Say you’re sorry — but never apologise for anything you’ve actually done

Rod Liddle says that Gordon Brown’s contrition about the British children tragically deported to Australia is a very Noughties phenomenon — the perfectly pointless non-apology

I never knew it was Gordon Brown who sent all those kids off to Australia, packed them off and waved goodbye from the quayside, and now feels terribly bad about the whole thing. This deportation scheme, which ran from about 1920 to 1967, was designed to give British children from underprivileged backgrounds a new life in the former colony, which considered itself to be short of white folks, any white folks; too often, though, the children were torn from the comfort and familiarity of their neighbourhoods and, once abroad, exploited for their puny labour, and treated with what can only be described as the roughest of love. There were cases of abuse, although none of it, by the standards of the time, seemed like abuse then.