There is something quite beautiful about the British culture of keeping a stiff upper lip, but sometimes you should let it go a little bit and riot. It's cathartic.
Brit and avid history fan here! Stiff upper lip is a myth. We used to be a very rebelious lot:
We're taught about Henry VIII, but not about the mass uprising he had to put down (The Pilgrimage of Grace)
We hear about the Battle of Hastings but not the Harrying of the North.
We're never taught about the Enclosure Acts (that stole land from the common folk) and the subsequent uprising and brutal repression (including the Midlands Revolt).
We also had the Peasants Revolt trying to stop the crazy taxation during the 100 year war!
And if we're looking for other acts of rebellion:
The Peterloo Massacre
The General Strike of 1926
The Miner's Strikes of the 80s
The Battle of Cable Street (Police protecting Nazis)
The Battle of Lewisham (Police protecting Nazis)
But it is far, far better for those in power to make us believe we have always been meek and "stiff upper lip"
EDIT: for people looking for a complete list, this ain't it. I just chose a few that were in my mind at the time. I also didn't include anything to do with imposed rule or I'd just gesture vaguely at the island of Ireland.
I also didn't include anything to do with aristocrats fighting each other. This is an incomplete list of popular uprisings to make a point.
As revealed in a freedom of information response to the Labour Party, British taxpayers paid more than £1,400 per head for 12 government officials on a single trip to Australia.
A spokesperson for Ms Truss told The Independent: “Liz had many responsibilities as foreign secretary, but it ought to be self-evident that organising the in-flight catering on overseas trips was not among them.”
The Mail on Sunday reported last year that Ms Truss was contesting a £12,000 government bill relating to her use of the grace-and-favour country house at the Chevening estate that she had access to as foreign secretary.
Leaked correspondence, revealed by The Sunday Times, disclosed that Ms Truss in 2022 had requested taxpayers’ cash for a £3,000 lunch at a private club owned by a Tory donor, overruling her officials’ advice to go somewhere more suitable.
The freedom of information data released on Thursday also showed the in-flight catering bill for Ms Truss’ predecessor Dominic Raab came to £6,215 during a trip to Indonesia and Brunei in April 2021, and £7,625 for a visit to Singapore, Vietnam and Cambodia in June of that year.
A government spokesperson said: “The figures shown represent the end-to-end cost of providing in-flight catering, including transport, on-boarding/off-boarding, preparation, disposal in line with adherence to international waste management regulations, and the required equipment for these processes.
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