Surely the correct answer is “everything needs to formally comply to a metric value because it’s easier, but list it in inspiration if you like”? Can’t everyone agree to that and move on?
Like many have said I have the odd (uniquely British from our history?) mix of thinking of height/length in inches, feet, and yards; except for when I don’t and I use cm/m. Weight of a person or food is imperial but other weights are metic. Volumes of drinks are imperial but a swimming pool wouldn’t be.
Is PMQs cancelled today, or are politicians actually going to get some work done?
HoC will sit for 8 days between 21 July and 17 Oct, 2 of which exclusively used for tribute to the Queen. Then off again for another break 9 November before 3 weeks off for Xmas.
I think it is necessary to seperate for practical purposes the question of 'Russian conduct in Ukraine post 2014' (indefensible) with 'Putin's grievances about NATO conduct and expansion in the post 1990 era' (defensible).
Reuters @Reuters Exclusive: Vladimir Putin's chief envoy on Ukraine told the Russian leader as the war began that he had struck a provisional deal with Kyiv that would satisfy Russia's demand that Ukraine stay out of NATO, but Putin rejected it and pressed ahead
Because it was never about NATO (the war has, very predictably, led to NATO expansion, and even if the war had been won would mean more NATO on Russian borders). Almost feel bad for an envoy on such a pointless task, I wonder if he knew.
Sucks for all those folks clinging to 'I guess Russia was in the wrong, maybe, but NATO expansion is scary and its understandable'.
I thought it was also significant in that it showed a Ukrainian willingness to compromise for peace that was not reciprocated, and would help to explain why they would be less willing to compromise with Russia now, or in the future.
Indeed. Once Ukraine has liberated Crimea and Donbas and the war ends, then Ukraine should immediately join NATO if they so desire.
They have earnt that right.
The ratification process for Swedish and Finnish accession to NATO has rather ground to a halt, which is a little bit concerning.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I agree that we need to be honest about the historical record. But, this means facing up to the prevalance of 'slavery' and 'colonialism' in the entirety of human history and, in particular, outside of Europe and North America. But the trouble is that there is an idea being perpetrated that this is only about white people. It is essentially a deceptive and convenient narrative invented by socialists/communists as a way of making people doubt the wisdom of capitalism and liberal democracy. But in fact it was capitalism and liberal democracy that abolished slavery and eventually, in the case of Britain, colonialism - and facilitated the creation of post colonial independent nation states. So the entire process should be viewed in this context.
People don't like this idea because it is a lot easier to explain complex phenomena through simple stories of heroes and villains. It seems to me like this type of simplified moral analysis of complicated historical questions has infested large parts of academia (if not actual history departments); and has a big impact on the education system. It played a large part in the phenomena of statue toppling in 2020 and the concept of 'decolonisation' being rolled out through many public and private institutions.
If you want to feel better about being British, just go and look at what China is up to in Xinjiang and what the Russians are trying to do/have done in Ukraine.
I think it's useful to remember that capitalism comes in many flavours, from the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade to benign Scandinavian style social democracy. I am not a communist so have no interest in overthrowing capitalism, but I think we should educate ourselves about history so that we can choose the appropriate form of capitalism to live under. I see the abolition of slavery and the advent of mass democracy in this country (which happened at approximately the same time, no coincidence) as part of a process of working class people asserting their fundamental dignity and rights at a time when the elite barely recognised their humanity. Long may it continue, because that is a process that is incomplete. It's surely right that we, as British people, focus on our own history and ancestors, as slave owners, as beneficiaries of slavery or as slaves. And as descendents of colonisers and the colonised. Let the French, the Arabs, the Japanese, the Greeks et al study and learn from their own history. Incidentally, I think we are quietly getting on with that process and doing an okay job if it, probably better than many other countries. I'm impressed by what my kids are learning at school, it is nuanced and based on the facts.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Nothing kills an evening at a nice restaurant stone dead more effectively than seeing the effing calories of each option.
As The Trip showed and we all knew but tried to ignore, seemingly the most important ingredient for just about everything on a menu is cream and butter.
Totally agree. Another stunning success from our 'red-tape slashing' government.
The solution is to avoid chains - restaurants with fewer than 250 employees are exempt.
Do not agree. We have an obesity crisis and any sensitivities you might have round how much you are eating should be met head on.
It's a reminder that eating out is a treat, and doing it too often will have serious repercussions for your health.
#savetheNHS
It is also quite informative. I tend not to bother with it or evne notice really - eating out is a treat, not very frequent and not going to make much difference to overall calorie intake (and Im happy with my weight, so no particular incentive). But I remember my mother in law, who was on a 'wedding waistline challenge'* being surprised to see that the salad she thought she should probably have was approximately as calorific as the sea bass she wanted to have, so she had what she wanted instead.
*she did this for each of three of her offsprings' weddings over three years, with some success, but generally short lived. Then got an exercise bike that she uses every morning, which has been much more effective at long term weight control, with added fitness benefits.
It is the salad dressing that kills it. We should go back to the 1970s when olive oil cured earache. Something similar must be true of seabass as well, as it is pretty much all protein; does it come with new potatoes and a herb (and oil) sauce?
I think it is necessary to seperate for practical purposes the question of 'Russian conduct in Ukraine post 2014' (indefensible) with 'Putin's grievances about NATO conduct and expansion in the post 1990 era' (defensible).
I think it is necessary to seperate for practical purposes the question of 'Russian conduct in Ukraine post 2014' (indefensible) with 'Putin's grievances about NATO conduct and expansion in the post 1990 era' (defensible).
No, its really not.
There is absolutely nothing defensible for a "grievance" about countries that are free and independent signing a defence pact.
Both are utterly indefensible and come from a point of view whereby Russia considers other countries to be in its 'orbit' or sphere of influence which is contemptible either way.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I agree that we need to be honest about the historical record. But, this means facing up to the prevalance of 'slavery' and 'colonialism' in the entirety of human history and, in particular, outside of Europe and North America. But the trouble is that there is an idea being perpetrated that this is only about white people. It is essentially a deceptive and convenient narrative invented by socialists/communists as a way of making people doubt the wisdom of capitalism and liberal democracy. But in fact it was capitalism and liberal democracy that abolished slavery and eventually, in the case of Britain, colonialism - and facilitated the creation of post colonial independent nation states. So the entire process should be viewed in this context.
People don't like this idea because it is a lot easier to explain complex phenomena through simple stories of heroes and villains. It seems to me like this type of simplified moral analysis of complicated historical questions has infested large parts of academia (if not actual history departments); and has a big impact on the education system. It played a large part in the phenomena of statue toppling in 2020 and the concept of 'decolonisation' being rolled out through many public and private institutions.
If you want to feel better about being British, just go and look at what China is up to in Xinjiang and what the Russians are trying to do/have done in Ukraine.
That is pretty much wrong from start to finish. Murder and torture have also been prevalent in all known human societies. Do you think it's complex condemning individual cases of either because they have to be seen "in the historical context"?
Slavery at the time the triangular trade started was so far in this country's past that the historical justification would be hugely stronger if we reinstituted the thing now, than it was then. Should we do that do you think?
And yes the IR and capitalism ended slavery but so what? first how do you propose capitalism would have got off the ground without the huge cash surpluses generated by the slave trade and in the case of this country, the enormous compensation payoffs to owners after the 1837 Act, and secondly do you think cars caught on primarily out of concern for horses?
Reuters @Reuters Exclusive: Vladimir Putin's chief envoy on Ukraine told the Russian leader as the war began that he had struck a provisional deal with Kyiv that would satisfy Russia's demand that Ukraine stay out of NATO, but Putin rejected it and pressed ahead
Because it was never about NATO (the war has, very predictably, led to NATO expansion, and even if the war had been won would mean more NATO on Russian borders). Almost feel bad for an envoy on such a pointless task, I wonder if he knew.
Sucks for all those folks clinging to 'I guess Russia was in the wrong, maybe, but NATO expansion is scary and its understandable'.
I thought it was also significant in that it showed a Ukrainian willingness to compromise for peace that was not reciprocated, and would help to explain why they would be less willing to compromise with Russia now, or in the future.
Indeed. Once Ukraine has liberated Crimea and Donbas and the war ends, then Ukraine should immediately join NATO if they so desire.
They have earnt that right.
The ratification process for Swedish and Finnish accession to NATO has rather ground to a halt, which is a little bit concerning.
Six countries yet to ratify, including Türkiye, Greece and Hungary.
I fear that Ukrainian NATO membership is unlikely to be straightforward.
It was always going to be like this. However, it will get resolved one way or the other, possibly with some kind of reconfiguration of NATO. I think the recent successes of Ukraine will help.
I think it is necessary to seperate for practical purposes the question of 'Russian conduct in Ukraine post 2014' (indefensible) with 'Putin's grievances about NATO conduct and expansion in the post 1990 era' (defensible).
Why is it 'defensible'? There was no written agreement; no understanding. It is up to sovereign nations to decide which bodies they want to join. If Russia had wanted them to join CSTO instead, they should have a) been a better neighbour and b) made a better offer.
Is PMQs cancelled today, or are politicians actually going to get some work done?
HoC will sit for 8 days between 21 July and 17 Oct, 2 of which exclusively used for tribute to the Queen. Then off again for another break 9 November before 3 weeks off for Xmas.
It would have been off for a lot of that anyway, but they should canncel any break before Christmas, they've had plenty.
Nothing kills an evening at a nice restaurant stone dead more effectively than seeing the effing calories of each option.
As The Trip showed and we all knew but tried to ignore, seemingly the most important ingredient for just about everything on a menu is cream and butter.
Totally agree. Another stunning success from our 'red-tape slashing' government.
The solution is to avoid chains - restaurants with fewer than 250 employees are exempt.
Do not agree. We have an obesity crisis and any sensitivities you might have round how much you are eating should be met head on.
It's a reminder that eating out is a treat, and doing it too often will have serious repercussions for your health.
#savetheNHS
It is also quite informative. I tend not to bother with it or evne notice really - eating out is a treat, not very frequent and not going to make much difference to overall calorie intake (and Im happy with my weight, so no particular incentive). But I remember my mother in law, who was on a 'wedding waistline challenge'* being surprised to see that the salad she thought she should probably have was approximately as calorific as the sea bass she wanted to have, so she had what she wanted instead.
*she did this for each of three of her offsprings' weddings over three years, with some success, but generally short lived. Then got an exercise bike that she uses every morning, which has been much more effective at long term weight control, with added fitness benefits.
It is the salad dressing that kills it. We should go back to the 1970s when olive oil cured earache. Something similar must be true of seabass as well, as it is pretty much all protein; does it come with new potatoes and a herb (and oil) sauce?
Speaking of which, time for fish and chips!
Not just the s. d. Depends how it is cooked. Pan fried or grilled?
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
Is PMQs cancelled today, or are politicians actually going to get some work done?
HoC will sit for 8 days between 21 July and 17 Oct, 2 of which exclusively used for tribute to the Queen. Then off again for another break 9 November before 3 weeks off for Xmas.
It would have been off for a lot of that anyway, but they should canncel any break before Christmas, they've had plenty.
Give MPs a pay rise. Calculate the average hours worked by people on £100k a year, and give them an hourly rate. MPs then paid based on hours worked for the country, not party. If they want to take a month off for party conferences it should be unpaid, or the parties can pay them.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
But every family is madly mixed
As I've mentioned on here, my maternal grandmother, Annie Maud *****, worked as a barefoot bal maiden on the clifftop tin mines of St Agnes, Cornwall, sorting out broken rocks. She was aged NINE. Essentially child slave labour, she had no choice in this. Forced into the mines as a tiny girl, to do terrible work which often sent girls deaf (the noise of the stamps crushing the ore was thunderous)
My mum's Cornish family were probably as poor as it got in the British Isles, at that time, and the idea they benefited from the White Privilege of Owning Slaves is so insultingly stupid Annie Maud would - I hope - give you a thump if she heard it
And yet, on my Dad's side, by a huge quirk, we have discovered we are directly descended from Maud Ingelric (another Maud!), concubine of William the Conqueror, matriarch of the noble Peverells, medieval aristos for centuries, and through her we probably descend from Anglo Saxon kings, Norman dukes and Viking warlords. They DID own slaves. But probably white slaves, in the main, so what does that mean?
It means history is ridiculously complex and this Woke attempt to divide it into White = Bad and Black = Victim is dangerous, corrosive nonsense
BTW I am sure 98% of British family trees have similar paradoxes and contrasts - kings and serfs in the background - we are just unusual in that we can trace them
I think it is necessary to seperate for practical purposes the question of 'Russian conduct in Ukraine post 2014' (indefensible) with 'Putin's grievances about NATO conduct and expansion in the post 1990 era' (defensible).
I don't really see the value in seperating those out. Nations have grievances about any number of things, or they don't like what other nations are doing, but the business of others is their own business, and undertakings change. Given the grievances are only used to justify things, and as you note the thing he uses it to justify is entirely indefensible, I don't think it needs to be given much consideration at all. There's enough people in the West conflating the two as it is.
More to the point, his supposed grievances were blatantly a pretext, giving the myriad other reasons for his conduct, and that his conduct inevitably led (even in his victory scenario) to more of what he claimed he did not want. So even his supposed grievances are a lie as his conduct shows it was not a real concern at all, indeed, he was happy to increase NATO presence on his borders.
How many people go into the shops and ask for 454 grams of mince for example... most don't know that 454 grams is a pound weight. I often ask for 681 grams of mince in our butcher....
I'm fully metric (49 years old) and I always ask in grams e.g. 700 grams of stewing steak etc
I am also fully metric (67 yrs old) with one exception, people's height. I don't know why I can't get my head around that one. I will measure anything of similar length in metres, but can only mentally visualise peoples height in feet and inches. Peoples weight in kg is the norm for me. Even imperial stuff you have to deal with (miles and pints) I can let go of easily (happy to order a drink in 25, 33, 50 cl and 1L or measure trips in km).
Food tastes worse in metric. Fact.
Drinking has benefits. Go metric and you can truthfully deny having a pint and say you only had about a half.
'May I offer you a drink?' he said.
'You're a gent,' said the other, straightening his shoulders again. He appeared not to have noticed Winston's blue overalls. 'Pint!' he added aggressively to the barman. 'Pint of wallop.'
The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer into thick glasses which he had rinsed in a bucket under the counter. Beer was the only drink you could get in prole pubs. The proles were supposed not to drink gin, though in practice they could get hold of it easily enough. The game of darts was in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun talking about lottery tickets. Winston's presence was forgotten for a moment. There was a deal table under the window where he and the old man could talk without fear of being overheard. It was horribly dangerous, but at any rate there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had made sure of as soon as he came in.
"E could 'a drawed me off a pint,' grumbled the old man as he settled down behind a glass. 'A 'alf litre ain't enough. It don't satisfy. And a 'ole litre's too much. It starts my bladder running. Let alone the price.'
'You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,' said Winston tentatively.
The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in the bar-room that he expected the changes to have occurred.
'The beer was better,' he said finally. 'And cheaper! When I was a young man, mild beer -- wallop we used to call it -- was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.'
'Which war was that?' said Winston.
'It's all wars,' said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, and his shoulders straightened again. "Ere's wishing you the very best of 'ealth!'
In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam's apple made a surprisingly rapid up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished. Winston went to the bar and came back with two more half-litres. The old man appeared to have forgotten his prejudice against drinking a full litre.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
Yeah, I think Britain is amongst the very best countries on earth. It still has lots of things wrong with it past and present. Humans learn more from their mistakes than their triumphs, we should learn about bad things as well as good things.
A bit surprised that outlets like the Guardian are still running acres of Royal coverage at the top of their front pages. Sure, the Telegraph and BBC you’d expect. But it’s not like there isn’t any actual news happening at the moment.
Liz Truss could scrap anti-obesity strategy in drive to cut red tape
Exclusive: Health officials ‘aghast’ as review launched of measures to deter people from eating junk food
There is a longstanding part of 'woke' thinking that essentially glorifies obesity, trying to suggest it is a social construct rather than a medical problem. The alternative 'fattylmpics' in 2012; along with the emergence of an academic discipline of 'fat studies' over the past 2 decades was an early manifestation of this. It is now mainstreamed with this idea of body positivity, people being obese and thinking that there is nothing wrong with it, that the problem is with 'society' and it all being reducible to a question of identity, with them being 'victims'. There is a good chapter on it in 'cynical theories' by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.
It is clearly not good for either the individual or society if you are obese . That said government "intervention" and spend in this area clearly has not worked so why bother ? Better to spend the dosh on making sport participation zero rated for VAT
Is it costing the government anything? I think the objection on the part of government is that it is a 'cost to business'.
red tape costs both government (or taxpayer) and business .Put it this way when you invite guests around for a dinner party do you think they woudl appreciate you putting little cards next to the servings telling them how many calories are in the food? Its nannying in the sense of the government thinking they can do something about it when it is down to individuals own respeonsibility for their health - as i said the best way for government to approach this is to not intervene but tax less healthy activity
About .01% of what obesity and its consequences cost the NHS.
and people are getting fatter - Its not working bascially because nobody needs "government education " on this (we have the sodding internet if you reallly do value education on this )- its up to individuals and their own responsibility - WFH probably does not help either - walking to work ,moving around offices probably helped a bit stave off the fat
Leaving it to individuals and their own responsibility isn't working though is it. Some action and nudges at the supplier end may not be a bad thing, though in general I agree with you that the state should stay out of matters of individual choice.
I'm increasingly reminded of the Victorian arguments about food adulteration - how it should be permitted for the free market to put chalk in bread, psychotropic nuts in beer, arsenic on wallpaper, and so on, because it was a legitimate business strategy, and it was up to the consumer to choose. Some of the modern over-processed foods come very close to adulteration in my view.
My grandmother born about 1900 used to be very keen her grandchildren should not eat green colour sweets because arsenic was the colouring agent. Cannot believe this was true at any stage during her lifetime.
Some research suggests there were deaths from arsenic used a colourant as late as 1860, but it had been phased out of use by 1900. So, yes.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
I learned loads about it at school. It was a major part of the principle module we did on British Foreign Policy from 18th-20th centuries. I don't know where they idea we don't teach about it comes from, even if we could do more about the pervasiveness of that particular mass slavery system.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
But every family is madly mixed
As I've mentioned on here, my maternal grandmother, Annie Maud *****, worked as a barefoot bal maiden on the clifftop tin mines of St Agnes, Cornwall, sorting out broken rocks. She was aged NINE. Essentially child slave labour, she had no choice in this. Forced into the mines as a tiny girl, to do terrible work which often sent girls deaf (the noise of the stamps crushing the ore was thunderous)
My mum's Cornish family were probably as poor as it got in the British Isles, at that time, and the idea they benefited from the White Privilege of Owning Slaves is so insultingly stupid Annie Maud would - I hope - give you a thump if she heard it
And yet, on my Dad's side, by a huge quirk, we have discovered we are directly descended from Maud Ingelric (another Maud!), concubine of William the Conqueror, matriarch of the noble Peverells, medieval aristos for centuries, and through her we probably descend from Anglo Saxon kings, Norman dukes and Viking warlords. They DID own slaves. But probably white slaves, in the main, so what does that mean?
It means history is ridiculously complex and this Woke attempt to divide it into White = Bad and Black = Victim is dangerous, corrosive nonsense
BTW I am sure 98% of British family trees have similar paradoxes and contrasts - kings and serfs in the background - we are just unusual in that we can trace them
Chronology a bit out there, unless your family is very longlived - even for the products of American slavery.
And yet ... cheap cotton, cheap sugar. All important for the poor. On the other hand, did the mine owners not then screw the pay down to allow for that? (And perhaps owned the truck shop too.)
People who join a queue 24 hours before the doors open are either:
1. Ultra-monarchists 2. Users of Apple products
In neither case should these people on the fringes of society be interviewed live on the TV news channels.
I once worked with a chap who was a Microsoft groupie in the way that people are Apple groupies. He actually queued outside the Microsoft store in London to get the first Surface….
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
How many people go into the shops and ask for 454 grams of mince for example... most don't know that 454 grams is a pound weight. I often ask for 681 grams of mince in our butcher....
I'm fully metric (49 years old) and I always ask in grams e.g. 700 grams of stewing steak etc
I am also fully metric (67 yrs old) with one exception, people's height. I don't know why I can't get my head around that one. I will measure anything of similar length in metres, but can only mentally visualise peoples height in feet and inches. Peoples weight in kg is the norm for me. Even imperial stuff you have to deal with (miles and pints) I can let go of easily (happy to order a drink in 25, 33, 50 cl and 1L or measure trips in km).
That was the last thing for me too, but I do know my height in cm now (and also know the imperial). I've no idea offhand of my weight in stone or pounds, but know it's ~80kg
I've only ever measured my children in cm. To work out their heights in imperial I'd have to convert in my head from cm now.
So in an attempt to sort this blip in my character out I have just measured myself and now I am depressed because I am over and inch shorter than I was 50 years ago. Anyway I am now memorising my height in cm.
I dream of being 80kg. I haven't been that weight since playing squash competitively which was over 30 years ago. I am currently losing weight (which I find easy) initially to make the weight for the Pitts Special flight, but I'm now continuing. Down from 96 kg to 89kg.
A bit surprised that outlets like the Guardian are still running acres of Royal coverage at the top of their front pages. Sure, the Telegraph and BBC you’d expect. But it’s not like there isn’t any actual news happening at the moment.
Liz Truss could scrap anti-obesity strategy in drive to cut red tape
Exclusive: Health officials ‘aghast’ as review launched of measures to deter people from eating junk food
There is a longstanding part of 'woke' thinking that essentially glorifies obesity, trying to suggest it is a social construct rather than a medical problem. The alternative 'fattylmpics' in 2012; along with the emergence of an academic discipline of 'fat studies' over the past 2 decades was an early manifestation of this. It is now mainstreamed with this idea of body positivity, people being obese and thinking that there is nothing wrong with it, that the problem is with 'society' and it all being reducible to a question of identity, with them being 'victims'. There is a good chapter on it in 'cynical theories' by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.
It is clearly not good for either the individual or society if you are obese . That said government "intervention" and spend in this area clearly has not worked so why bother ? Better to spend the dosh on making sport participation zero rated for VAT
Is it costing the government anything? I think the objection on the part of government is that it is a 'cost to business'.
red tape costs both government (or taxpayer) and business .Put it this way when you invite guests around for a dinner party do you think they woudl appreciate you putting little cards next to the servings telling them how many calories are in the food? Its nannying in the sense of the government thinking they can do something about it when it is down to individuals own respeonsibility for their health - as i said the best way for government to approach this is to not intervene but tax less healthy activity
About .01% of what obesity and its consequences cost the NHS.
and people are getting fatter - Its not working bascially because nobody needs "government education " on this (we have the sodding internet if you reallly do value education on this )- its up to individuals and their own responsibility - WFH probably does not help either - walking to work ,moving around offices probably helped a bit stave off the fat
Leaving it to individuals and their own responsibility isn't working though is it. Some action and nudges at the supplier end may not be a bad thing, though in general I agree with you that the state should stay out of matters of individual choice.
I'm happy enough with concepts like sugar taxes etc. These things have negative externalities which are picked up by the government so, like smoking, I've no problem with tax on that. There's also the point that pricing signals could be effective - e.g. two similar products, one cheaper due to lower sugar and dodging tax (e.g. someome might buy full sugar Coke out of habit, but Zero being cheaper due to tax might nudge them towards trying that). In practice, of course, what tends to happen - at least where the alternative is not fom the same vendor and lobbying fails to kill the tax - is that products are designed around the tax, to avoid it. Which is also fine.
Edit to add: a sometime colleague (occasional collaborations over a number of years, but not at the same institution) has done a lot of work on minimum alcohol pricing. Not my field and I haven't been involved, but it's interesting stuff.
I think controlling weight and eventually obesity is a really tough one for a lot of people. Some people don't get fat, for a lot of reasons. Some are very self disciplined, recognising that if they don't control what the eat and drink they will put on weight. Others are more naturally blessed, such as my wife. When she isn't hungry she has no interest in food. None. For me, I can eat whenever - hungry or not. I have poor control. I don't particularly eat a bad diet but almost certainly too much.
And yet weight really isn't as simple as calories in vs calories out. Loads of studies on over-eating (such as giving people 4000 to 5000 calories a day for an extended period but not seeing huge weight gains) bear this out. More likely hormone regulation about what the body does with food (does it store fats, or try to excrete sugars etc) plus gut bacteria, combined with food choices (processed food is terrible).
Frankkly if we only had greengrocers and butchers and had to cook from there we'd probably all be healthier.
Yep, it's complicated. At the base level, the solution to obesity is to eat less and/or exercise more. But there do seem to be substantial differences between what people can eat without becoming overwieght, beyond obvious differences in exercise. Some physiology, I expect, but maybe also some micro-differences in lifestyle and activity that are not easily recorded.
The eating less issue is key IMHO. Every fat person I know, especially those who complain they can’t lose weight just eat too much.
They will have giant plates or bowls of food and then express shock that they are still fat “but I’m not eating really unhealthy food” they cry without realising they are eating enough for four people in the evening so not only too much food but no time to burn it off as they are also too full to do anything but have a food coma on the sofa afterwards.
So if the gov have to do anything they need to really start hammering home portion sizes to people - when the ready meal says “serves 4” it generally means it unless you are working physically all day or exercising a lot.
Too true. As I've written here before, despite eating healthily I was for several years overweight, because I was overeating at meal times. Last year I lost a lot of weight, so that I am now a "healthy" weight and this year have sucessfully kept the weight off. Eating less was easily the main factor in losing weight.
I find the difference in how people react to smoking and obesity interesting. I’m an idiot and I smoke. I know it’s totally stupid and have given myself a point where I stop - it’s a specific moment soon where I will because of other things in my life but I know it will be when I totally stop.
When someone criticises me for smoking, as people do, I don’t have a strop or cry but agree saying “yes it’s grim and stupid and will stop”.
If however you tell someone they should eat less and lose weight as it’s bad for them then it tends to get a slightly less accepting reception.
You can of course stop smoking entirely. It will be hard for a few weeks no doubt. You will probably succeed after that if you never have another cigarette. If you have just the odd one though, you may soon find you are back smoking regularly.
You cannot stop eating entirely and remain alive.
I smoked between 60 and 80 a day when I first started offshore. The logging unit where I worked was the only place on the rig outside of the accommodation you were allowed to smoke as we did all the gas analysis there so had naked flames.
Then I got to boxing day 1990 and was sat in the pub with my mates and realised I was the only one who smoked. So I decided to stop. I put out the cigarette I had lit and have never smoked again.
It was hard at first. But I realised that it was a choice. It was always a matter of choosing to smoke so I chose not to. I even had a cigarette in my mouth a couple of times but then chose not to light it.
I don't consider myself an ex-smoker. I am a smoker who chooses not to smoke. After 32 years I still absolutely love everything about smoking. I have never lost the memory of the enjoyment and I would start again tomorrow if you told me it wouldn't kill me. But I won't, because I choose not to.
People who join a queue 24 hours before the doors open are either:
1. Ultra-monarchists 2. Users of Apple products
In neither case should these people on the fringes of society be interviewed live on the TV news channels.
I once worked with a chap who was a Microsoft groupie in the way that people are Apple groupies. He actually queued outside the Microsoft store in London to get the first Surface….
I was once an Acorn groupie. I'd go to the shows, buy the magazines, digest all the information being released on bulletin boards. That fandom ended about five minutes after I started working for them and I realised that everyone working there was human, and not some sort of tech-God. Except perhaps for Sophie, the two Richards and Kev. There are always exceptions.
With inflation under her watch now down to tiny, tiny single figures she will soon be twenty five points ahead. And you get the inch-perfect Conservative Government you desire.
Crushing inflation, the CoL crisis, and the Putin-Starmer coalition in less than a week Is nothing short of impressive. The lead is imminent.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
I learned loads about it at school. It was a major part of the principle module we did on British Foreign Policy from 18th-20th centuries. I don't know where they idea we don't teach about it comes from, even if we could do more about the pervasiveness of that particular mass slavery system.
You're lucky. I studied history at school (in Scotland) all the way through and learned almost nothing about the empire even though we covered the industrial revolution in depth. In CSYS history I studied the American Civil War and so learned a lot about slavery in the US but not about the British in relation to slavery. I was only really confronted with the issue when I moved to the Caribbean for work.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
But every family is madly mixed
As I've mentioned on here, my maternal grandmother, Annie Maud *****, worked as a barefoot bal maiden on the clifftop tin mines of St Agnes, Cornwall, sorting out broken rocks. She was aged NINE. Essentially child slave labour, she had no choice in this. Forced into the mines as a tiny girl, to do terrible work which often sent girls deaf (the noise of the stamps crushing the ore was thunderous)
My mum's Cornish family were probably as poor as it got in the British Isles, at that time, and the idea they benefited from the White Privilege of Owning Slaves is so insultingly stupid Annie Maud would - I hope - give you a thump if she heard it
And yet, on my Dad's side, by a huge quirk, we have discovered we are directly descended from Maud Ingelric (another Maud!), concubine of William the Conqueror, matriarch of the noble Peverells, medieval aristos for centuries, and through her we probably descend from Anglo Saxon kings, Norman dukes and Viking warlords. They DID own slaves. But probably white slaves, in the main, so what does that mean?
It means history is ridiculously complex and this Woke attempt to divide it into White = Bad and Black = Victim is dangerous, corrosive nonsense
BTW I am sure 98% of British family trees have similar paradoxes and contrasts - kings and serfs in the background - we are just unusual in that we can trace them
Chronology a bit out there, unless your family is very longlived - even for the products of American slavery.
And yet ... cheap cotton, cheap sugar. All important for the poor. On the other hand, did the mine owners not then screw the pay down to allow for that? (And perhaps owned the truck shop too.)
Are you seriously trying to claim that my nine year old, barefoot grandmother, standing outdoors in January on the Cornish cliffs, ten hours a day, smashing fucking rocks with a hammer, day after day, using sign language because everyone is going deaf from the steam-powered stamps, and all this as her Dad is down the mines getting sick from the dust (he died of it in the end), is somehow benefiting from slavery because she's wearing hand me downs made of cheap cotton picked by slaves in distant Mississippi?
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
I learned loads about it at school. It was a major part of the principle module we did on British Foreign Policy from 18th-20th centuries. I don't know where they idea we don't teach about it comes from, even if we could do more about the pervasiveness of that particular mass slavery system.
It's a state/private education thing. The poshos on here don't understand
How many people go into the shops and ask for 454 grams of mince for example... most don't know that 454 grams is a pound weight. I often ask for 681 grams of mince in our butcher....
I'm fully metric (49 years old) and I always ask in grams e.g. 700 grams of stewing steak etc
I am also fully metric (67 yrs old) with one exception, people's height. I don't know why I can't get my head around that one. I will measure anything of similar length in metres, but can only mentally visualise peoples height in feet and inches. Peoples weight in kg is the norm for me. Even imperial stuff you have to deal with (miles and pints) I can let go of easily (happy to order a drink in 25, 33, 50 cl and 1L or measure trips in km).
Food tastes worse in metric. Fact.
Drinking has benefits. Go metric and you can truthfully deny having a pint and say you only had about a half.
'May I offer you a drink?' he said.
'You're a gent,' said the other, straightening his shoulders again. He appeared not to have noticed Winston's blue overalls. 'Pint!' he added aggressively to the barman. 'Pint of wallop.'
The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer into thick glasses which he had rinsed in a bucket under the counter. Beer was the only drink you could get in prole pubs. The proles were supposed not to drink gin, though in practice they could get hold of it easily enough. The game of darts was in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun talking about lottery tickets. Winston's presence was forgotten for a moment. There was a deal table under the window where he and the old man could talk without fear of being overheard. It was horribly dangerous, but at any rate there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had made sure of as soon as he came in.
"E could 'a drawed me off a pint,' grumbled the old man as he settled down behind a glass. 'A 'alf litre ain't enough. It don't satisfy. And a 'ole litre's too much. It starts my bladder running. Let alone the price.'
'You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,' said Winston tentatively.
The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in the bar-room that he expected the changes to have occurred.
'The beer was better,' he said finally. 'And cheaper! When I was a young man, mild beer -- wallop we used to call it -- was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.'
'Which war was that?' said Winston.
'It's all wars,' said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, and his shoulders straightened again. "Ere's wishing you the very best of 'ealth!'
In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam's apple made a surprisingly rapid up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished. Winston went to the bar and came back with two more half-litres. The old man appeared to have forgotten his prejudice against drinking a full litre.
It's interesting, isn't it? You'd think Oceania would have stayed imperial to differentiate from Eurasia etc. But I guess the litre seemed sufficiently foreign to underline the change between UK and Oceania.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
I went to a comprehensive and learned practically nothing about it. But this was in Scotland, perhaps it was taught more down here. Or perhaps it was just patchy. I would imagine that all forms of undeserved privilege are off limits in private school curricula, for obvious reasons.
Is PMQs cancelled today, or are politicians actually going to get some work done?
HoC will sit for 8 days between 21 July and 17 Oct, 2 of which exclusively used for tribute to the Queen. Then off again for another break 9 November before 3 weeks off for Xmas.
It would have been off for a lot of that anyway, but they should canncel any break before Christmas, they've had plenty.
Give MPs a pay rise. Calculate the average hours worked by people on £100k a year, and give them an hourly rate. MPs then paid based on hours worked for the country, not party. If they want to take a month off for party conferences it should be unpaid, or the parties can pay them.
But we shouldn’t fall into the fallacy that MPs are only working when the House is sitting. They do a large amount of constituency work year round.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
But every family is madly mixed
As I've mentioned on here, my maternal grandmother, Annie Maud *****, worked as a barefoot bal maiden on the clifftop tin mines of St Agnes, Cornwall, sorting out broken rocks. She was aged NINE. Essentially child slave labour, she had no choice in this. Forced into the mines as a tiny girl, to do terrible work which often sent girls deaf (the noise of the stamps crushing the ore was thunderous)
My mum's Cornish family were probably as poor as it got in the British Isles, at that time, and the idea they benefited from the White Privilege of Owning Slaves is so insultingly stupid Annie Maud would - I hope - give you a thump if she heard it
And yet, on my Dad's side, by a huge quirk, we have discovered we are directly descended from Maud Ingelric (another Maud!), concubine of William the Conqueror, matriarch of the noble Peverells, medieval aristos for centuries, and through her we probably descend from Anglo Saxon kings, Norman dukes and Viking warlords. They DID own slaves. But probably white slaves, in the main, so what does that mean?
It means history is ridiculously complex and this Woke attempt to divide it into White = Bad and Black = Victim is dangerous, corrosive nonsense
BTW I am sure 98% of British family trees have similar paradoxes and contrasts - kings and serfs in the background - we are just unusual in that we can trace them
Chronology a bit out there, unless your family is very longlived - even for the products of American slavery.
And yet ... cheap cotton, cheap sugar. All important for the poor. On the other hand, did the mine owners not then screw the pay down to allow for that? (And perhaps owned the truck shop too.)
They did. There's a place down the road called Chipshop for that reason.
Arsenic makes the point rather neatly. It is very good for deterring boll weevils from eating your cotton crops. So it gets mined in Devon and Cornwall, poisoning the poor whitey miners in the process, and then shipped to the Caribbean to poison the poor black cotton slaves.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
Yes, I learned plenty about the horrors of the slave trade, when I was at school. Along with the horrors inflicted on children in mines and factories etc. The past was a pretty unpleasant place to dwell in, unless you were part of the elite.
What I did not learn, however, was the part played by the slaves themselves in ending it. The Haitian and Baptist revolts, and constant escapes and mutinies on board ships, put the fear of God into the slave owners, and ultimately persuaded them that they would be better off taking cash to agree to abolition,
Paying compensation to slave owners stick in one's throat, but if it hastens the process of abolition, then so be it.
Is PMQs cancelled today, or are politicians actually going to get some work done?
HoC will sit for 8 days between 21 July and 17 Oct, 2 of which exclusively used for tribute to the Queen. Then off again for another break 9 November before 3 weeks off for Xmas.
It would have been off for a lot of that anyway, but they should canncel any break before Christmas, they've had plenty.
Give MPs a pay rise. Calculate the average hours worked by people on £100k a year, and give them an hourly rate. MPs then paid based on hours worked for the country, not party. If they want to take a month off for party conferences it should be unpaid, or the parties can pay them.
But we shouldn’t fall into the fallacy that MPs are only working when the House is sitting. They do a large amount of constituency work year round.
Happy to pay for constituency work. Not happy to pay for party work or extended holidays.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
I learned loads about it at school. It was a major part of the principle module we did on British Foreign Policy from 18th-20th centuries. I don't know where they idea we don't teach about it comes from, even if we could do more about the pervasiveness of that particular mass slavery system.
Everybody talking about what they learnt at school needs to give dates! There’s a span of half a century between some PBers.
Is PMQs cancelled today, or are politicians actually going to get some work done?
HoC will sit for 8 days between 21 July and 17 Oct, 2 of which exclusively used for tribute to the Queen. Then off again for another break 9 November before 3 weeks off for Xmas.
It would have been off for a lot of that anyway, but they should canncel any break before Christmas, they've had plenty.
Give MPs a pay rise. Calculate the average hours worked by people on £100k a year, and give them an hourly rate. MPs then paid based on hours worked for the country, not party. If they want to take a month off for party conferences it should be unpaid, or the parties can pay them.
But we shouldn’t fall into the fallacy that MPs are only working when the House is sitting. They do a large amount of constituency work year round.
Yes, but my complaint is not that they are lazy when the Commons is not sitting. The correct ratio of parliamentary vs constituency work is to be debated, and probably not reconcilable, but the former is a rather important aspect of the job, and all these breaks they take, even when they have just had some, makes scrutinizing and approving legislation more time sensitive than it should be.
I know the government don't want MPs scrutinising legislation, but the time must be found, and they even put themselves under pressure in fitting in what they want to do!
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
But every family is madly mixed
As I've mentioned on here, my maternal grandmother, Annie Maud *****, worked as a barefoot bal maiden on the clifftop tin mines of St Agnes, Cornwall, sorting out broken rocks. She was aged NINE. Essentially child slave labour, she had no choice in this. Forced into the mines as a tiny girl, to do terrible work which often sent girls deaf (the noise of the stamps crushing the ore was thunderous)
My mum's Cornish family were probably as poor as it got in the British Isles, at that time, and the idea they benefited from the White Privilege of Owning Slaves is so insultingly stupid Annie Maud would - I hope - give you a thump if she heard it
And yet, on my Dad's side, by a huge quirk, we have discovered we are directly descended from Maud Ingelric (another Maud!), concubine of William the Conqueror, matriarch of the noble Peverells, medieval aristos for centuries, and through her we probably descend from Anglo Saxon kings, Norman dukes and Viking warlords. They DID own slaves. But probably white slaves, in the main, so what does that mean?
It means history is ridiculously complex and this Woke attempt to divide it into White = Bad and Black = Victim is dangerous, corrosive nonsense
BTW I am sure 98% of British family trees have similar paradoxes and contrasts - kings and serfs in the background - we are just unusual in that we can trace them
Chronology a bit out there, unless your family is very longlived - even for the products of American slavery.
And yet ... cheap cotton, cheap sugar. All important for the poor. On the other hand, did the mine owners not then screw the pay down to allow for that? (And perhaps owned the truck shop too.)
Are you seriously trying to claim that my nine year old, barefoot grandmother, standing outdoors in January on the Cornish cliffs, ten hours a day, smashing fucking rocks with a hammer, day after day, using sign language because everyone is going deaf from the steam-powered stamps, and all this as her Dad is down the mines getting sick from the dust (he died of it in the end), is somehow benefiting from slavery because she's wearing hand me downs made of cheap cotton picked by slaves in distant Mississippi?
I mean, fuck that. No offence
No offence.
She must have been doing that, when, 1910? Even the Americans had aboilished slavery then. (Sharecropping, yes.)
Consider, however, a previous generation of bal maiden shovelling mineral ore on the floor. On the strict economic level, her family did benefit from getting x calories as sugar more cheaply than as, say, wheat, and cotton more cheaply than wool, etc. But one has to see it in wider context, as I perhaps did not stress enough: wouldn't the mineowners have reduced wages commensurately anyway? So zero benefit to her.
PS my granddad was a surface worker in a coal mine, too ...
A bit surprised that outlets like the Guardian are still running acres of Royal coverage at the top of their front pages. Sure, the Telegraph and BBC you’d expect. But it’s not like there isn’t any actual news happening at the moment.
Liz Truss could scrap anti-obesity strategy in drive to cut red tape
Exclusive: Health officials ‘aghast’ as review launched of measures to deter people from eating junk food
There is a longstanding part of 'woke' thinking that essentially glorifies obesity, trying to suggest it is a social construct rather than a medical problem. The alternative 'fattylmpics' in 2012; along with the emergence of an academic discipline of 'fat studies' over the past 2 decades was an early manifestation of this. It is now mainstreamed with this idea of body positivity, people being obese and thinking that there is nothing wrong with it, that the problem is with 'society' and it all being reducible to a question of identity, with them being 'victims'. There is a good chapter on it in 'cynical theories' by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.
It is clearly not good for either the individual or society if you are obese . That said government "intervention" and spend in this area clearly has not worked so why bother ? Better to spend the dosh on making sport participation zero rated for VAT
Is it costing the government anything? I think the objection on the part of government is that it is a 'cost to business'.
red tape costs both government (or taxpayer) and business .Put it this way when you invite guests around for a dinner party do you think they woudl appreciate you putting little cards next to the servings telling them how many calories are in the food? Its nannying in the sense of the government thinking they can do something about it when it is down to individuals own respeonsibility for their health - as i said the best way for government to approach this is to not intervene but tax less healthy activity
About .01% of what obesity and its consequences cost the NHS.
and people are getting fatter - Its not working bascially because nobody needs "government education " on this (we have the sodding internet if you reallly do value education on this )- its up to individuals and their own responsibility - WFH probably does not help either - walking to work ,moving around offices probably helped a bit stave off the fat
Leaving it to individuals and their own responsibility isn't working though is it. Some action and nudges at the supplier end may not be a bad thing, though in general I agree with you that the state should stay out of matters of individual choice.
I'm happy enough with concepts like sugar taxes etc. These things have negative externalities which are picked up by the government so, like smoking, I've no problem with tax on that. There's also the point that pricing signals could be effective - e.g. two similar products, one cheaper due to lower sugar and dodging tax (e.g. someome might buy full sugar Coke out of habit, but Zero being cheaper due to tax might nudge them towards trying that). In practice, of course, what tends to happen - at least where the alternative is not fom the same vendor and lobbying fails to kill the tax - is that products are designed around the tax, to avoid it. Which is also fine.
Edit to add: a sometime colleague (occasional collaborations over a number of years, but not at the same institution) has done a lot of work on minimum alcohol pricing. Not my field and I haven't been involved, but it's interesting stuff.
I think controlling weight and eventually obesity is a really tough one for a lot of people. Some people don't get fat, for a lot of reasons. Some are very self disciplined, recognising that if they don't control what the eat and drink they will put on weight. Others are more naturally blessed, such as my wife. When she isn't hungry she has no interest in food. None. For me, I can eat whenever - hungry or not. I have poor control. I don't particularly eat a bad diet but almost certainly too much.
And yet weight really isn't as simple as calories in vs calories out. Loads of studies on over-eating (such as giving people 4000 to 5000 calories a day for an extended period but not seeing huge weight gains) bear this out. More likely hormone regulation about what the body does with food (does it store fats, or try to excrete sugars etc) plus gut bacteria, combined with food choices (processed food is terrible).
Frankkly if we only had greengrocers and butchers and had to cook from there we'd probably all be healthier.
Yep, it's complicated. At the base level, the solution to obesity is to eat less and/or exercise more. But there do seem to be substantial differences between what people can eat without becoming overwieght, beyond obvious differences in exercise. Some physiology, I expect, but maybe also some micro-differences in lifestyle and activity that are not easily recorded.
The eating less issue is key IMHO. Every fat person I know, especially those who complain they can’t lose weight just eat too much.
They will have giant plates or bowls of food and then express shock that they are still fat “but I’m not eating really unhealthy food” they cry without realising they are eating enough for four people in the evening so not only too much food but no time to burn it off as they are also too full to do anything but have a food coma on the sofa afterwards.
So if the gov have to do anything they need to really start hammering home portion sizes to people - when the ready meal says “serves 4” it generally means it unless you are working physically all day or exercising a lot.
Too true. As I've written here before, despite eating healthily I was for several years overweight, because I was overeating at meal times. Last year I lost a lot of weight, so that I am now a "healthy" weight and this year have sucessfully kept the weight off. Eating less was easily the main factor in losing weight.
I find the difference in how people react to smoking and obesity interesting. I’m an idiot and I smoke. I know it’s totally stupid and have given myself a point where I stop - it’s a specific moment soon where I will because of other things in my life but I know it will be when I totally stop.
When someone criticises me for smoking, as people do, I don’t have a strop or cry but agree saying “yes it’s grim and stupid and will stop”.
If however you tell someone they should eat less and lose weight as it’s bad for them then it tends to get a slightly less accepting reception.
You can of course stop smoking entirely. It will be hard for a few weeks no doubt. You will probably succeed after that if you never have another cigarette. If you have just the odd one though, you may soon find you are back smoking regularly.
You cannot stop eating entirely and remain alive.
I smoked between 60 and 80 a day when I first started offshore. The logging unit where I worked was the only place on the rig outside of the accommodation you were allowed to smoke as we did all the gas analysis there so had naked flames.
Then I got to boxing day 1990 and was sat in the pub with my mates and realised I was the only one who smoked. So I decided to stop. I put out the cigarette I had lit and have never smoked again.
It was hard at first. But I realised that it was a choice. It was always a matter of choosing to smoke so I chose not to. I even had a cigarette in my mouth a couple of times but then chose not to light it.
I don't consider myself an ex-smoker. I am a smoker who chooses not to smoke. After 32 years I still absolutely love everything about smoking. I have never lost the memory of the enjoyment and I would start again tomorrow if you told me it wouldn't kill me. But I won't, because I choose not to.
I'm impressed. I'm glad I never started as I can't believe I would be able to stop. Lucky I guess. I used to hate the smell of smoke. Glad the days of smoke filled pubs have gone. The smell on ones clothes was awful.
Totally O/T but in case @MaxPB is around (or anyone else who knows Zurich Airport). I am due to land at Zurich at 9:30am with only cabin baggage - have I any hope at all of getting from Zurich airport to Zurich HB in order to catch a 10:33 train? I guess my questions are how long does it take to walk through Zurich airport / what immigration queues can I expect and is the local train from the airport station to HB as straightforward as it appears to be?
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
I learned loads about it at school. It was a major part of the principle module we did on British Foreign Policy from 18th-20th centuries. I don't know where they idea we don't teach about it comes from, even if we could do more about the pervasiveness of that particular mass slavery system.
Everybody talking about what they learnt at school needs to give dates! There’s a span of half a century between some PBers.
I was at school in the 1970s and early 80s. We did nothing at all on the Slave Trade nor on Empire either at O level or A level.
My daughter left school just over 3 years ago and my son does GCSEs next year. They both did a lot about Empire and the Slave trade but mostly (from memory) in the years before they started their GCSEs.
Is PMQs cancelled today, or are politicians actually going to get some work done?
HoC will sit for 8 days between 21 July and 17 Oct, 2 of which exclusively used for tribute to the Queen. Then off again for another break 9 November before 3 weeks off for Xmas.
It would have been off for a lot of that anyway, but they should canncel any break before Christmas, they've had plenty.
Give MPs a pay rise. Calculate the average hours worked by people on £100k a year, and give them an hourly rate. MPs then paid based on hours worked for the country, not party. If they want to take a month off for party conferences it should be unpaid, or the parties can pay them.
But we shouldn’t fall into the fallacy that MPs are only working when the House is sitting. They do a large amount of constituency work year round.
Yes, but my complaint is not that they are lazy when the Commons is not sitting. The correct ratio of parliamentary vs constituency work is to be debated, and probably not reconcilable, but the former is a rather important aspect of the job, and all these breaks they take, even when they have just had some, makes scrutinizing and approving legislation more time sensitive than it should be.
I know the government don't want MPs scrutinising legislation, but the time must be found, and they even put themselves under pressure in fitting in what they want to do!
One positive is I fail to see how they are going to have time to pass the onerous new gambling legislation.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
I was taught about it at private school at age about 9 BUT as a purely economic phenomenon. Not the faintest suggestion that your Africa to Caribbean cargo raised questions that C to UK and UK to Africa did not.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
I learned loads about it at school. It was a major part of the principle module we did on British Foreign Policy from 18th-20th centuries. I don't know where they idea we don't teach about it comes from, even if we could do more about the pervasiveness of that particular mass slavery system.
Everybody talking about what they learnt at school needs to give dates! There’s a span of half a century between some PBers.
90s to mid 2000s. The transatlantic slave trade was prominent at secondary. I don't believe I was taught about it in Primary, but then I can only remember doing Romans, Aztecs, Tudors, and something about Victorian London then.
For all the talk about over focus on dates and kings, I honestly don't remember ever being taken through an overview of British history, with key dates, reigns, that sort of thing. We were never taught about the 17th century civil wars for instance.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
I learned loads about it at school. It was a major part of the principle module we did on British Foreign Policy from 18th-20th centuries. I don't know where they idea we don't teach about it comes from, even if we could do more about the pervasiveness of that particular mass slavery system.
Everybody talking about what they learnt at school needs to give dates! There’s a span of half a century between some PBers.
Nothing kills an evening at a nice restaurant stone dead more effectively than seeing the effing calories of each option.
As The Trip showed and we all knew but tried to ignore, seemingly the most important ingredient for just about everything on a menu is cream and butter.
Totally agree. Another stunning success from our 'red-tape slashing' government.
The solution is to avoid chains - restaurants with fewer than 250 employees are exempt.
Do not agree. We have an obesity crisis and any sensitivities you might have round how much you are eating should be met head on.
It's a reminder that eating out is a treat, and doing it too often will have serious repercussions for your health.
#savetheNHS
It is also quite informative. I tend not to bother with it or evne notice really - eating out is a treat, not very frequent and not going to make much difference to overall calorie intake (and Im happy with my weight, so no particular incentive). But I remember my mother in law, who was on a 'wedding waistline challenge'* being surprised to see that the salad she thought she should probably have was approximately as calorific as the sea bass she wanted to have, so she had what she wanted instead.
*she did this for each of three of her offsprings' weddings over three years, with some success, but generally short lived. Then got an exercise bike that she uses every morning, which has been much more effective at long term weight control, with added fitness benefits.
It is the salad dressing that kills it. We should go back to the 1970s when olive oil cured earache. Something similar must be true of seabass as well, as it is pretty much all protein; does it come with new potatoes and a herb (and oil) sauce?
Speaking of which, time for fish and chips!
Yep. I remember quite clearly as I had the sea bass too. Just some crushed new potatoes and selection of veg, some herbs in butter (but not very much). It was excellent - very good food cooked simply but very well. I saw a salad there another time that was drenched in sauce - it looked very tasty, but that will be where the calories came from.
Is PMQs cancelled today, or are politicians actually going to get some work done?
HoC will sit for 8 days between 21 July and 17 Oct, 2 of which exclusively used for tribute to the Queen. Then off again for another break 9 November before 3 weeks off for Xmas.
It would have been off for a lot of that anyway, but they should canncel any break before Christmas, they've had plenty.
Give MPs a pay rise. Calculate the average hours worked by people on £100k a year, and give them an hourly rate. MPs then paid based on hours worked for the country, not party. If they want to take a month off for party conferences it should be unpaid, or the parties can pay them.
But we shouldn’t fall into the fallacy that MPs are only working when the House is sitting. They do a large amount of constituency work year round.
Yes, but my complaint is not that they are lazy when the Commons is not sitting. The correct ratio of parliamentary vs constituency work is to be debated, and probably not reconcilable, but the former is a rather important aspect of the job, and all these breaks they take, even when they have just had some, makes scrutinizing and approving legislation more time sensitive than it should be.
I know the government don't want MPs scrutinising legislation, but the time must be found, and they even put themselves under pressure in fitting in what they want to do!
One positive is I fail to see how they are going to have time to pass the onerous new gambling legislation.
Doing something to counter 410 suicides a year looks rather a positive to me. I doubt most PB punters will be affected.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
I went to a comprehensive and learned practically nothing about it. But this was in Scotland, perhaps it was taught more down here. Or perhaps it was just patchy. I would imagine that all forms of undeserved privilege are off limits in private school curricula, for obvious reasons.
I knew there had to be a reason that private schools don't have to follow the "national" curriculum. That said, the slave trade is "non-statutory" even on the NC. (See page 4.)
Is PMQs cancelled today, or are politicians actually going to get some work done?
HoC will sit for 8 days between 21 July and 17 Oct, 2 of which exclusively used for tribute to the Queen. Then off again for another break 9 November before 3 weeks off for Xmas.
It would have been off for a lot of that anyway, but they should canncel any break before Christmas, they've had plenty.
Give MPs a pay rise. Calculate the average hours worked by people on £100k a year, and give them an hourly rate. MPs then paid based on hours worked for the country, not party. If they want to take a month off for party conferences it should be unpaid, or the parties can pay them.
But we shouldn’t fall into the fallacy that MPs are only working when the House is sitting. They do a large amount of constituency work year round.
Yes, but my complaint is not that they are lazy when the Commons is not sitting. The correct ratio of parliamentary vs constituency work is to be debated, and probably not reconcilable, but the former is a rather important aspect of the job, and all these breaks they take, even when they have just had some, makes scrutinizing and approving legislation more time sensitive than it should be.
I know the government don't want MPs scrutinising legislation, but the time must be found, and they even put themselves under pressure in fitting in what they want to do!
One positive is I fail to see how they are going to have time to pass the onerous new gambling legislation.
Doing something to counter 410 suicides a year looks rather a positive to me. I doubt most PB punters will be affected.
I haven't reviewed the legislation in question, but surely sometimes the positive purpose of legislation does not necessarily eclipse whether it is worthwhile or effective legislation in its practice?
Is PMQs cancelled today, or are politicians actually going to get some work done?
HoC will sit for 8 days between 21 July and 17 Oct, 2 of which exclusively used for tribute to the Queen. Then off again for another break 9 November before 3 weeks off for Xmas.
It would have been off for a lot of that anyway, but they should canncel any break before Christmas, they've had plenty.
Give MPs a pay rise. Calculate the average hours worked by people on £100k a year, and give them an hourly rate. MPs then paid based on hours worked for the country, not party. If they want to take a month off for party conferences it should be unpaid, or the parties can pay them.
But we shouldn’t fall into the fallacy that MPs are only working when the House is sitting. They do a large amount of constituency work year round.
Yes, but my complaint is not that they are lazy when the Commons is not sitting. The correct ratio of parliamentary vs constituency work is to be debated, and probably not reconcilable, but the former is a rather important aspect of the job, and all these breaks they take, even when they have just had some, makes scrutinizing and approving legislation more time sensitive than it should be.
I know the government don't want MPs scrutinising legislation, but the time must be found, and they even put themselves under pressure in fitting in what they want to do!
One positive is I fail to see how they are going to have time to pass the onerous new gambling legislation.
Doing something to counter 410 suicides a year looks rather a positive to me. I doubt most PB punters will be affected.
In favour of doing something, definitely. The existing legislation is wrong and should be rebalanced. The proposals are not the answer though.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
Yes, I learned plenty about the horrors of the slave trade, when I was at school. Along with the horrors inflicted on children in mines and factories etc. The past was a pretty unpleasant place to dwell in, unless you were part of the elite.
What I did not learn, however, was the part played by the slaves themselves in ending it. The Haitian and Baptist revolts, and constant escapes and mutinies on board ships, put the fear of God into the slave owners, and ultimately persuaded them that they would be better off taking cash to agree to abolition,
Paying compensation to slave owners stick in one's throat, but if it hastens the process of abolition, then so be it.
Indeed. The revolts, the legal challenges too, it’s important to remember how the enslaved, and others, always fought back against slavery. The Crash Course Black American History on YouTube is a good series that covers this: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNYJO8JWpXO2JP0ezgxsrJJ
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
Yeah, I think Britain is amongst the very best countries on earth. It still has lots of things wrong with it past and present. Humans learn more from their mistakes than their triumphs, we should learn about bad things as well as good things.
I used to get annoyed by idiots who would regard any criticism of Britain as unpatriotic. These people have now disappeared, but it seems that many of those on the left (ie: the statue topplers) are equally stupid and ignorant and are cheered on by people who should know better, ie: university lecturers. In the end, you will never overcome the problem that people like simple stories where there is just good and evil, and there is a tendency to apply this to the study of history, unfortunately.
Everybody talking about what they learnt at school needs to give dates! There’s a span of half a century between some PBers.
I definitely had the inequities of imperialism drummed into me at école primaire in Belgium in the 70s. I remember pictures of glum looking Africans in the Belgian Congo with theirs hands chopped off in my history textbook when I was 9 or 10!
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
But every family is madly mixed
As I've mentioned on here, my maternal grandmother, Annie Maud *****, worked as a barefoot bal maiden on the clifftop tin mines of St Agnes, Cornwall, sorting out broken rocks. She was aged NINE. Essentially child slave labour, she had no choice in this. Forced into the mines as a tiny girl, to do terrible work which often sent girls deaf (the noise of the stamps crushing the ore was thunderous)
My mum's Cornish family were probably as poor as it got in the British Isles, at that time, and the idea they benefited from the White Privilege of Owning Slaves is so insultingly stupid Annie Maud would - I hope - give you a thump if she heard it
And yet, on my Dad's side, by a huge quirk, we have discovered we are directly descended from Maud Ingelric (another Maud!), concubine of William the Conqueror, matriarch of the noble Peverells, medieval aristos for centuries, and through her we probably descend from Anglo Saxon kings, Norman dukes and Viking warlords. They DID own slaves. But probably white slaves, in the main, so what does that mean?
It means history is ridiculously complex and this Woke attempt to divide it into White = Bad and Black = Victim is dangerous, corrosive nonsense
BTW I am sure 98% of British family trees have similar paradoxes and contrasts - kings and serfs in the background - we are just unusual in that we can trace them
Sean Gabb made much the same point about his own family history. We're all descended from perpetrators, and victims, of horrors.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
I went to a comprehensive and learned practically nothing about it. But this was in Scotland, perhaps it was taught more down here. Or perhaps it was just patchy. I would imagine that all forms of undeserved privilege are off limits in private school curricula, for obvious reasons.
My state secondary education, 70s-80s, did a good job in showing Britain: warts and all
So we did slavery and the horrors of early industrial revolution (boys up chimneys etc), but you also got a sense of British imperial grandeur, half the map pink, and also the sheer longevity of Britain/England as a concept. And of course we were told how we beat the Nazis, with lots of Russian and American help
Not bad. It gave me the basics and was not slanted either way
What it didn't do was teach me anything much beyond British history, apart from some European (Nazis, Russian revolution) and modern American stuff (and Rome, they did do the Roman Empire)
But there is only so much you can squeeze in the brains of kids, and it is right for the curriculum to focus on the history of the nation in which you live, especially a nation as consequential as the UK. If you know the history of the UK, you pretty much know why the world is as it is
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary.
I think it may also be variable within the state school system. I went through in the 80s/90s, and my impression was that the curriculum at the time was somewhat modular, so depending on the preferences of the school and teachers you might or might not study a particular period of history - the curriculum was more interested in whether you picked up the basic principles of studying history rather than teaching specifics.
At any rate I don't have a strong memory of studying slavery and empire.
With inflation under her watch now down to tiny, tiny single figures she will soon be twenty five points ahead. And you get the inch-perfect Conservative Government you desire.
Crushing inflation, the CoL crisis, and the Putin-Starmer coalition in less than a week Is nothing short of impressive. The lead is imminent.
Useless pro establishment anti working class Party vs Useless pro establishment anti working class liars Party
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
But every family is madly mixed
As I've mentioned on here, my maternal grandmother, Annie Maud *****, worked as a barefoot bal maiden on the clifftop tin mines of St Agnes, Cornwall, sorting out broken rocks. She was aged NINE. Essentially child slave labour, she had no choice in this. Forced into the mines as a tiny girl, to do terrible work which often sent girls deaf (the noise of the stamps crushing the ore was thunderous)
My mum's Cornish family were probably as poor as it got in the British Isles, at that time, and the idea they benefited from the White Privilege of Owning Slaves is so insultingly stupid Annie Maud would - I hope - give you a thump if she heard it
And yet, on my Dad's side, by a huge quirk, we have discovered we are directly descended from Maud Ingelric (another Maud!), concubine of William the Conqueror, matriarch of the noble Peverells, medieval aristos for centuries, and through her we probably descend from Anglo Saxon kings, Norman dukes and Viking warlords. They DID own slaves. But probably white slaves, in the main, so what does that mean?
It means history is ridiculously complex and this Woke attempt to divide it into White = Bad and Black = Victim is dangerous, corrosive nonsense
BTW I am sure 98% of British family trees have similar paradoxes and contrasts - kings and serfs in the background - we are just unusual in that we can trace them
Chronology a bit out there, unless your family is very longlived - even for the products of American slavery.
And yet ... cheap cotton, cheap sugar. All important for the poor. On the other hand, did the mine owners not then screw the pay down to allow for that? (And perhaps owned the truck shop too.)
Are you seriously trying to claim that my nine year old, barefoot grandmother, standing outdoors in January on the Cornish cliffs, ten hours a day, smashing fucking rocks with a hammer, day after day, using sign language because everyone is going deaf from the steam-powered stamps, and all this as her Dad is down the mines getting sick from the dust (he died of it in the end), is somehow benefiting from slavery because she's wearing hand me downs made of cheap cotton picked by slaves in distant Mississippi?
I mean, fuck that. No offence
No offence.
She must have been doing that, when, 1910? Even the Americans had aboilished slavery then. (Sharecropping, yes.)
Consider, however, a previous generation of bal maiden shovelling mineral ore on the floor. On the strict economic level, her family did benefit from getting x calories as sugar more cheaply than as, say, wheat, and cotton more cheaply than wool, etc. But one has to see it in wider context, as I perhaps did not stress enough: wouldn't the mineowners have reduced wages commensurately anyway?
PS my granddad was a surface worker in a coal mine, too ...
The relevant argument is less about whether the historical working class benefited from slavery, but more whether contemporary society does so, beyond those with a direct inheritance of slavery-based wealth.
If you can make that argument, and the related argument that countries where slaves were shipped from, or to, are still suffering from a negative inheritance, then you can make the case for some degree of reparations at the state-to-state level.
I broadly accept that argument, and I think it could provide a better basis for development assistance to many countries than the charity-based model we have been using, and all the associated problems of governance and control that have gone along with that.
I was at a 50s grammar school. We did history in chronological order, and I got about as far as the Glorious Revolution but then went into the science fourth and dropped the subject together. Which I was rather sad about!
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
But every family is madly mixed
As I've mentioned on here, my maternal grandmother, Annie Maud *****, worked as a barefoot bal maiden on the clifftop tin mines of St Agnes, Cornwall, sorting out broken rocks. She was aged NINE. Essentially child slave labour, she had no choice in this. Forced into the mines as a tiny girl, to do terrible work which often sent girls deaf (the noise of the stamps crushing the ore was thunderous)
My mum's Cornish family were probably as poor as it got in the British Isles, at that time, and the idea they benefited from the White Privilege of Owning Slaves is so insultingly stupid Annie Maud would - I hope - give you a thump if she heard it
And yet, on my Dad's side, by a huge quirk, we have discovered we are directly descended from Maud Ingelric (another Maud!), concubine of William the Conqueror, matriarch of the noble Peverells, medieval aristos for centuries, and through her we probably descend from Anglo Saxon kings, Norman dukes and Viking warlords. They DID own slaves. But probably white slaves, in the main, so what does that mean?
It means history is ridiculously complex and this Woke attempt to divide it into White = Bad and Black = Victim is dangerous, corrosive nonsense
BTW I am sure 98% of British family trees have similar paradoxes and contrasts - kings and serfs in the background - we are just unusual in that we can trace them
Sean Gabb made much the same point about his own family history. We're all descended from perpetrators, and victims, of horrors.
Yes, this is true in many families - and national societies.
Incidentally, that state/private thing may be correct, at least a few decades ago. I was educated at a public school, not as reactionary as Eton, but still was taught nothing about it at all until taking the time to find out myself, some time later.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
I went to a comprehensive and learned practically nothing about it. But this was in Scotland, perhaps it was taught more down here. Or perhaps it was just patchy. I would imagine that all forms of undeserved privilege are off limits in private school curricula, for obvious reasons.
In 80s, when I went to private school, slavery was on the curriculum. Interestingly, it was much less on the state school curriculum.
In the mid 90s, I took part in an experimental thing at a local state school where a non-school teacher would teach a lesson. I did slavery, complete with a Minard diagram of the Atlantic slave trade and a cardboard model of a slave ship. This shocked some 13 year olds - according to the regular teacher.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
But every family is madly mixed
As I've mentioned on here, my maternal grandmother, Annie Maud *****, worked as a barefoot bal maiden on the clifftop tin mines of St Agnes, Cornwall, sorting out broken rocks. She was aged NINE. Essentially child slave labour, she had no choice in this. Forced into the mines as a tiny girl, to do terrible work which often sent girls deaf (the noise of the stamps crushing the ore was thunderous)
My mum's Cornish family were probably as poor as it got in the British Isles, at that time, and the idea they benefited from the White Privilege of Owning Slaves is so insultingly stupid Annie Maud would - I hope - give you a thump if she heard it
And yet, on my Dad's side, by a huge quirk, we have discovered we are directly descended from Maud Ingelric (another Maud!), concubine of William the Conqueror, matriarch of the noble Peverells, medieval aristos for centuries, and through her we probably descend from Anglo Saxon kings, Norman dukes and Viking warlords. They DID own slaves. But probably white slaves, in the main, so what does that mean?
It means history is ridiculously complex and this Woke attempt to divide it into White = Bad and Black = Victim is dangerous, corrosive nonsense
BTW I am sure 98% of British family trees have similar paradoxes and contrasts - kings and serfs in the background - we are just unusual in that we can trace them
Sean Gabb made much the same point about his own family history. We're all descended from perpetrators, and victims, of horrors.
If you trace it far enough back, we're all descended from the same fish.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
Yes, I learned plenty about the horrors of the slave trade, when I was at school. Along with the horrors inflicted on children in mines and factories etc. The past was a pretty unpleasant place to dwell in, unless you were part of the elite.
What I did not learn, however, was the part played by the slaves themselves in ending it. The Haitian and Baptist revolts, and constant escapes and mutinies on board ships, put the fear of God into the slave owners, and ultimately persuaded them that they would be better off taking cash to agree to abolition,
Paying compensation to slave owners stick in one's throat, but if it hastens the process of abolition, then so be it.
Indeed. The revolts, the legal challenges too, it’s important to remember how the enslaved, and others, always fought back against slavery. The Crash Course Black American History on YouTube is a good series that covers this: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNYJO8JWpXO2JP0ezgxsrJJ
Slave revolts are as old as slavery. The Three Servile Wars, in Sicily and Italy, were absolutely brutal by any measure.
Slavery in the ancient world was dealt with in my classics lessons. The view seemed to be that it was sort of okay because it was not race-based.
Wrong. Slavery in the last 150 years of the Roman Republic, or as a helot, was every bit as grim as in the West Indies.
I was at a 50s grammar school. We did history in chronological order, and I got about as far as the Glorious Revolution but then went into the science fourth and dropped the subject together. Which I was rather sad about!
Similar for me a bit later- dropped history early, for the same reason, with about the same terminus.
With inflation under her watch now down to tiny, tiny single figures she will soon be twenty five points ahead. And you get the inch-perfect Conservative Government you desire.
Crushing inflation, the CoL crisis, and the Putin-Starmer coalition in less than a week Is nothing short of impressive. The lead is imminent.
Useless pro establishment anti working class Party vs Useless pro establishment anti working class liars Party
Tough choice.
Low turnout in 2024 methinks
Also won't be as big a turnout of voters desperate to keep Corbyn out of No 10
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
Yes, I learned plenty about the horrors of the slave trade, when I was at school. Along with the horrors inflicted on children in mines and factories etc. The past was a pretty unpleasant place to dwell in, unless you were part of the elite.
What I did not learn, however, was the part played by the slaves themselves in ending it. The Haitian and Baptist revolts, and constant escapes and mutinies on board ships, put the fear of God into the slave owners, and ultimately persuaded them that they would be better off taking cash to agree to abolition,
Paying compensation to slave owners stick in one's throat, but if it hastens the process of abolition, then so be it.
Indeed. The revolts, the legal challenges too, it’s important to remember how the enslaved, and others, always fought back against slavery. The Crash Course Black American History on YouTube is a good series that covers this: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNYJO8JWpXO2JP0ezgxsrJJ
Slave revolts are as old as slavery. The Three Servile Wars, in Sicily and Italy, were absolutely brutal by any measure.
Slavery in the ancient world was dealt with in my classics lessons. The view seemed to be that it was sort of okay because it was not race-based.
Wrong. Slavery in the last 150 years of the Roman Republic, or as a helot, was every bit as grim as in the West Indies.
I remember Latin classes (public school, early ‘80s), “Caecilius est in horto” and all that, and nary a suggestion that there was anything problematic about slavery or any other aspects of Roman society.
Is he some kind of expert on showing respect and are we OK showing it in the way he respects Socialists?
In all the change, it's delightful that at least there are some constants. BJO pissing in the wind about socialists and Starmer, is a reassuring presence.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
I learned loads about it at school. It
was a major part of the principle module we did on British Foreign Policy from 18th-20th centuries. I don't know where they idea we don't teach about it comes from, even if we could do more about the pervasiveness of that particular mass slavery system.
It's a state/private education thing. The poshos on here don't understand
Not really a state/private thing. It’s an exam board thing. If it’s not part of the syllabus for exams then it’s not likely to covered in depth so everyone gets a general bit of time dedicated to learning about it at best.
Wasn’t remotely in my history GCSE or A-Level syllabus but we had an hour each day lesson called a Division where you learnt about non-examined things so was dealt with there during history, cultural, philosophical and theological studies at various times over 5 years.
Similarly in the way of learning about the Renaissance, philosophy etc. Not on any of our exam syllabuses but good to learn about anyway.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
Yes, I learned plenty about the horrors of the slave trade, when I was at school. Along with the horrors inflicted on children in mines and factories etc. The past was a pretty unpleasant place to dwell in, unless you were part of the elite.
What I did not learn, however, was the part played by the slaves themselves in ending it. The Haitian and Baptist revolts, and constant escapes and mutinies on board ships, put the fear of God into the slave owners, and ultimately persuaded them that they would be better off taking cash to agree to abolition,
Paying compensation to slave owners stick in one's throat, but if it hastens the process of abolition, then so be it.
Indeed. The revolts, the legal challenges too, it’s important to remember how the enslaved, and others, always fought back against slavery. The Crash Course Black American History on YouTube is a good series that covers this: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNYJO8JWpXO2JP0ezgxsrJJ
Slave revolts are as old as slavery. The Three Servile Wars, in Sicily and Italy, were absolutely brutal by any measure.
Slavery in the ancient world was dealt with in my classics lessons. The view seemed to be that it was sort of okay because it was not race-based.
Wrong. Slavery in the last 150 years of the Roman Republic, or as a helot, was every bit as grim as in the West Indies.
I remember Latin classes (public school, early ‘80s), “Caecilius est in horto” and all that, and nary a suggestion that there was anything problematic about slavery or any other aspects of Roman society.
I remember we all had a good laugh when the paterfamilias bought a hot, young, female slave, and his wife got pissed off.
We weren't told she was stripped naked, groped, and auctioned, to a group of men, all bidding for the right to rape her.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
Yes, I learned plenty about the horrors of the slave trade, when I was at school. Along with the horrors inflicted on children in mines and factories etc. The past was a pretty unpleasant place to dwell in, unless you were part of the elite.
What I did not learn, however, was the part played by the slaves themselves in ending it. The Haitian and Baptist revolts, and constant escapes and mutinies on board ships, put the fear of God into the slave owners, and ultimately persuaded them that they would be better off taking cash to agree to abolition,
Paying compensation to slave owners stick in one's throat, but if it hastens the process of abolition, then so be it.
Indeed. The revolts, the legal challenges too, it’s important to remember how the enslaved, and others, always fought back against slavery. The Crash Course Black American History on YouTube is a good series that covers this: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNYJO8JWpXO2JP0ezgxsrJJ
Slave revolts are as old as slavery. The Three Servile Wars, in Sicily and Italy, were absolutely brutal by any measure.
Slavery in the ancient world was dealt with in my classics lessons. The view seemed to be that it was sort of okay because it was not race-based.
Wrong. Slavery in the last 150 years of the Roman Republic, or as a helot, was every bit as grim as in the West Indies.
Think on this when you visit the Rio Tinto mines…
1) The life expectancy of a slave there as attested by ancient authors 2) the number of slaves there 3) the period of time the mines were operated for
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
Yes, I learned plenty about the horrors of the slave trade, when I was at school. Along with the horrors inflicted on children in mines and factories etc. The past was a pretty unpleasant place to dwell in, unless you were part of the elite.
What I did not learn, however, was the part played by the slaves themselves in ending it. The Haitian and Baptist revolts, and constant escapes and mutinies on board ships, put the fear of God into the slave owners, and ultimately persuaded them that they would be better off taking cash to agree to abolition,
Paying compensation to slave owners stick in one's throat, but if it hastens the process of abolition, then so be it.
Indeed. The revolts, the legal challenges too, it’s important to remember how the enslaved, and others, always fought back against slavery. The Crash Course Black American History on YouTube is a good series that covers this: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNYJO8JWpXO2JP0ezgxsrJJ
Slave revolts are as old as slavery. The Three Servile Wars, in Sicily and Italy, were absolutely brutal by any measure.
Slavery in the ancient world was dealt with in my classics lessons. The view seemed to be that it was sort of okay because it was not race-based.
Wrong. Slavery in the last 150 years of the Roman Republic, or as a helot, was every bit as grim as in the West Indies.
I remember Latin classes (public school, early ‘80s), “Caecilius est in horto” and all that, and nary a suggestion that there was anything problematic about slavery or any other aspects of Roman society.
I certainly remember having to recite all the different cases for servus at prep school
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I agree that we need to be honest about the historical record. But, this means facing up to the prevalance of 'slavery' and 'colonialism' in the entirety of human history and, in particular, outside of Europe and North America. But the trouble is that there is an idea being perpetrated that this is only about white people. It is essentially a deceptive and convenient narrative invented by socialists/communists as a way of making people doubt the wisdom of capitalism and liberal democracy. But in fact it was capitalism and liberal democracy that abolished slavery and eventually, in the case of Britain, colonialism - and facilitated the creation of post colonial independent nation states. So the entire process should be viewed in this context.
People don't like this idea because it is a lot easier to explain complex phenomena through simple stories of heroes and villains. It seems to me like this type of simplified moral analysis of complicated historical questions has infested large parts of academia (if not actual history departments); and has a big impact on the education system. It played a large part in the phenomena of statue toppling in 2020 and the concept of 'decolonisation' being rolled out through many public and private institutions.
If you want to feel better about being British, just go and look at what China is up to in Xinjiang and what the Russians are trying to do/have done in Ukraine.
I think it's useful to remember that capitalism comes in many flavours, from the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade to benign Scandinavian style social democracy. I am not a communist so have no interest in overthrowing capitalism, but I think we should educate ourselves about history so that we can choose the appropriate form of capitalism to live under. I see the abolition of slavery and the advent of mass democracy in this country (which happened at approximately the same time, no coincidence) as part of a process of working class people asserting their fundamental dignity and rights at a time when the elite barely recognised their humanity. Long may it continue, because that is a process that is incomplete. It's surely right that we, as British people, focus on our own history and ancestors, as slave owners, as beneficiaries of slavery or as slaves. And as descendents of colonisers and the colonised. Let the French, the Arabs, the Japanese, the Greeks et al study and learn from their own history. Incidentally, I think we are quietly getting on with that process and doing an okay job if it, probably better than many other countries. I'm impressed by what my kids are learning at school, it is nuanced and based on the facts.
By and large I agree. Certainly the more distant parts of history should be treated in a fairly neutral way as obviously times and social mores were very different.
As we get more recent though, we are still within living memory of the Kenyan concentration and torture centres of the Mau Mau revolt, within the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
I went to a comprehensive and learned practically nothing about it. But this was in Scotland, perhaps it was taught more down here. Or perhaps it was just patchy. I would imagine that all forms of undeserved privilege are off limits in private school curricula, for obvious reasons.
In 80s, when I went to private school, slavery was on the curriculum. Interestingly, it was much less on the state school curriculum.
In the mid 90s, I took part in an experimental thing at a local state school where a non-school teacher would teach a lesson. I did slavery, complete with a Minard diagram of the Atlantic slave trade and a cardboard model of a slave ship. This shocked some 13 year olds - according to the regular teacher.
We never learned much about it at school, but I did spend an afternoon in a slavery museum some years back and finally gained some deeper understanding of the utter horrors involved.
Remember how we've been talking about whether Russia will use nukes, and whether those nukes will work?
Well, they've been using conscripts from the Strategic Rocket Forces as infantry replacements in Ukraine. Whilst that's only one of the three main delivery routes Russia has (missiles, planes, submarines), it won't help readiness.
And rumours there was an assassination attempt on Putin. Probably not true, but if the rumour's coming from within Russia, then that's a sign things are not hunky-dory for the regime. https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1569951155735904256
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
But every family is madly mixed
As I've mentioned on here, my maternal grandmother, Annie Maud *****, worked as a barefoot bal maiden on the clifftop tin mines of St Agnes, Cornwall, sorting out broken rocks. She was aged NINE. Essentially child slave labour, she had no choice in this. Forced into the mines as a tiny girl, to do terrible work which often sent girls deaf (the noise of the stamps crushing the ore was thunderous)
My mum's Cornish family were probably as poor as it got in the British Isles, at that time, and the idea they benefited from the White Privilege of Owning Slaves is so insultingly stupid Annie Maud would - I hope - give you a thump if she heard it
And yet, on my Dad's side, by a huge quirk, we have discovered we are directly descended from Maud Ingelric (another Maud!), concubine of William the Conqueror, matriarch of the noble Peverells, medieval aristos for centuries, and through her we probably descend from Anglo Saxon kings, Norman dukes and Viking warlords. They DID own slaves. But probably white slaves, in the main, so what does that mean?
It means history is ridiculously complex and this Woke attempt to divide it into White = Bad and Black = Victim is dangerous, corrosive nonsense
BTW I am sure 98% of British family trees have similar paradoxes and contrasts - kings and serfs in the background - we are just unusual in that we can trace them
Chronology a bit out there, unless your family is very longlived - even for the products of American slavery.
And yet ... cheap cotton, cheap sugar. All important for the poor. On the other hand, did the mine owners not then screw the pay down to allow for that? (And perhaps owned the truck shop too.)
Are you seriously trying to claim that my nine year old, barefoot grandmother, standing outdoors in January on the Cornish cliffs, ten hours a day, smashing fucking rocks with a hammer, day after day, using sign language because everyone is going deaf from the steam-powered stamps, and all this as her Dad is down the mines getting sick from the dust (he died of it in the end), is somehow benefiting from slavery because she's wearing hand me downs made of cheap cotton picked by slaves in distant Mississippi?
I mean, fuck that. No offence
No offence.
She must have been doing that, when, 1910? Even the Americans had aboilished slavery then. (Sharecropping, yes.)
Consider, however, a previous generation of bal maiden shovelling mineral ore on the floor. On the strict economic level, her family did benefit from getting x calories as sugar more cheaply than as, say, wheat, and cotton more cheaply than wool, etc. But one has to see it in wider context, as I perhaps did not stress enough: wouldn't the mineowners have reduced wages commensurately anyway?
PS my granddad was a surface worker in a coal mine, too ...
The relevant argument is less about whether the historical working class benefited from slavery, but more whether contemporary society does so, beyond those with a direct inheritance of slavery-based wealth.
If you can make that argument, and the related argument that countries where slaves were shipped from, or to, are still suffering from a negative inheritance, then you can make the case for some degree of reparations at the state-to-state level.
I broadly accept that argument, and I think it could provide a better basis for development assistance to many countries than the charity-based model we have been using, and all the associated problems of governance and control that have gone along with that.
A LOT of it was invested in houses and land. If you talk to posh Scots and they know you well enough they will as often as not say that they have had the old castle and surrounding 5,000 acres since God was a boy, but the next 20,000 and the big house was compensation money. The big houses may have gone to the NT, the land often hasn't. Other money invested in mines and railways and stuff would be harder to trace.
The National Trust point is one which I have reclassified from Woke Gone Mad to, actually, they do have a serious problem.
European gas prices back up over 10% today. The market seems all over the place. Can't help wondering if there are attempts at manipulation going on.
It's probably a fairly easy market to bid up right now as well.
Bouncing around based on news from Ukraine & reports of improving supply from alternative sources vs truth that Ukraine war ending probably wont increase supplies.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
I learned loads about it at school. It was a major part of the principle module we did on British Foreign Policy from 18th-20th centuries. I don't know where they idea we don't teach about it comes from, even if we could do more about the pervasiveness of that particular mass slavery system.
Everybody talking about what they learnt at school needs to give dates! There’s a span of half a century between some PBers.
90s to mid 2000s. The transatlantic slave trade was prominent at secondary. I don't believe I was taught about it in Primary, but then I can only remember doing Romans, Aztecs, Tudors, and something about Victorian London then.
For all the talk about over focus on dates and kings, I honestly don't remember ever being taken through an overview of British history, with key dates, reigns, that sort of thing. We were never taught about the 17th century civil wars for instance.
My Grandad (born 1920) used to talk about how the idea of what was history had changed (he ended up teaching it) over the course of his life. When he was at school history ended with the Boer Wars, and WWI was considered to be too recent to be taught as history.
This kinda makes history an impossible subject to teach. I doubt we'd consider the history curriculum of the 1920s and 30s to be particularly appropriate for today anyway, but suppose for the sake of argument that it had the ideal balance of teaching about important principles and turning points that made the country what it is, together with an overview of important bits of history of the rest of the world, and a smattering of local detail so that one can tie local places, events and objects into the wider story.
That would be great. But, even if it was perfect, you could hardly teach it now and leave out WWI, WWII, the Cold War, etc. Somehow you'd have to butcher your perfect curriculum in order to fit lots of extra stuff in. In fifty years time any comprehensive history curriculum has surely got to make at least a little time for the War on Terror, and Putin's Wars of Russian Imperialism.
We need polling in the Carribean realms. A lot of their governments get tempted to fire from the hip - I suspect it's not a slam dunk in Antigua or even Jamaica.
Two factors at play here, I suspect. And likewise in Canada. The main one is complacency. Canada, Oz and NZ are all successful, prosperous democracies. Why risk that with wrenching political change?
I also suspect a backlash against Woke. Everyone Anglo in Oz and NZ is constantly bashed over the head with “white guilt” and “we stole these lands”
What’s a good but quiet way of subtly rebelling against all that? By saying “yes fair enough, but we also have our own European heritage, and we’re quite proud of that, actually”
So they stick with the monarchy.
Cf the NZ referendum to change the flag and drop the Union Jack. That failed badly. It was a discreet fuck-you to liberal Wokeness
It failed but not by quite as wide a margin as I'd thought.
But, I think that works both ways.
Are you and Leon quite OK with how "woke" Charles, William and Harry are or has it not really dawned on you both yet?
Do you really think that is anything other than a public relations strategy ?
I mean, if you are looking for families that directly benefitted from slavery, it would be hard to find better examples than the various Royal Families of Europe, especially the UK Royal Family.
So, I don't for one moment believe that Charles & Co seriously entertain financially compensating the peoples who enriched them.
The "wokeness" is to obscure their culpability.
The "wokeness' is to tarnish the whole population of the UK with collective guilt for slavery, when it was largely a ruling elite who benefitted.
I don't see it as tarnishing anything, more a question of opening our eyes to what happened rather than sweeping it under the carpet. Of course the main beneficiaries from any economic system will be the people at the top of the system, but actually the profits from slavery were spread fairly widely. We know from data on who was compensated when slavery was abolished (the owners not the slaves of course!) that there were plenty of widows on fairly modest incomes and the like who had a stake in it, with Scotland over represented iirc. There were plenty of overseer jobs out on the plantations. The cotton grown by slaves in the US provided jobs in British mill towns. Sugar, cotton, tobacco and other crops grown using slave labour were available to British consumers at lower cost. Government treasuries benefited and supported the growth of Britain as a major European power, which probably benefited the average person. It's always popular to blame 'the elite' for everything, on the left and the right, but the reality is that complicity starts at the top but definitely percolate downwards. Again, not a question of guilt, it's certainly not something I feel any guilt over, but a question of being honest about the historical record.
I think that this is a gross misrepresentation of what life was like for the working poor during the Industrial Revolution.
My own ancestors at this time were working in slate mines in pitiful conditions. There is abundant contemporary documentary evidence of the state of the Welsh-speaking miners in North Wales.
In fact, the owner of the slate mines was the same person who owned plantations in the West Indies. The wealth of the Penrhyn family derives both from exploitation of slaves and exploitation of Welsh slate miners.
There were families that benefitted enormously from slavery, and they should pay compensation (in the form say of educational scholarships for the descendants in the Caribbean).
The Royal Family is one such family.
Yes sure, the very poorest in the UK at the time (a lot of people) probably didn't see a huge amount of benefit but I guess the question should be - if slaves had been paid a wage for producing things like cotton, sugar and tobacco that the poor in the UK consumed, would the poor in the UK have had to pay more for them and be worse off? It seems plausible to me that the answer to this question might be yes. On the other hand, yes obviously the main beneficiaries were the slave owners and merchants, who as you note frequently owned capital on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm kind of lukewarm on the idea or reparations - I see the moral case for them but I think the logistics are hard given the passage of time, and the amount of exploitation at the time was so widespread and not limited to slavery that it opens all kinds of questions. Do descendents of exploited miners and mill workers 'deserve' reparations in some sense? Probably, yes. I think it would be better to work towards a world where opportunities are spread more widely, ingrained privilege is reduced and there is dignity and a fair wage for everyone's work. I think that understanding better all the ways that exploitative forms of capitalism blighted lives in the past can help us to build a better society today. A proper reckoning on slavery is part of that process, but only one part. And we should be wary of how divide and rule is still used to oppress working class people. I see slavery as the worst case of capitalist exploitation but not really a special case. It's right that it should be a notable area of debate but it shouldn't be the sole focus.
There's a similar discussion about the Highland Clearances, for example - how far did the landlords use money from exploiting people's labour elsewhere (Lanarkshire, Lancashire, Jamaica, India, Far East ...) to subsidise the local peasantry, if they were that way inclined, or conversely as a source of capital to transform the landscape, which might involve clearing out the locals?
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved) (2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people (3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Indeed, slavery and the Empire more broadly was absolutely woven into the fabric of the British economy and society. It is incredible to me how little I learned about it at school. Part of the reason that it has become such a divisive topic is that those of us who have taken some time to educate ourselves about it have had to do it on our own initiative, and so we've ended up in a very different place from those who haven't. The latter's instinctive reaction is often that we are hating on Britain, rather than simply satisfying our intellectual curiosity about this humungous elephant in the room.
There seems to be a huge gulf here between state schools and private
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
Yes, I learned plenty about the horrors of the slave trade, when I was at school. Along with the horrors inflicted on children in mines and factories etc. The past was a pretty unpleasant place to dwell in, unless you were part of the elite.
What I did not learn, however, was the part played by the slaves themselves in ending it. The Haitian and Baptist revolts, and constant escapes and mutinies on board ships, put the fear of God into the slave owners, and ultimately persuaded them that they would be better off taking cash to agree to abolition,
Paying compensation to slave owners stick in one's throat, but if it hastens the process of abolition, then so be it.
Indeed. The revolts, the legal challenges too, it’s important to remember how the enslaved, and others, always fought back against slavery. The Crash Course Black American History on YouTube is a good series that covers this: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNYJO8JWpXO2JP0ezgxsrJJ
Slave revolts are as old as slavery. The Three Servile Wars, in Sicily and Italy, were absolutely brutal by any measure.
Slavery in the ancient world was dealt with in my classics lessons. The view seemed to be that it was sort of okay because it was not race-based.
Wrong. Slavery in the last 150 years of the Roman Republic, or as a helot, was every bit as grim as in the West Indies.
Think on this when you visit the Rio Tinto mines…
1) The life expectancy of a slave there as attested by ancient authors 2) the number of slaves there 3) the period of time the mines were operated for
People like Tiro were outliers. Household slaves were the privileged minority. They could be killed or raped at will, but had a fairly good chance of manumission.
Agricultural slaves had an average working life of about seven years. Mine and quarry slaves, about 18 months. From the point of view of the slave owner, working them to death, and then replacing them with fresh stock, was the most profitable thing to do.
Comments
Like many have said I have the odd (uniquely British from our history?) mix of thinking of height/length in inches, feet, and yards; except for when I don’t and I use cm/m. Weight of a person or food is imperial but other weights are metic. Volumes of drinks are imperial but a swimming pool wouldn’t be.
It needs the obvious fudge and then to move on.
Why is your useless Tory leader 10% behind the other useless liar's Tory lite Party.
Westminster voting intention:
LAB: 42% (-2)
CON: 32% (+3)
LDEM: 10% (-)
GRN: 7% (-)
REF: 2% (-1)
via
@YouGov
, 11 - 12 Sep
Midterm polls are useless crap.
Give it a bit of time and she'll be 20 points behind.
https://www.nato-pa.int/content/finland-sweden-accession
Six countries yet to ratify, including Türkiye, Greece and Hungary.
I fear that Ukrainian NATO membership is unlikely to be straightforward.
I see the abolition of slavery and the advent of mass democracy in this country (which happened at approximately the same time, no coincidence) as part of a process of working class people asserting their fundamental dignity and rights at a time when the elite barely recognised their humanity. Long may it continue, because that is a process that is incomplete.
It's surely right that we, as British people, focus on our own history and ancestors, as slave owners, as beneficiaries of slavery or as slaves. And as descendents of colonisers and the colonised. Let the French, the Arabs, the Japanese, the Greeks et al study and learn from their own history. Incidentally, I think we are quietly getting on with that process and doing an okay job if it, probably better than many other countries. I'm impressed by what my kids are learning at school, it is nuanced and based on the facts.
On slavery more generally, the other problems with the modern British establishment polishing their collective fingernails on their lapel over the abolition of slavery in 1832, [edit] at least uncritically, are
(1) the continuation as the "apprenticeship" system - a form of bonded labour AIUI (though it did not carry on for long once people realised what was involved)
(2) the fact that the only reparation at the time, paid from taxation, excise duties, and public debt on the UK population as a whole, went *entirely* to the owners, not the enslaved people
(3) the continuing reliance of industry, in part, on slave products, directly (cotton) and indirectly (sugar, as cheap urban calories)
I've also been fascinated, the more I drill down into local history studies (I have been helping a friend with his research), the more I see for myself how integrated the slave trade and plantation products were with the UK economy. Like oil today, almost. It wasn't just something that was an add-on and came to the UK only as nice clean finished sacks of sugar or dividends in bank accounts.
Speaking of which, time for fish and chips!
There is absolutely nothing defensible for a "grievance" about countries that are free and independent signing a defence pact.
Both are utterly indefensible and come from a point of view whereby Russia considers other countries to be in its 'orbit' or sphere of influence which is contemptible either way.
https://www.rte.ie/sport/soccer/2022/0914/1323302-thirteen-year-old-makes-history-after-glenavon-debut/
Slavery at the time the triangular trade started was so far in this country's past that the historical justification would be hugely stronger if we reinstituted the thing now, than it was then. Should we do that do you think?
And yes the IR and capitalism ended slavery but so what? first how do you propose capitalism would have got off the ground without the huge cash surpluses generated by the slave trade and in the case of this country, the enormous compensation payoffs to owners after the 1837 Act, and secondly do you think cars caught on primarily out of concern for horses?
1. Ultra-monarchists
2. Users of Apple products
In neither case should these people on the fringes of society be interviewed live on the TV news channels.
As I've mentioned on here, my maternal grandmother, Annie Maud *****, worked as a barefoot bal maiden on the clifftop tin mines of St Agnes, Cornwall, sorting out broken rocks. She was aged NINE. Essentially child slave labour, she had no choice in this. Forced into the mines as a tiny girl, to do terrible work which often sent girls deaf (the noise of the stamps crushing the ore was thunderous)
My mum's Cornish family were probably as poor as it got in the British Isles, at that time, and the idea they benefited from the White Privilege of Owning Slaves is so insultingly stupid Annie Maud would - I hope - give you a thump if she heard it
And yet, on my Dad's side, by a huge quirk, we have discovered we are directly descended from Maud Ingelric (another Maud!), concubine of William the Conqueror, matriarch of the noble Peverells, medieval aristos for centuries, and through her we probably descend from Anglo Saxon kings, Norman dukes and Viking warlords. They DID own slaves. But probably white slaves, in the main, so what does that mean?
It means history is ridiculously complex and this Woke attempt to divide it into White = Bad and Black = Victim is dangerous, corrosive nonsense
BTW I am sure 98% of British family trees have similar paradoxes and contrasts - kings and serfs in the background - we are just unusual in that we can trace them
More to the point, his supposed grievances were blatantly a pretext, giving the myriad other reasons for his conduct, and that his conduct inevitably led (even in his victory scenario) to more of what he claimed he did not want. So even his supposed grievances are a lie as his conduct shows it was not a real concern at all, indeed, he was happy to increase NATO presence on his borders.
'You're a gent,' said the other, straightening his shoulders again. He appeared not to have noticed Winston's blue overalls. 'Pint!' he added aggressively to the barman. 'Pint of wallop.'
The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer into thick glasses which he had rinsed in a bucket under the counter. Beer was the only drink you could get in prole pubs. The proles were supposed not to drink gin, though in practice they could get hold of it easily enough. The game of darts was in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun talking about lottery tickets. Winston's presence was forgotten for a moment. There was a deal table under the window where he and the old man could talk without fear of being overheard. It was horribly dangerous, but at any rate there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had made sure of as soon as he came in.
"E could 'a drawed me off a pint,' grumbled the old man as he settled down behind a glass. 'A 'alf litre ain't enough. It don't satisfy. And a 'ole litre's too much. It starts my bladder running. Let alone the price.'
'You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,' said Winston tentatively.
The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in the bar-room that he expected the changes to have occurred.
'The beer was better,' he said finally. 'And cheaper! When I was a young man, mild beer -- wallop we used to call it -- was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.'
'Which war was that?' said Winston.
'It's all wars,' said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, and his shoulders straightened again. "Ere's wishing you the very best of 'ealth!'
In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam's apple made a surprisingly rapid up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished. Winston went to the bar and came back with two more half-litres. The old man appeared to have forgotten his prejudice against drinking a full litre.
And yet ... cheap cotton, cheap sugar. All important for the poor. On the other hand, did the mine owners not then screw the pay down to allow for that? (And perhaps owned the truck shop too.)
In state schools you definitely learned about slavery. It was drummed into me more than once, primary and especially secondary. We had to redraw those horrible diagrams of black slaves packed like sardines in the boats of the Middle Passage. It obviously worked because they made me shudder then as they make me shudder now. I can remember my horror aged 12-13 or so: they did THIS to OTHER HUMANS?
However when I ask friends who went to private schools, they often look blank. They did NOT get this. So maybe it's one particular corner of the education system at fault, not wider British society, which does a pretty good job, and was already doing that in the 1970-80s
I dream of being 80kg. I haven't been that weight since playing squash competitively which was over 30 years ago. I am currently losing weight (which I find easy) initially to make the weight for the Pitts Special flight, but I'm now continuing. Down from 96 kg to 89kg.
Then I got to boxing day 1990 and was sat in the pub with my mates and realised I was the only one who smoked. So I decided to stop. I put out the cigarette I had lit and have never smoked again.
It was hard at first. But I realised that it was a choice. It was always a matter of choosing to smoke so I chose not to. I even had a cigarette in my mouth a couple of times but then chose not to light it.
I don't consider myself an ex-smoker. I am a smoker who chooses not to smoke. After 32 years I still absolutely love everything about smoking. I have never lost the memory of the enjoyment and I would start again tomorrow if you told me it wouldn't kill me. But I won't, because I choose not to.
Crushing inflation, the CoL crisis, and the Putin-Starmer coalition in less than a week
Is nothing short of impressive. The lead is imminent.
I mean, fuck that. No offence
I would imagine that all forms of undeserved privilege are off limits in private school curricula, for obvious reasons.
Arsenic makes the point rather neatly. It is very good for deterring boll weevils from eating your cotton crops. So it gets mined in Devon and Cornwall, poisoning the poor whitey miners in the process, and then shipped to the Caribbean to poison the poor black cotton slaves.
What I did not learn, however, was the part played by the slaves themselves in ending it. The Haitian and Baptist revolts, and constant escapes and mutinies on board ships, put the fear of God into the slave owners, and ultimately persuaded them that they would be better off taking cash to agree to abolition,
Paying compensation to slave owners stick in one's throat, but if it hastens the process of abolition, then so be it.
I know the government don't want MPs scrutinising legislation, but the time must be found, and they even put themselves under pressure in fitting in what they want to do!
She must have been doing that, when, 1910? Even the Americans had aboilished slavery then. (Sharecropping, yes.)
Consider, however, a previous generation of bal maiden shovelling mineral ore on the floor. On the strict economic level, her family did benefit from getting x calories as sugar more cheaply than as, say, wheat, and cotton more cheaply than wool, etc. But one has to see it in wider context, as I perhaps did not stress enough: wouldn't the mineowners have reduced wages commensurately anyway? So zero benefit to her.
PS my granddad was a surface worker in a coal mine, too ...
My daughter left school just over 3 years ago and my son does GCSEs next year. They both did a lot about Empire and the Slave trade but mostly (from memory) in the years before they started their GCSEs.
For all the talk about over focus on dates and kings, I honestly don't remember ever being taken through an overview of British history, with key dates, reigns, that sort of thing. We were never taught about the 17th century civil wars for instance.
So we did slavery and the horrors of early industrial revolution (boys up chimneys etc), but you also got a sense of British imperial grandeur, half the map pink, and also the sheer longevity of Britain/England as a concept. And of course we were told how we beat the Nazis, with lots of Russian and American help
Not bad. It gave me the basics and was not slanted either way
What it didn't do was teach me anything much beyond British history, apart from some European (Nazis, Russian revolution) and modern American stuff (and Rome, they did do the Roman Empire)
But there is only so much you can squeeze in the brains of kids, and it is right for the curriculum to focus on the history of the nation in which you live, especially a nation as consequential as the UK. If you know the history of the UK, you pretty much know why the world is as it is
At any rate I don't have a strong memory of studying slavery and empire.
Tough choice.
Low turnout in 2024 methinks
If you can make that argument, and the related argument that countries where slaves were shipped from, or to, are still suffering from a negative inheritance, then you can make the case for some degree of reparations at the state-to-state level.
I broadly accept that argument, and I think it could provide a better basis for development assistance to many countries than the charity-based model we have been using, and all the associated problems of governance and control that have gone along with that.
Incidentally, that state/private thing may be correct, at least a few decades ago. I was educated at a public school, not as reactionary as Eton, but still was taught nothing about it at all until taking the time to find out myself, some time later.
In the mid 90s, I took part in an experimental thing at a local state school where a non-school teacher would teach a lesson. I did slavery, complete with a Minard diagram of the Atlantic slave trade and a cardboard model of a slave ship. This shocked some 13 year olds - according to the regular teacher.
Slavery in the ancient world was dealt with in my classics lessons. The view seemed to be that it was sort of okay because it was not race-based.
Wrong. Slavery in the last 150 years of the Roman Republic, or as a helot, was every bit as grim as in the West Indies.
Is he some kind of expert on showing respect and are we OK showing it in the way he respects Socialists?
And burnt the topless towers of Izyum?
Wasn’t remotely in my history GCSE or A-Level syllabus but we had an hour each day lesson called a Division where you learnt about non-examined things so was dealt with there during history, cultural, philosophical and theological studies at various times over 5 years.
Similarly in the way of learning about the Renaissance, philosophy etc. Not on any of our exam syllabuses but good to learn about anyway.
We weren't told she was stripped naked, groped, and auctioned, to a group of men, all bidding for the right to rape her.
https://twitter.com/knittingknots/status/1570011087461834760
1) The life expectancy of a slave there as attested by ancient authors
2) the number of slaves there
3) the period of time the mines were operated for
As we get more recent though, we are still within living memory of the Kenyan concentration and torture centres of the Mau Mau revolt, within the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
Well, they've been using conscripts from the Strategic Rocket Forces as infantry replacements in Ukraine. Whilst that's only one of the three main delivery routes Russia has (missiles, planes, submarines), it won't help readiness.
https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1569834731944177667
And rumours there was an assassination attempt on Putin. Probably not true, but if the rumour's coming from within Russia, then that's a sign things are not hunky-dory for the regime.
https://twitter.com/igorsushko/status/1569951155735904256
The National Trust point is one which I have reclassified from Woke Gone Mad to, actually, they do have a serious problem.
Expect lots of sentiment driven volatility.
This kinda makes history an impossible subject to teach. I doubt we'd consider the history curriculum of the 1920s and 30s to be particularly appropriate for today anyway, but suppose for the sake of argument that it had the ideal balance of teaching about important principles and turning points that made the country what it is, together with an overview of important bits of history of the rest of the world, and a smattering of local detail so that one can tie local places, events and objects into the wider story.
That would be great. But, even if it was perfect, you could hardly teach it now and leave out WWI, WWII, the Cold War, etc. Somehow you'd have to butcher your perfect curriculum in order to fit lots of extra stuff in. In fifty years time any comprehensive history curriculum has surely got to make at least a little time for the War on Terror, and Putin's Wars of Russian Imperialism.
Teaching Maths doesn't face those problems.
Agricultural slaves had an average working life of about seven years. Mine and quarry slaves, about 18 months. From the point of view of the slave owner, working them to death, and then replacing them with fresh stock, was the most profitable thing to do.