England’s Selective Memory: From Convict Ships to Culture Wars By Lawson Akhigbe

England has always had a remarkable talent for exporting its problems — and then pretending they were never homegrown in the first place. A few centuries ago, when the jails were full and the gallows couldn’t keep up, Britain had a brilliant idea: ship the criminals somewhere sunny. Thus, Australia was born — not from kangaroos or koalas, but from convicts and colonial creativity.

Fast-forward to today, and the same country that turned a continent into a correctional experiment is being told by the uber-right that crime only arrived when foreigners did. You’d think Jack the Ripper had arrived on a migrant boat or that the Kray twins had dodgy visas from Eastern Europe.

The irony is so thick you could serve it with Yorkshire pudding. For a nation that sent its felons halfway around the globe, Britain now trembles at the sight of a dinghy on the Channel. Never mind that some of those arriving are escaping wars Britain either funded, armed, or politely ignored — the narrative now is that “foreigners brought crime.”

It’s as if centuries of English pickpockets, smugglers, pirates, and politicians never existed. The modern far-right imagination has edited the national memory, replacing Dickensian London’s grime and thuggery with a nostalgic sepia postcard of perfect English manners, where the worst crime was overcooked tea.

Let’s be clear: crime in Britain didn’t arrive on a boat — it set sail on one. And it came with official paperwork and a naval escort.

What’s even more comic is how the descendants of those convict-shippers now lecture the rest of the world on law and order. The same folks who turned colonisation into an art form now rage against immigration as if their forebears didn’t colonise half the planet and rename everything in sight. (Fun fact: there’s an England in Australia, New South Wales, New England, and an Oxford Falls — all in the same country that once had a law against stealing bread.)

The British right’s selective amnesia would be funny if it weren’t so contagious. You hear echoes of it in pubs, on talk radio, and in Parliament — the idea that once upon a time, England was pure, crime-free, and filled with polite white people who all said “sorry” before robbing you.

So here’s a little historical refresher:

England’s 18th-century prisons were so overcrowded they used hulks — floating jails on the Thames. Between 1788 and 1868, over 160,000 convicts were shipped to Australia. Many of them were guilty of theft, forgery, and fraud — the same sins now blamed on “foreigners.”

In short, the modern far-right isn’t defending “British values.” They’re defending a version of Britain that never existed — one airbrushed of its criminal past and conveniently cleansed of accountability.

The truth is that crime, like irony, has always been an equal-opportunity employer. England didn’t import it — it industrialised it, branded it, and exported it with empire-level efficiency.

So when next you hear someone on TV or social media claiming that “foreigners brought crime,” remind them that Britain’s first successful global export wasn’t tea or textiles — it was criminals with luggage.

Now, if only we could export today’s hypocrisy with the same enthusiasm.