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.
Teaching Maths doesn't face those problems.
“History teacher strike - unions demand stop to making more history, say that it is making life harder and harder for their members.”
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 did a little about the "scramble for Africa" and other than hinting that Leopold was not a very nice King there was no other moralising.
I am of a similar age to Leon, so I can only conclude he went to The Hereford School of Wokery, or he is talking through his a***.
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.
Teaching Maths doesn't face those problems.
My Mum used to recall how plate tectonics was a whacky theory no one believed in when she was at school. When I was at school, dinosaurs were cold-blooded and weren’t wiped out by an asteroid. All subjects move on, even maths. And older generations are always surprised by what young people learn in school today.
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
So you are literally the descendent of a royal bastard.
^ And we don’t just have more history because events still happen (and Fukuyama was wrong), we also have new understandings of past events. We now know that the pre-Columbus population of the Americas was far larger than we used to think, for example.
If Truss doesn't do something about benefits, when even right-wing cheerleaders like the Legatum Institute are urging on her on to, let alone David Willetts and the Resolution Foundation, it will be extreme cruelty.
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?
I went through Zurich in late February. All very quick and efficient. I think I waited a couple of minutes for the passport check.
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.
At the Betty's Hope sugar plantation memorial in Antigua you can see some of the records the owners kept.
The way the slave numbers were tallied suggests the owners regarded the slaves as little more than head of cattle.
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.
Teaching Maths doesn't face those problems.
My Mum used to recall how plate tectonics was a whacky theory no one believed in when she was at school. When I was at school, dinosaurs were cold-blooded and weren’t wiped out by an asteroid. All subjects move on, even maths. And older generations are always surprised by what young people learn in school today.
That about plate tectonics is itself a myth. Continental drift was a batty theory and quite rightly rejected, because continents don't drift. You have to discover subduction zones to get to plate tectonics.
An unfortunate side effect is that people vaguely think Weigener was vindicated rather than disproved by PT, so they think continents come in to it, so you get gibberish claims like that the UK is "part of" Europe.
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.
At the Betty's Hope sugar plantation memorial in Antigua you can see some of the records the owners kept.
The way the slave numbers were tallied suggests the owners regarded the slaves as little more than head of cattle.
That is exactly how they saw them.
Humans are less docile than cattle however, and so, they must be treated more harshly, in order to make them obedient.
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.
At the Betty's Hope sugar plantation memorial in Antigua you can see some of the records the owners kept.
The way the slave numbers were tallied suggests the owners regarded the slaves as little more than head of cattle.
That's appalling, but in what way? Is it the norm to have different counting systems for different 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 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.
That's me, too. Though I had about five goes at stopping. Similar length of time.
If Truss doesn't do something about benefits, when even right-wing cheerleaders like the Legatum Institute are urging on her on to, let alone David Willetts and the Resolution Foundation, it will be extreme cruelty.
I think that it is next month's inflation figure that is used for the upgrading of benefits. What I think is clear, given the current rate of inflation, is that people simply cannot wait as long as they would normally do for the upgrade to take effect (I may be wrong but I think its February). Accelerating the increase is appropriate and humane at a time of high inflation.
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 did a little about the "scramble for Africa" and other than hinting that Leopold was not a very nice King there was no other moralising.
I am of a similar age to Leon, so I can only conclude he went to The Hereford School of Wokery, or he is talking through his a***.
I went to the old Hereford boy's grammar which became a comp when I was there
And no I am not lying. Why the F would I do that? Pointless
The drawings of the packed slave boats was a really effective way to ram home the cruelty: if you are 12
Losing your temper like that is shorthand for saying that someone has fucked up; except for John Cleese and the car people don't lose their temper with inanimate things. If you are the head honcho, the implication is that your inferior has fucked up in his duty to you. Doing it in public is a humiliation. Humiliating people is bullying them.
look at the scowl in pengate 1 and tell me the recipient of it is not being bullied.
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.
Teaching Maths doesn't face those problems.
My Mum used to recall how plate tectonics was a whacky theory no one believed in when she was at school. When I was at school, dinosaurs were cold-blooded and weren’t wiped out by an asteroid. All subjects move on, even maths. And older generations are always surprised by what young people learn in school today.
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.
At the Betty's Hope sugar plantation memorial in Antigua you can see some of the records the owners kept.
The way the slave numbers were tallied suggests the owners regarded the slaves as little more than head of cattle.
That is exactly how they saw them.
Humans are less docile than cattle however, and so, they must be treated more harshly, in order to make them obedient.
I was on a tour of English Harbour a couple of years ago and there was no mention by the Antiguan guide of the slave trade. When I asked why, she said the majority of her customers are American and don't want to hear about slavery. She explained that she had been admonished by several US tourists because there were "no such thing as slaves", they were instead "indentured servants".
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.
Teaching Maths doesn't face those problems.
My Mum used to recall how plate tectonics was a whacky theory no one believed in when she was at school. When I was at school, dinosaurs were cold-blooded and weren’t wiped out by an asteroid. All subjects move on, even maths. And older generations are always surprised by what young people learn in school today.
You went to school with dinosaurs?
Hell yes. My history teacher Mr Turner for one.
Edit, and the cold blooded misconception was entirely understandable.
Losing your temper like that is shorthand for saying that someone has fucked up; except for John Cleese and the car people don't lose their temper with inanimate things. If you are the head honcho, the implication is that your inferior has fucked up in his duty to you. Doing it in public is a humiliation. Humiliating people is bullying them.
look at the scowl in pengate 1 and tell me the recipient of it is not being bullied.
Major Japanese newspaper reported MOD plans to buy UCAVs on a trial basis from 2023 and buy several hundred UCAVs, both foreign and domestic, after 2025. IAI and US made Kamikaze drone are candidates for the test introduction, as well as TB2 . https://mobile.twitter.com/GreatPoppo/status/1569880442219954176
Losing your temper like that is shorthand for saying that someone has fucked up; except for John Cleese and the car people don't lose their temper with inanimate things. If you are the head honcho, the implication is that your inferior has fucked up in his duty to you. Doing it in public is a humiliation. Humiliating people is bullying them.
look at the scowl in pengate 1 and tell me the recipient of it is not being bullied.
Off topic. Save money, go green. https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/news/decarbonised-energy-could-save-12-trillion-by-2050 "At least $12 trillion could be saved globally by switching to a decarbonised energy system by around 2050, a peer-reviewed study by Oxford University researchers has found." "They found the real cost of solar energy dropped twice as fast as the most ambitious projections in these models, revealing that previous models over the last 20 years overestimated the future costs of clean energy technologies."
Major Japanese newspaper reported MOD plans to buy UCAVs on a trial basis from 2023 and buy several hundred UCAVs, both foreign and domestic, after 2025. IAI and US made Kamikaze drone are candidates for the test introduction, as well as TB2 . https://mobile.twitter.com/GreatPoppo/status/1569880442219954176
This is the new arms race.
Yep, and the MBT, the champion of the battlefield since roughly 1917, is dead. Just over 100 years is a pretty good run mind you.
The next step (a genuinely scary one) is when these drones or their successors have AI. At that point having humans on the battlefield is going to be next to suicidal.
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.
At the Betty's Hope sugar plantation memorial in Antigua you can see some of the records the owners kept.
The way the slave numbers were tallied suggests the owners regarded the slaves as little more than head of cattle.
That is exactly how they saw them.
Humans are less docile than cattle however, and so, they must be treated more harshly, in order to make them obedient.
I was on a tour of English Harbour a couple of years ago and there was no mention by the Antiguan guide of the slave trade. When I asked why, she said the majority of her customers are American and don't want to hear about slavery. She explained that she had been admonished by several US tourists because there were "no such thing as slaves", they were instead "indentured servants".
And that was just until we promoted them to apprenticeships. How caring is that?
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?
I went through Zurich in late February. All very quick and efficient. I think I waited a couple of minutes for the passport check.
Yep it is literally 400 yards. Not quite as efficient as Stockholm but pretty good.
I went to a grammar school in the sixties and we ;learnt all about the slave trade. It was a shock when I learnt that it wasn't restricted to black people. I suppose we didn't do Roman history, or Viking history or Arab history. It's also mentioned in the bible but that was so long away, it no longer counted.
I dropped the subject the first chance I got. But the slave ships stuck in my mind so it must have been on the syllabus.
Losing your temper like that is shorthand for saying that someone has fucked up; except for John Cleese and the car people don't lose their temper with inanimate things. If you are the head honcho, the implication is that your inferior has fucked up in his duty to you. Doing it in public is a humiliation. Humiliating people is bullying them.
look at the scowl in pengate 1 and tell me the recipient of it is not being bullied.
King Charles snapping his leaking pen, or like Fawlty beating his non-starting Austin 1100 with a branch would confirm it is in the inanimate rather than the subservient that he is punishing.
I suspect rather than being unhinged like Fawlty, Charles is just a bully.
I went to a grammar school in the sixties and we ;learnt all about the slave trade. It was a shock when I learnt that it wasn't restricted to black people. I suppose we didn't do Roman history, or Viking history or Arab history. It's also mentioned in the bible but that was so long away, it no longer counted.
I dropped the subject the first chance I got. But the slave ships stuck in my mind so it must have been on the syllabus.
Also little known that Barbery pirates used to raid the south coast, particularly the south west, and carry random Brits off as slaves.
The dog has just eaten my pineapple (1/2 a pineapple actually).
This is an outrage of some sort, that's somehow similar to how the Italians feel about pineapple pizza.
An improvement though on how they describe things in South Carolina.
On our tour of an 18th century row of houses in Charleston, the local guide called the outhouses where slaves had been kept "the servants' quarters before the Civil War"
I went to a grammar school in the sixties and we ;learnt all about the slave trade. It was a shock when I learnt that it wasn't restricted to black people. I suppose we didn't do Roman history, or Viking history or Arab history. It's also mentioned in the bible but that was so long away, it no longer counted.
I dropped the subject the first chance I got. But the slave ships stuck in my mind so it must have been on the syllabus.
Also little known that Barbery pirates used to raid the south coast, particularly the south west, and carry random Brits off as slaves.
There are a lot of European-looking North Africans mainly for this reason, I think. In Libya and Egypt some are descended from Greeks, but in Morocco and Algeria most are probably descended from Spaniards, French and Italians picked up in raids.
On an outing to Iceland, the guide menioned that the Icelanders were supposed to have converted to Christianity after being brought up mainly by Irish slave women. I doubt they'll get far if they ask for recompense.
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.
Teaching Maths doesn't face those problems.
My Mum used to recall how plate tectonics was a whacky theory no one believed in when she was at school. When I was at school, dinosaurs were cold-blooded and weren’t wiped out by an asteroid. All subjects move on, even maths. And older generations are always surprised by what young people learn in school today.
In my later years of schooling the school strongly recommended we buy a TI-82 or TI-83 calculator for use during lessons.
Pretty sure the maths teachers from the 1920s wouldn't have used them.
Major Japanese newspaper reported MOD plans to buy UCAVs on a trial basis from 2023 and buy several hundred UCAVs, both foreign and domestic, after 2025. IAI and US made Kamikaze drone are candidates for the test introduction, as well as TB2 . https://mobile.twitter.com/GreatPoppo/status/1569880442219954176
This is the new arms race.
Yep, and the MBT, the champion of the battlefield since roughly 1917, is dead. Just over 100 years is a pretty good run mind you.
The next step (a genuinely scary one) is when these drones or their successors have AI. At that point having humans on the battlefield is going to be next to suicidal.
I suspect they already do. At least for spotting potential targets/threats and what to do when not in contact with the operator. I mean the RAF have missiles that know what a Russian tank looks like and can self direct once fired (Brimstone).
It would be unlike the Americans not to be using drones to their full potential.
also, shout out to @Dura_Ace for "Statty Fyoons" for Monday's event.
You just f****** pre-empted this! Sarah Montague has just announced that the BBC are now live streaming the action from Westminster Hall for those who can't make it in person.
Losing your temper like that is shorthand for saying that someone has fucked up; except for John Cleese and the car people don't lose their temper with inanimate things. If you are the head honcho, the implication is that your inferior has fucked up in his duty to you. Doing it in public is a humiliation. Humiliating people is bullying them.
look at the scowl in pengate 1 and tell me the recipient of it is not being bullied.
King Charles snapping his leaking pen, or like Fawlty beating his non-starting Austin 1100 with a branch would confirm it is in the inanimate rather than the subservient that he is punishing.
I suspect rather than being unhinged like Fawlty, Charles is just a bully.
Since the very moment his mother died there has been a camera stuck up his nose. She was 96 and ill but those who have lost a parent will know that you can prepare for it all you want but when it happens it is a huge shock.
At times just after my father died (expected but a huge shock...) there were many times I felt like picking up whatever was in front of me and throwing it through the window. The anger stage of grief I believe it's called, when you want all normal laws of everything to be suspended. But they aren't. You must carry on.
And if you're King then you must carry on in the public gaze. Charles literally had a camera pointing up his nose. I feel better disposed towards him after seeing the incident.
If the BBC coverage couldn't get any worse WATO have Paddy O'Connell as their on the spot reporter at Westminster Hall.
CNN has sent Anderson Cooper over to London to report on the spot. He always seemed like a hologram invented solely for the studio.
It's OK now, BBC WATO are interviewing Piers Morgan.
And Piers states that those doomsayers who reckoned Charles wouldn't be a great King have already been proved wrong. Nothing quite like rushing to a premature judgement, is there?
He probably thinks that Truss has already proved herself to be the best postwar PM.
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.
Teaching Maths doesn't face those problems.
My Mum used to recall how plate tectonics was a whacky theory no one believed in when she was at school. When I was at school, dinosaurs were cold-blooded and weren’t wiped out by an asteroid. All subjects move on, even maths. And older generations are always surprised by what young people learn in school today.
In my later years of schooling the school strongly recommended we buy a TI-82 or TI-83 calculator for use during lessons.
Pretty sure the maths teachers from the 1920s wouldn't have used them.
Those are the models Germany are providing to Ukraine in lieu of anything useful iirc?
Major Japanese newspaper reported MOD plans to buy UCAVs on a trial basis from 2023 and buy several hundred UCAVs, both foreign and domestic, after 2025. IAI and US made Kamikaze drone are candidates for the test introduction, as well as TB2 . https://mobile.twitter.com/GreatPoppo/status/1569880442219954176
This is the new arms race.
Yep, and the MBT, the champion of the battlefield since roughly 1917, is dead. Just over 100 years is a pretty good run mind you.
The next step (a genuinely scary one) is when these drones or their successors have AI. At that point having humans on the battlefield is going to be next to suicidal.
Losing your temper like that is shorthand for saying that someone has fucked up; except for John Cleese and the car people don't lose their temper with inanimate things. If you are the head honcho, the implication is that your inferior has fucked up in his duty to you. Doing it in public is a humiliation. Humiliating people is bullying them.
look at the scowl in pengate 1 and tell me the recipient of it is not being bullied.
You have never lost your temper with a printer?
... that's fine. Beating up on your Secretary for the machine's failure is somewhat different.
also, shout out to @Dura_Ace for "Statty Fyoons" for Monday's event.
You just f****** pre-empted this! Sarah Montague has just announced that the BBC are now live streaming the action from Westminster Hall for those who can't make it in person.
Hand me back my license fee!
And The Archers today at 2pm is off. Ruined my afternoon nap. Not happy.
also, shout out to @Dura_Ace for "Statty Fyoons" for Monday's event.
You just f****** pre-empted this! Sarah Montague has just announced that the BBC are now live streaming the action from Westminster Hall for those who can't make it in person.
Hand me back my license fee!
I have been quite busy today but popping in and out of our lounge all that seems to be happening is Sarah Jane Mee of Sky monotonously interviewing people queuing to see the Queen in Westminster Hall
It is like watching paint dry, but at least I am happy I have not been in front of the TV this morning
If the BBC coverage couldn't get any worse WATO have Paddy O'Connell as their on the spot reporter at Westminster Hall.
CNN has sent Anderson Cooper over to London to report on the spot. He always seemed like a hologram invented solely for the studio.
It's OK now, BBC WATO are interviewing Piers Morgan.
And Piers states that those doomsayers who reckoned Charles wouldn't be a great King have already been proved wrong. Nothing quite like rushing to a premature judgement, is there?
He probably thinks that Truss has already proved herself to be the best postwar PM.
Major Japanese newspaper reported MOD plans to buy UCAVs on a trial basis from 2023 and buy several hundred UCAVs, both foreign and domestic, after 2025. IAI and US made Kamikaze drone are candidates for the test introduction, as well as TB2 . https://mobile.twitter.com/GreatPoppo/status/1569880442219954176
This is the new arms race.
Yep, and the MBT, the champion of the battlefield since roughly 1917, is dead. Just over 100 years is a pretty good run mind you.
The next step (a genuinely scary one) is when these drones or their successors have AI. At that point having humans on the battlefield is going to be next to suicidal.
Nearly right - that last paragraph should read "The next step (a genuinely scary one) is when these drones or their successors have AI. At that point being a human is going to be next to suicidal."
Only a complete an utter f*ckwit builds autonomous machines which have a mission to kill people.
I went to a grammar school in the sixties and we ;learnt all about the slave trade. It was a shock when I learnt that it wasn't restricted to black people. I suppose we didn't do Roman history, or Viking history or Arab history. It's also mentioned in the bible but that was so long away, it no longer counted.
I dropped the subject the first chance I got. But the slave ships stuck in my mind so it must have been on the syllabus.
Also little known that Barbery pirates used to raid the south coast, particularly the south west, and carry random Brits off as slaves.
I got chased by Barbery pirates in Cornwall. I got away but it was a close shave.
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.
Only examined (or on the NC) stuff versus a mixture of examined and non-examined stuff is very much a state/private thing.
I went to a grammar school in the sixties and we ;learnt all about the slave trade. It was a shock when I learnt that it wasn't restricted to black people. I suppose we didn't do Roman history, or Viking history or Arab history. It's also mentioned in the bible but that was so long away, it no longer counted.
I dropped the subject the first chance I got. But the slave ships stuck in my mind so it must have been on the syllabus.
Also little known that Barbery pirates used to raid the south coast, particularly the south west, and carry random Brits off as slaves.
I got chased by Barbery pirates in Cornwall. I got away but it was a close shave.
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.
Teaching Maths doesn't face those problems.
My Mum used to recall how plate tectonics was a whacky theory no one believed in when she was at school. When I was at school, dinosaurs were cold-blooded and weren’t wiped out by an asteroid. All subjects move on, even maths. And older generations are always surprised by what young people learn in school today.
In my later years of schooling the school strongly recommended we buy a TI-82 or TI-83 calculator for use during lessons.
Pretty sure the maths teachers from the 1920s wouldn't have used them.
I had this classic back in the late 70s. I loved it
It is a real shame that he didn’t come out with this before the referendum. By some margin the pithiest, most easy to understand analogy for why Brexit is the shittest idea in human history. https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1569791902144417792
Losing your temper like that is shorthand for saying that someone has fucked up; except for John Cleese and the car people don't lose their temper with inanimate things. If you are the head honcho, the implication is that your inferior has fucked up in his duty to you. Doing it in public is a humiliation. Humiliating people is bullying them.
look at the scowl in pengate 1 and tell me the recipient of it is not being bullied.
King Charles snapping his leaking pen, or like Fawlty beating his non-starting Austin 1100 with a branch would confirm it is in the inanimate rather than the subservient that he is punishing.
I suspect rather than being unhinged like Fawlty, Charles is just a bully.
Since the very moment his mother died there has been a camera stuck up his nose. She was 96 and ill but those who have lost a parent will know that you can prepare for it all you want but when it happens it is a huge shock.
At times just after my father died (expected but a huge shock...) there were many times I felt like picking up whatever was in front of me and throwing it through the window. The anger stage of grief I believe it's called, when you want all normal laws of everything to be suspended. But they aren't. You must carry on.
And if you're King then you must carry on in the public gaze. Charles literally had a camera pointing up his nose. I feel better disposed towards him after seeing the incident
My father always reacted like Charles to minor incumberances like the leaking pen. He too was pre- disposed to bullying those around him as a reaction. It is not a stress related lashing out due to grief, it is an innate character flaw.
Mr. Pete, that sounds like a possible similarity but certainly not a guaranteed one. Just because your father was that way does not mean Charles is, necessarily.
If the BBC coverage couldn't get any worse WATO have Paddy O'Connell as their on the spot reporter at Westminster Hall.
CNN has sent Anderson Cooper over to London to report on the spot. He always seemed like a hologram invented solely for the studio.
It's OK now, BBC WATO are interviewing Piers Morgan.
And Piers states that those doomsayers who reckoned Charles wouldn't be a great King have already been proved wrong. Nothing quite like rushing to a premature judgement, is there?
He probably thinks that Truss has already proved herself to be the best postwar PM.
Who does he rate as the world's Greatest Living Pundit?
also, shout out to @Dura_Ace for "Statty Fyoons" for Monday's event.
You just f****** pre-empted this! Sarah Montague has just announced that the BBC are now live streaming the action from Westminster Hall for those who can't make it in person.
Hand me back my license fee!
I have been quite busy today but popping in and out of our lounge all that seems to be happening is Sarah Jane Mee of Sky monotonously interviewing people queuing to see the Queen in Westminster Hall
It is like watching paint dry, but at least I am happy I have not been in front of the TV this morning
They found one woman who had queued for 15 hours and been in to see the coffin 7 times. She's making the rest of you soi disant monarchists look like shit. Grieve harder. Grieve like you really fucking mean it.
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.
Teaching Maths doesn't face those problems.
My Mum used to recall how plate tectonics was a whacky theory no one believed in when she was at school. When I was at school, dinosaurs were cold-blooded and weren’t wiped out by an asteroid. All subjects move on, even maths. And older generations are always surprised by what young people learn in school today.
In my later years of schooling the school strongly recommended we buy a TI-82 or TI-83 calculator for use during lessons.
Pretty sure the maths teachers from the 1920s wouldn't have used them.
I had this classic back in the late 70s. I loved it
Right manufacturer, wrong model. The greatest calculator ever was the TI59. 960 programmable steps. HP can shove all their Reverse Polish Notation nonsense.
Losing your temper like that is shorthand for saying that someone has fucked up; except for John Cleese and the car people don't lose their temper with inanimate things. If you are the head honcho, the implication is that your inferior has fucked up in his duty to you. Doing it in public is a humiliation. Humiliating people is bullying them.
look at the scowl in pengate 1 and tell me the recipient of it is not being bullied.
King Charles snapping his leaking pen, or like Fawlty beating his non-starting Austin 1100 with a branch would confirm it is in the inanimate rather than the subservient that he is punishing.
I suspect rather than being unhinged like Fawlty, Charles is just a bully.
Since the very moment his mother died there has been a camera stuck up his nose. She was 96 and ill but those who have lost a parent will know that you can prepare for it all you want but when it happens it is a huge shock.
At times just after my father died (expected but a huge shock...) there were many times I felt like picking up whatever was in front of me and throwing it through the window. The anger stage of grief I believe it's called, when you want all normal laws of everything to be suspended. But they aren't. You must carry on.
And if you're King then you must carry on in the public gaze. Charles literally had a camera pointing up his nose. I feel better disposed towards him after seeing the incident
My father always reacted like Charles to minor incumberances like the leaking pen. He too was pre- disposed to bullying those around him as a reaction. It is not a stress related lashing out due to grief, it is an innate character flaw.
The Queen wouldn't have responded similarly.
Did you see your father do it days after his mother died?
Drawing a line from a very minor outburst of anger, grief, frustration directed to no one in particular, directly to being a bully is an extraordinary leap.
An old fish market designed by Gustav Eiffel. And refurbed. You grab your food and wine from one of 20 stalls and you can take it down to the banks of the Guadalquivir
Hard recommend. Bit pricey. Splendid setting
Parts of Seville feel as prosperous as Switzerland. Unexpected
Mr. Pete, that sounds like a possible similarity but certainly not a guaranteed one. Just because your father was that way does not mean Charles is, necessarily.
The similarity was striking and I suspect "normal" people can keep their cool even under duress.
Charles is a major downgrade from HMQ. A man who has his cake AND eats it.
I may be wrong. Time will tell Morris, time will tell.
Right manufacturer, wrong model. The greatest calculator ever was the TI59. 960 programmable steps. HP can shove all their Reverse Polish Notation nonsense.
Somebody wrote a chess program for that!
When I was about 13 or 14, one of my schoolfriends had one of those, and it was the object of extreme envy my others, including me. Calcporn.
We're already closing the strongest mourning and shock period, and entering the slight backlash period. After another mourning period on Monday, the most ardent monarchists will have to get used to a wider range of views of support or dissent again - something our constitutional monarchy should be and, constitutionally, is there to guarantee.
An old fish market designed by Gustav Eiffel. And refurbed. You grab your food and wine from one of 20 stalls and you can take it down to the banks of the Guadalquivir
Hard recommend. Bit pricey. Splendid setting
Parts of Seville feel as prosperous as Switzerland. Unexpected
Losing your temper like that is shorthand for saying that someone has fucked up; except for John Cleese and the car people don't lose their temper with inanimate things. If you are the head honcho, the implication is that your inferior has fucked up in his duty to you. Doing it in public is a humiliation. Humiliating people is bullying them.
look at the scowl in pengate 1 and tell me the recipient of it is not being bullied.
King Charles snapping his leaking pen, or like Fawlty beating his non-starting Austin 1100 with a branch would confirm it is in the inanimate rather than the subservient that he is punishing.
I suspect rather than being unhinged like Fawlty, Charles is just a bully.
Since the very moment his mother died there has been a camera stuck up his nose. She was 96 and ill but those who have lost a parent will know that you can prepare for it all you want but when it happens it is a huge shock.
At times just after my father died (expected but a huge shock...) there were many times I felt like picking up whatever was in front of me and throwing it through the window. The anger stage of grief I believe it's called, when you want all normal laws of everything to be suspended. But they aren't. You must carry on.
And if you're King then you must carry on in the public gaze. Charles literally had a camera pointing up his nose. I feel better disposed towards him after seeing the incident
My father always reacted like Charles to minor incumberances like the leaking pen. He too was pre- disposed to bullying those around him as a reaction. It is not a stress related lashing out due to grief, it is an innate character flaw.
The Queen wouldn't have responded similarly.
Mine too. It is very distinctive when you are used to seeing it up close.
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.
Teaching Maths doesn't face those problems.
My Mum used to recall how plate tectonics was a whacky theory no one believed in when she was at school. When I was at school, dinosaurs were cold-blooded and weren’t wiped out by an asteroid. All subjects move on, even maths. And older generations are always surprised by what young people learn in school today.
In my later years of schooling the school strongly recommended we buy a TI-82 or TI-83 calculator for use during lessons.
Pretty sure the maths teachers from the 1920s wouldn't have used them.
I had this classic back in the late 70s. I loved it
Right manufacturer, wrong model. The greatest calculator ever was the TI59. 960 programmable steps. HP can shove all their Reverse Polish Notation nonsense.
Somebody wrote a chess program for that!
I was a schoolkid. I had pocket money, not a mortgage!!!
An old fish market designed by Gustav Eiffel. And refurbed. You grab your food and wine from one of 20 stalls and you can take it down to the banks of the Guadalquivir
Hard recommend. Bit pricey. Splendid setting
Parts of Seville feel as prosperous as Switzerland. Unexpected
Major Japanese newspaper reported MOD plans to buy UCAVs on a trial basis from 2023 and buy several hundred UCAVs, both foreign and domestic, after 2025. IAI and US made Kamikaze drone are candidates for the test introduction, as well as TB2 . https://mobile.twitter.com/GreatPoppo/status/1569880442219954176
This is the new arms race.
Yep, and the MBT, the champion of the battlefield since roughly 1917, is dead. Just over 100 years is a pretty good run mind you.
The next step (a genuinely scary one) is when these drones or their successors have AI. At that point having humans on the battlefield is going to be next to suicidal.
Nearly right - that last paragraph should read "The next step (a genuinely scary one) is when these drones or their successors have AI. At that point being a human is going to be next to suicidal."
Only a complete an utter f*ckwit builds autonomous machines which have a mission to kill people.
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.
Do you mean the NT or the NTS given your mention of Scots? Different operations, but I believe both are addressing the matter. e.g
Losing your temper like that is shorthand for saying that someone has fucked up; except for John Cleese and the car people don't lose their temper with inanimate things. If you are the head honcho, the implication is that your inferior has fucked up in his duty to you. Doing it in public is a humiliation. Humiliating people is bullying them.
look at the scowl in pengate 1 and tell me the recipient of it is not being bullied.
King Charles snapping his leaking pen, or like Fawlty beating his non-starting Austin 1100 with a branch would confirm it is in the inanimate rather than the subservient that he is punishing.
I suspect rather than being unhinged like Fawlty, Charles is just a bully.
Since the very moment his mother died there has been a camera stuck up his nose. She was 96 and ill but those who have lost a parent will know that you can prepare for it all you want but when it happens it is a huge shock.
At times just after my father died (expected but a huge shock...) there were many times I felt like picking up whatever was in front of me and throwing it through the window. The anger stage of grief I believe it's called, when you want all normal laws of everything to be suspended. But they aren't. You must carry on.
And if you're King then you must carry on in the public gaze. Charles literally had a camera pointing up his nose. I feel better disposed towards him after seeing the incident
My father always reacted like Charles to minor incumberances like the leaking pen. He too was pre- disposed to bullying those around him as a reaction. It is not a stress related lashing out due to grief, it is an innate character flaw.
The Queen wouldn't have responded similarly.
Did you see your father do it days after his mother died?
Drawing a line from a very minor outburst of anger, grief, frustration directed to no one in particular, directly to being a bully is an extraordinary leap.
He was like that day in day out, so it would be hard to tell.
I don't know Charles, but we have had two loss of control moments in almost the same number of days. You may be right, but I doubt it.
Major Japanese newspaper reported MOD plans to buy UCAVs on a trial basis from 2023 and buy several hundred UCAVs, both foreign and domestic, after 2025. IAI and US made Kamikaze drone are candidates for the test introduction, as well as TB2 . https://mobile.twitter.com/GreatPoppo/status/1569880442219954176
This is the new arms race.
Yep, and the MBT, the champion of the battlefield since roughly 1917, is dead. Just over 100 years is a pretty good run mind you.
The next step (a genuinely scary one) is when these drones or their successors have AI. At that point having humans on the battlefield is going to be next to suicidal.
Not according to the Ukrainians. I’ll have to dig it out, but a serving Ukrainian officer precisely rebutted the “Tank is dead” thing, in a paper.
As he saw it, tanks are doing more roles now than ever.
The key is combined arms - without support tanks are dead meat. Which was also true at Cambrai in 1917.
The Russians bizarre habit of sending single tanks, unsupported, out to star in Ukrainian YouTube videos is not how tanks were ever supposed to be used.
An old fish market designed by Gustav Eiffel. And refurbed. You grab your food and wine from one of 20 stalls and you can take it down to the banks of the Guadalquivir
Hard recommend. Bit pricey. Splendid setting
Parts of Seville feel as prosperous as Switzerland. Unexpected
Good to see you taking the late Queen's death so well.
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.
Do you mean the NT or the NTS given your mention of Scots? Different operations, but I believe both are addressing the matter. e.g
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.
Teaching Maths doesn't face those problems.
My Mum used to recall how plate tectonics was a whacky theory no one believed in when she was at school. When I was at school, dinosaurs were cold-blooded and weren’t wiped out by an asteroid. All subjects move on, even maths. And older generations are always surprised by what young people learn in school today.
In my later years of schooling the school strongly recommended we buy a TI-82 or TI-83 calculator for use during lessons.
Pretty sure the maths teachers from the 1920s wouldn't have used them.
I had this classic back in the late 70s. I loved it
Right manufacturer, wrong model. The greatest calculator ever was the TI59. 960 programmable steps. HP can shove all their Reverse Polish Notation nonsense.
Somebody wrote a chess program for that!
I was a schoolkid. I had pocket money, not a mortgage!!!
I didn't have a calculator - just a British Thornton slide rule (which I still have). Had to upgrade to a calculator of much the same model as yours at uni when I was trying to calculate to 5 sf (measuring optical refractive indices IIRC). Was very sad when it died - none since have been so good.
I went to a grammar school in the sixties and we ;learnt all about the slave trade. It was a shock when I learnt that it wasn't restricted to black people. I suppose we didn't do Roman history, or Viking history or Arab history. It's also mentioned in the bible but that was so long away, it no longer counted.
I dropped the subject the first chance I got. But the slave ships stuck in my mind so it must have been on the syllabus.
Also little known that Barbery pirates used to raid the south coast, particularly the south west, and carry random Brits off as slaves.
I got chased by Barbery pirates in Cornwall. I got away but it was a close shave.
I'll get my coat.
Was it the brown oilskin riding coat or the green knee length one?
Losing your temper like that is shorthand for saying that someone has fucked up; except for John Cleese and the car people don't lose their temper with inanimate things. If you are the head honcho, the implication is that your inferior has fucked up in his duty to you. Doing it in public is a humiliation. Humiliating people is bullying them.
look at the scowl in pengate 1 and tell me the recipient of it is not being bullied.
King Charles snapping his leaking pen, or like Fawlty beating his non-starting Austin 1100 with a branch would confirm it is in the inanimate rather than the subservient that he is punishing.
I suspect rather than being unhinged like Fawlty, Charles is just a bully.
Since the very moment his mother died there has been a camera stuck up his nose. She was 96 and ill but those who have lost a parent will know that you can prepare for it all you want but when it happens it is a huge shock.
At times just after my father died (expected but a huge shock...) there were many times I felt like picking up whatever was in front of me and throwing it through the window. The anger stage of grief I believe it's called, when you want all normal laws of everything to be suspended. But they aren't. You must carry on.
And if you're King then you must carry on in the public gaze. Charles literally had a camera pointing up his nose. I feel better disposed towards him after seeing the incident
My father always reacted like Charles to minor incumberances like the leaking pen. He too was pre- disposed to bullying those around him as a reaction. It is not a stress related lashing out due to grief, it is an innate character flaw.
The Queen wouldn't have responded similarly.
Did you see your father do it days after his mother died?
Drawing a line from a very minor outburst of anger, grief, frustration directed to no one in particular, directly to being a bully is an extraordinary leap.
He was like that day in day out, so it would be hard to tell.
I don't know Charles, but we have had two loss of control moments in almost the same number of days. You may be right, but I doubt it.
ie it's pure supposition on your part. Thanks for clarifying.
On that note, there are a number of unfinushed Nazi infrastructure projects in eastern Europe. Including the spectacular Borovsko Bridge, which was later partly flooded.
Losing your temper like that is shorthand for saying that someone has fucked up; except for John Cleese and the car people don't lose their temper with inanimate things. If you are the head honcho, the implication is that your inferior has fucked up in his duty to you. Doing it in public is a humiliation. Humiliating people is bullying them.
look at the scowl in pengate 1 and tell me the recipient of it is not being bullied.
King Charles snapping his leaking pen, or like Fawlty beating his non-starting Austin 1100 with a branch would confirm it is in the inanimate rather than the subservient that he is punishing.
I suspect rather than being unhinged like Fawlty, Charles is just a bully.
Since the very moment his mother died there has been a camera stuck up his nose. She was 96 and ill but those who have lost a parent will know that you can prepare for it all you want but when it happens it is a huge shock.
At times just after my father died (expected but a huge shock...) there were many times I felt like picking up whatever was in front of me and throwing it through the window. The anger stage of grief I believe it's called, when you want all normal laws of everything to be suspended. But they aren't. You must carry on.
And if you're King then you must carry on in the public gaze. Charles literally had a camera pointing up his nose. I feel better disposed towards him after seeing the incident
My father always reacted like Charles to minor incumberances like the leaking pen. He too was pre- disposed to bullying those around him as a reaction. It is not a stress related lashing out due to grief, it is an innate character flaw.
The Queen wouldn't have responded similarly.
Charles actually was bullied pretty brutally at Gordonstoun where his parents sent him.
His staff however are paid to ensure he had things like pens in top condition, minor irritation if they failed to do what they are paid to do is hardly a problem
An old fish market designed by Gustav Eiffel. And refurbed. You grab your food and wine from one of 20 stalls and you can take it down to the banks of the Guadalquivir
Hard recommend. Bit pricey. Splendid setting
Parts of Seville feel as prosperous as Switzerland. Unexpected
also, shout out to @Dura_Ace for "Statty Fyoons" for Monday's event.
You just f****** pre-empted this! Sarah Montague has just announced that the BBC are now live streaming the action from Westminster Hall for those who can't make it in person.
Hand me back my license fee!
I have been quite busy today but popping in and out of our lounge all that seems to be happening is Sarah Jane Mee of Sky monotonously interviewing people queuing to see the Queen in Westminster Hall
It is like watching paint dry, but at least I am happy I have not been in front of the TV this morning
Some of them have been camping out for days, as “the world prepares to say goodbye” (copyright CNN), and you can’t be bothered to park your arse in your big chair for a morning?
Major Japanese newspaper reported MOD plans to buy UCAVs on a trial basis from 2023 and buy several hundred UCAVs, both foreign and domestic, after 2025. IAI and US made Kamikaze drone are candidates for the test introduction, as well as TB2 . https://mobile.twitter.com/GreatPoppo/status/1569880442219954176
This is the new arms race.
Yep, and the MBT, the champion of the battlefield since roughly 1917, is dead. Just over 100 years is a pretty good run mind you.
The next step (a genuinely scary one) is when these drones or their successors have AI. At that point having humans on the battlefield is going to be next to suicidal.
Not according to the Ukrainians. I’ll have to dig it out, but a serving Ukrainian officer precisely rebutted the “Tank is dead” thing, in a paper.
As he saw it, tanks are doing more roles now than ever.
The key is combined arms - without support tanks are dead meat. Which was also true at Cambrai in 1917.
The Russians bizarre habit of sending single tanks, unsupported, out to star in Ukrainian YouTube videos is not how tanks were ever supposed to be used.
I don't think that really rebuts the argument. Ukraine is fighting the Russian army, and most of their kit is as old as that used by the Russians. Which is in basically obsolete. And they have a comparative handful of military drones, plus a lot of cobbled together stuff - while the Russians have a fraction of that.
Any battlefield in five or ten years' time is going to be a much less forgiving place for MBTs.
On that note, there are a number of unfinushed Nazi infrastructure projects in eastern Europe. Including the spectacular Borovsko Bridge, which was later partly flooded.
Comments
Here's the clip. Where's the servant being bullied? I see none except in some over-vivid imaginations. It amounts to "this bloody pen".
https://metro.co.uk/2022/09/13/charles-loses-his-temper-after-fountain-pen-leaks-on-his-finger-17368828/
I am of a similar age to Leon, so I can only conclude he went to The Hereford School of Wokery, or he is talking through his a***.
What confuses the issue is there's (so far) two pengates.
So you are literally the descendent of a royal bastard.
Oh, I must have mis-remembered something there...
The way the slave numbers were tallied suggests the owners regarded the slaves as little more than head of cattle.
An unfortunate side effect is that people vaguely think Weigener was vindicated rather than disproved by PT, so they think continents come in to it, so you get gibberish claims like that the UK is "part of" Europe.
Humans are less docile than cattle however, and so, they must be treated more harshly, in order to make them obedient.
Though I had about five goes at stopping. Similar length of time.
And no I am not lying. Why the F would I do that? Pointless
The drawings of the packed slave boats was a really effective way to ram home the cruelty: if you are 12
look at the scowl in pengate 1 and tell me the recipient of it is not being bullied.
Edit, and the cold blooded misconception was entirely understandable.
https://twitter.com/christhemarxist/status/1569971011537313792
also, shout out to @Dura_Ace for "Statty Fyoons" for Monday's event.
IAI and US made Kamikaze drone are candidates for the test introduction, as well as TB2 .
https://mobile.twitter.com/GreatPoppo/status/1569880442219954176
This is the new arms race.
What happened when the far-right Alternative for Germany asked a gummibear maker to produce sweets that look like its party logo.
https://mobile.twitter.com/wirereporter/status/1570009895927177216
Save money, go green.
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/news/decarbonised-energy-could-save-12-trillion-by-2050
"At least $12 trillion could be saved globally by switching to a decarbonised energy system by around 2050, a peer-reviewed study by Oxford University researchers has found."
"They found the real cost of solar energy dropped twice as fast as the most ambitious projections in these models, revealing that previous models over the last 20 years overestimated the future costs of clean energy technologies."
The next step (a genuinely scary one) is when these drones or their successors have AI. At that point having humans on the battlefield is going to be next to suicidal.
As you might, er, expect.
I dropped the subject the first chance I got. But the slave ships stuck in my mind so it must have been on the syllabus.
I suspect rather than being unhinged like Fawlty, Charles is just a bully.
On our tour of an 18th century row of houses in Charleston, the local guide called the outhouses where slaves had been kept "the servants' quarters before the Civil War"
Pretty sure the maths teachers from the 1920s wouldn't have used them.
It would be unlike the Americans not to be using drones to their full potential.
Hand me back my license fee!
At times just after my father died (expected but a huge shock...) there were many times I felt like picking up whatever was in front of me and throwing it through the window. The anger stage of grief I believe it's called, when you want all normal laws of everything to be suspended. But they aren't. You must carry on.
And if you're King then you must carry on in the public gaze. Charles literally had a camera pointing up his nose. I feel better disposed towards him after seeing the incident.
He probably thinks that Truss has already proved herself to be the best postwar PM.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUyAPQEb01Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI7T650RTT8
It is like watching paint dry, but at least I am happy I have not been in front of the TV this morning
Only a complete an utter f*ckwit builds autonomous machines which have a mission to kill people.
I'll get my coat.
Is your handle here a ref to the Rev Du Boulay?
My father always reacted like Charles to minor incumberances like the leaking pen. He too was pre- disposed to bullying those around him as a reaction. It is not a stress related lashing out due to grief, it is an innate character flaw.
The Queen wouldn't have responded similarly.
Somebody wrote a chess program for that!
Drawing a line from a very minor outburst of anger, grief, frustration directed to no one in particular, directly to being a bully is an extraordinary leap.
Lonja del Barranco
An old fish market designed by Gustav Eiffel. And refurbed. You grab your food and wine from one of 20 stalls and you can take it down to the banks of the Guadalquivir
Hard recommend. Bit pricey. Splendid setting
Parts of Seville feel as prosperous as Switzerland. Unexpected
Charles is a major downgrade from HMQ. A man who has his cake AND eats it.
I may be wrong. Time will tell Morris, time will tell.
https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/facing-our-past
I don't know Charles, but we have had two loss of control moments in almost the same number of days. You may be right, but I doubt it.
https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1570025552286810115
Why don't they just give up and go home ?
As he saw it, tanks are doing more roles now than ever.
The key is combined arms - without support tanks are dead meat. Which was also true at Cambrai in 1917.
The Russians bizarre habit of sending single tanks, unsupported, out to star in Ukrainian YouTube videos is not how tanks were ever supposed to be used.
https://www.dangerousroads.org/eastern-europe/czech-republic/3418-borovsko-bridge.html
His staff however are paid to ensure he had things like pens in top condition, minor irritation if they failed to do what they are paid to do is hardly a problem
Ukraine is fighting the Russian army, and most of their kit is as old as that used by the Russians. Which is in basically obsolete.
And they have a comparative handful of military drones, plus a lot of cobbled together stuff - while the Russians have a fraction of that.
Any battlefield in five or ten years' time is going to be a much less forgiving place for MBTs.