It’s not being meek, it’s being patient and resilient.
I’m French and I used to live in the UK for a while. There is a very strong difference in my experience between going on strike about twice a year (I’m on strike today!), and absolutely never demonstrating and rarely complaining publicly about deep social issues.
The list you provide is actually not very impressive by a lot of other countries standards. I don’t mean it in a demeaning way: there are other levers for social progress, and no country uses them all. But massive social action is not something that the Brits use very often in my experience.
The fact that you lived here a few years is kidna irrelevant to the history of the people of the country. We have been conditioned to think uprising, violent attacks on the people in power, and the power of masses is “just not British”. When history shows it very much is (there basically wasn’t a period for about 800 years where there wasn’t a civil war or popular uprising within England).
This isn’t a complete list by any stretch of the imagination, and I avoided everything to do with the aristocracies (which includes four civil wars just from the top of my head) and anything to do with imposed rule (i.e. English to other areas of the UK).
Some more: Monmouth Rebellion & Rye House Plot, Farnley Wood Plot, The Gunpowder Plot, Bigod’s Rebellion, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Uprising, The Essex Rebellion, The Oxfordshire Uprising (yes, a different one)
The list really does go on.
EDIT for fun here are a few more:
The Lincolnshire Uprising, Yorkshire Rebellion, The Luddites, 2011 London Riots
It’s not being meek, it’s being patient and resilient.
I’m French and I used to live in the UK for a while. There is a very strong difference in my experience between going on strike about twice a year (I’m on strike today!), and absolutely never demonstrating and rarely complaining publicly about deep social issues.
The list you provide is actually not very impressive by a lot of other countries standards. I don’t mean it in a demeaning way: there are other levers for social progress, and no country uses them all. But massive social action is not something that the Brits use very often in my experience.
The fact that you lived here a few years is kidna irrelevant to the history of the people of the country. We have been conditioned to think uprising, violent attacks on the people in power, and the power of masses is “just not British”. When history shows it very much is (there basically wasn’t a period for about 800 years where there wasn’t a civil war or popular uprising within England).
This isn’t a complete list by any stretch of the imagination, and I avoided everything to do with the aristocracies (which includes four civil wars just from the top of my head) and anything to do with imposed rule (i.e. English to other areas of the UK).
Some more: Monmouth Rebellion & Rye House Plot, Farnley Wood Plot, The Gunpowder Plot, Bigod’s Rebellion, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Uprising, The Essex Rebellion, The Oxfordshire Uprising (yes, a different one)
The list really does go on.
EDIT for fun here are a few more:
The Lincolnshire Uprising, Yorkshire Rebellion, The Luddites, 2011 London Riots