Sock it to ‘im, Prof Evans! http://zite.to/1cr5zxb

“‘ How can you possibly claim that Britain was fighting for democracy and liberal values when the main ally was Tsarist Russia? That was a despotism that put Germany in the shade and sponsored pogroms in 1903-6.’

“He said that unlike Germany where male suffrage was universal – 40 per cent of those British troops fighting in the war did not have the vote until 1918.”

Expect a lot of offensive idiocy about the Great War this year, amidst the sombre reflection – the coincidence of a European Parliament election happening just a few weeks before the 100th anniversary will simply be too much for the more jingoistic nationalist politicians to avoid. The worst of it, I hope, will be this commemorative £2 coin, being issued by the UK, featuring the man who, having seen the nascent concentration camps used by the British in the Boer War, thought: “ooh,  that’s a good idea – lets have loads more of them, make the conditions worse so more prisoners die, and chuck women and children in there too!”, thus demostrating their effectiveness as tools of mass repression and murder to bastards from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot and helping usher in some of the very worst excesses of the 20th century:

/rant

Update: For those that missed it, Gove also had idiotic things to say about Douglas Haig, the man who thought slowly walking towards machine guns through mud, bomb craters, barbed wire and poison gas to attack fortified positions with bayonets was a winning strategy – these have been nicely dissected over at Zelo Street.