Peter Hitchens
speaker
821 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Sep
Peter Hitchens’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It would have been perfectly possible for this country to quietly relinquish most of its empire, much of which was expensive to maintain and brought us no benefit, and become a major country in its own right.
We were still a huge manufacturer and exporter with enormous foreign investments, especially in South America.
And all that went.
By, I think, late 1915, we were in severe debt to the United States.
It took very, once, war isn't fantastically expensive.
The same thing was true of 1939, 40.
It took no time at all for us to be in debt.
And do you know we've never paid off our debt to the United States in the First World War?
You did.
I did not know that.
Most people don't.
In fact, when I tell them, they say, no, it can't be true.
We paid it off the other day.
What we paid off the other day was actually our Second World War debt.
The First World War debt, we stopped payments in 1934 and we haven't paid a penny since or any interest.
we actually defaulted on it.
It's one of the most undiscussed scandals in modern history.
The Americans absolutely remember.
You can get the Treasury to admit it if you try.
And there has actually been a book about it, a rather good book, called The Long Shadow of Default, which I recommend to anybody.
Showing 661–680 of 821 · page 34 of 42
← Previous
Next →