabinet members, all of whom thought that Corbin had failed because 30+% of Labour’s supporters voted for Britain to exit the EU.

There is further fall-out. Nigel Farage, the leader of the UN Independence Party, which has only one member in the House of Commons, has just announced his resignation as leader, claiming that he has done his bit and “…now, I want my life back…”.

One gets the impression that, for some strange, sick reason, those who campaigned for Britain to leave the EU, were not really expecting to win, and now that they have won they, particularly Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, would want to have nothing to do with guiding Britain, as David Cameron put it, “…to its next destination…”.

In addition, members of the Labour Party seem to be taking advantage of the air of uncertainty in the country to add fuel to the fire by endeavouring to stage a coup against their leader, Jeremy Corbin.

All in all, it does not surprise me because, I have long held that Britain has left problems wherever it was. I have pointed to areas such as Kashmir, that no-man’s-land between Pakistan and India, over which they have had skirmishes since their independence almost 70 years ago. There is that portion of Guyana which Venezuela continues to lay claim to, particularly since it was announced that large reserves of oil were discovered there. South Africa, Zimbabwe, the Israel/Palestinian debacle, St. Kitts & Nevis’ Constitutional Clause 113 etc., are all situations in which the legacy of Britain remains a bitter pill to swallow, and all of which Britain has walked away from, leaving them unresolved.

We cannot forget the Berlin Conference of 1884, a meeting of European nations at which Africa was chopped into chunks that each would control as its colonial domain. No regard was given to tribal boundaries so, for example, the countries of Rwanda and Burundi, having peoples of the Hutu and Tutsi tribes, were chopped up in such a way that some of each remained either country, a situation that gave rise to the genocidal killings of 1994, when the majority Hutu’s of Rwanda attempted to ethnically cleanse Rwanda of Tutsis while the reverse happened in Burundi where the Tutsi’s predominate.

I think that now would be a good time to renew our call for reparations, something that has been owing to us for having been forced to work on the estates for 400 years, for free.