FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
Why stop the slavery discussion there.
You could also add that for hundreds of years British people were enslaved by barbary pirates or that slavery continues in parts of Africa today.
Or for that matter that while the slaves were toiling away on the Jamaican plantations my ancestors were toiling away in the mines of Wales and the Midlands.
Slavery was a means of profiting from exploitation - the same profiting from exploitation which has always happened and continues to happen.
And there's very few people in this country who don't benefit from that.
Were your ancestors who toiled away in the mines allowed to choose their own names?
No.
Their surname was one they were born to and their first name was given by someone else.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Do you not think "white privilege" is a thing at all these days in the UK or is it more that you feel it is exaggerated?
Certainly not for the white working class and especially white working class boys.
The average British Indian or British Chinese for instance is both wealthier and better educated on average than the average British white working class male
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
I'm afraid I disagree with much of this I'm afraid. Windrush was Home Office bureaucratic pedantry over changed immigration law - not evidence of endemic racism. I can't speak for you but slavery was very clearly taught in my school and its lessons were very obvious. I'd be very careful about issue like "compensating the descendents", which has all sorts of vested self-interests in it and is ripe for abuse and creating further division.
Good on you for admitting your past failings and learning from them. It's good of you to share that. But there is no 'white supremacy' now and hasn't been for decades.
We need to move on from upping the ante on battles largely fought and won 30-40 years ago, and address any residual issues proportionately, or we'll fuel further culture wars in the West, you'll get another Trump (or worse) as a reaction to that and China will exploit the divisions and weaknesses as way of establishing its global domination.
Let's move on.
I don't think we can move on until we accept our problems and try to fix them. I don't know any person of colour living in this country who doesn't think we still have a problem of endemic and systematic racism in this country, often manifested in subtle ways and by no means absent in the attitudes of the liberal middle class. Of course most of them would say that things are better now than in the 1970s and 1980s, but how did that happen if not by challenging the attitudes prevalent at the time. Nobody wants a culture war, but the very fact that that is the reaction when these issues is raised is in itself an obvious manifestation of white supremacy and white privilege. In my experience, people who get angry when you bring up racism tend to be racists. (I am not talking about you).
I think that all things being equal, it's going to be easier being white in a country where 86% of the population is white than it will be as an ethnic minority. But, I see that as a feature of democracy and demography. Inevitably, a very large majority of people in leadership positions are going to be white.
Most people seem to accept that racial discrimination is wrong, and racial abuse is wrong. What they won't accept though, are liberal immigration policies, or schemes of wealth redistribution from white people to people of colour. They will accept wealth redistribution from rich to poor.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
I'm afraid I disagree with much of this I'm afraid. Windrush was Home Office bureaucratic pedantry over changed immigration law - not evidence of endemic racism. I can't speak for you but slavery was very clearly taught in my school and its lessons were very obvious. I'd be very careful about issue like "compensating the descendents", which has all sorts of vested self-interests in it and is ripe for abuse and creating further division.
Good on you for admitting your past failings and learning from them. It's good of you to share that. But there is no 'white supremacy' now and hasn't been for decades.
We need to move on from upping the ante on battles largely fought and won 30-40 years ago, and address any residual issues proportionately, or we'll fuel further culture wars in the West, you'll get another Trump (or worse) as a reaction to that and China will exploit the divisions and weaknesses as way of establishing its global domination.
Let's move on.
I don't think we can move on until we accept our problems and try to fix them. I don't know any person of colour living in this country who doesn't think we still have a problem of endemic and systematic racism in this country, often manifested in subtle ways and by no means absent in the attitudes of the liberal middle class. Of course most of them would say that things are better now than in the 1970s and 1980s, but how did that happen if not by challenging the attitudes prevalent at the time. Nobody wants a culture war, but the very fact that that is the reaction when these issues is raised is in itself an obvious manifestation of white supremacy and white privilege. In my experience, people who get angry when you bring up racism tend to be racists. (I am not talking about you).
I'm sure the Rotherham victims will be pleased to hear about their 'white privilege'.
The lack of response there of the 'anti-racists' was revealing.
So actually I do think they want a 'culture war' as indeed do other unpleasant people with different views.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Discussions about the British Empire usually have sod all to do with the British Empire and everything to do with the person's views of the modern world.
Including when you discuss it? Or are you able to put all that aside?
Mr. Boy, white supremacy and privilege wasn't much in evidence in Rotherham, Telford, Oxford, Newcastle etc when it came to the industrial scale rape of white girls and boys, and the reaction of authorities to the accusations.
I'm sure racism is still all too commonplace, and it should not be tolerated. That includes turning a blind eye to the abuse of children because of their skin colour (and/or class). Terms like white supremacy or white privilege judge people according to their skin colour, propagating rather than opposing overt bigotry.
White supremacy and white privilege are very different imo.
Id see white supremacy as a descriptor for South Africa apartheid.
White privilege clearly exists in the UK but less than in many places and very importantly not in isolation.
The following non exhaustive list also give privilege:
Gender Education Class Wealth
Studies even show things like height give significant privilege that will alter the personality and life success of a person. There will always be some forms of privilege conscious or subconscious in society, but it is part of societies job to try and minimise the impact of them.
As with most answers to difficult questions in 21st century society, most of us are leaping to one extreme (It doesnt exist) or the other (It is a disgrace and needs to stop asap) when the solution requires a more in depth and nuanced understanding of the problem.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. Thisls matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
I broadly agree with this but we do seem to swing from one extreme to the other. When I was at school slavery was mentioned in the context of William WIlberforce, the moral superiority of us giving it up and the moral inferiority of the Confederacy for hanging on to it. When my kids studied it, it was almost exclusively about the greed, the inhumanity, the major role the UK played etc. It was every bit as unnuanced (although in fairness much closer to reality) than the nonsense I was taught. Nothing about the history of slavery in other cultures, the roles played by African tribesmen willing to sell those they had conquered and sometimes even their own people into captivity, the moral outrage in this country which slowly but ultimately successfully brought our own role to an end and the steps taken by the Navy thereafter. Slavery is a horrible blot on our history. It is bewildering it was ever thought morally acceptable. It was both brutal and brutalising. And it created a legacy of racism (as a means of self justification) that we still live with today.
I don't think slavery created racism, quite the opposite. Blaming racism on slavery is like blaming a puddle for the rain. Racism predated slavery and outlasted it too.
Pre-existing racism allowed slavery to flourish, not the other way around. Racism is an evil in its own right and doesn't require slavery to happen or to be tackled.
Two years ago now my daughter had an Erasmus year in Groningen where she caught the cycling bug. I had the experience of driving in Groningen having taken a car load of stuff over with her. It brought home to me how radically different their attitude to cycling is from anything I have seen in the UK. Most of the minor roads were adapted in a way that made me, as a car driver, feel extremely unwelcome. Indeed I was constantly anxious that I should not be where I was. The road surface, furniture, narrowing, obstacles etc all made it feel as if the road was more of a path. I drove extremely slowly and gave way to everything, as I believe you were supposed to. The consequence was that unless you were using the vehicle to transport anything heavy it really added nothing to the pace of the journey. Bikes were clearly quicker but it was also noteworthy that the cyclists were quite traditional upright bikes, not the sort of boy racers that plague our cities. Because they too were slower they worked in with the pedestrians more safely. On the larger roads there were cycle lanes which had their own filters and turns on traffic lights etc. It was well beyond what I have seen in the UK where the "cycle path" is all too often a 1m wide strip that cars intrude into all too casually. If we have anything like this in the UK I have not seen it. It is a psychological change. The benefits for the local population were evident. Obesity was very rare and the air quality was remarkably different. I find bikes on our current roads a nuisance to be frank. I get irritated when they weave through lines of traffic, ignore traffic lights and constantly swing from lane to lane. But things can be different. Very different.
If you want to follow this through, the place to read is a blog called "A View from the Cycle Path" by David Hembrow, who moved from Cambridge to Holland 25 years or so ago because cycling there was enjoyable not a PITA. http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/
This is a piccie of the "Western Cycle" corridor in Nottingham, where they now get 1000 cycle movements per day (ie double over several years), which is a a reasonable quality facility - but still about 20-25 years behind best continental practice.
One of my lockdown projects has been creating a local cycling group in my small town, and writing some proposals for the Council in the hope of improvements as we exit Corona. We are way behind the above though - especially that when things are done they are not connected up.
Wonders why so many people were quick to ditch the bicycle over the last 50 years.
Given the lack of hills in Bedford, cycling isn't a problem.
Will be interested to see where the tax revenue comes from cycling. Loss of VED, fuel duties, VAT on new cars, spares & services.
Think you will find it is down to cars, the way people drive and think that they are allowed to cut up cyclists, dive within mm of them etc and therefore the chance of being splattered by halfwits that has put people off. That and too many burgers , chips, pizzas etc
That - and shit British weather.
In Scotland, you can cycle with the attendant perils of either hypothermia or a respiratory tract constantly full of midge.
Mr. Boy, white supremacy and privilege wasn't much in evidence in Rotherham, Telford, Oxford, Newcastle etc when it came to the industrial scale rape of white girls and boys, and the reaction of authorities to the accusations.
I'm sure racism is still all too commonplace, and it should not be tolerated. That includes turning a blind eye to the abuse of children because of their skin colour (and/or class). Terms like white supremacy or white privilege judge people according to their skin colour, propagating rather than opposing overt bigotry.
So we don't think the Empire left a legacy of white privilege that endures to this day then?
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Do you not think "white privilege" is a thing at all these days in the UK or is it more that you feel it is exaggerated?
Certainly not for the white working class and especially white working class boys.
The average British Indian or British Chinese for instance is both wealthier and better educated on average than the average British white working class male
Why would you not compare British Indian working class with White working class and British Indian middle class with White middle class if you were looking to see if there is a race aspect? The comparison itself is setting the expectation that certain racial groups should count themselves lucky if they are better than some in another group, not that they should aim for equality.
Of course there is a class apect there as well (which may be more or less important than the race aspect depending on the scenario).
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Do you not think "white privilege" is a thing at all these days in the UK or is it more that you feel it is exaggerated?
I think it is woke bollox , take a look around you. Plenty of less than "privileged whites" around.
Mr. Boy, white supremacy and privilege wasn't much in evidence in Rotherham, Telford, Oxford, Newcastle etc when it came to the industrial scale rape of white girls and boys, and the reaction of authorities to the accusations.
I'm sure racism is still all too commonplace, and it should not be tolerated. That includes turning a blind eye to the abuse of children because of their skin colour (and/or class). Terms like white supremacy or white privilege judge people according to their skin colour, propagating rather than opposing overt bigotry.
So we don't think the Empire left a legacy of white privilege that endures to this day then?
No, I think that puts the cart before the horse.
White privilege created Empire not the other way around.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Discussions about the British Empire usually have sod all to do with the British Empire and everything to do with the person's views of the modern world.
Including when you discuss it? Or are you able to put all that aside?
I try not to discuss it but I'm sure I fall victim to my own viewpoints as everyone else does.
Its one of the reasons why I always get irritated by people lauding Agincourt as some great achievement - to me it reveals an unpleasant nationalist-militarist viewpoint.
Looks like the IOW contact App won't now be fully working nationally until October
What a complete farce. This really shouldn’t be rocket science, how does it take until October to develop something that could be done by a couple of competent programmers in a month?
Well it's clearly not working now, because there are no stats being released about any action taken with identified contacts, no anecdotal stories on the island whatsoever, and the revised version we are supposed to have had by now is now promised "early June"
Mind you, the IOW hospital ICU now has only one covid patient, and of the small number of identified cases, most of them seem to be in case homes. So it's not clear how effective the App would have been here anyway.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under co Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. T End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Do you not think "white privilege" is a thing at all these days in the UK or is it more that you feel it is exaggerated?
I think it exists, but privilege based upon wealth, income, occupation, education is of far greater significance.
For example, I'd say that the life chances of a child born to an Asian family in Kenton or Hendon are going to be considerably better than the life chances of a child born to a white family in one of the "Red Wall" constituencies.
I am not entirely sure Goodwin paints a wholly accurate picture. I still remain convinced governments lose elections rather than oppositions winning them, and there has been a significant erosion of support from the Conservative Party over the last three weeks. I also believe there is more to it than Cummings.
Wonders why so many people were quick to ditch the bicycle over the last 50 years.
Given the lack of hills in Bedford, cycling isn't a problem.
Will be interested to see where the tax revenue comes from cycling. Loss of VED, fuel duties, VAT on new cars, spares & services.
Think you will find it is down to cars, the way people drive and think that they are allowed to cut up cyclists, dive within mm of them etc and therefore the chance of being splattered by halfwits that has put people off. That and too many burgers , chips, pizzas etc
That - and shit British weather.
In Scotland, you can cycle with the attendant perils of either hypothermia or a respiratory tract constantly full of midge.
For sure you would need a wooly jumper
I've only been cold in my fingers and toes when cycling - the rest of me is warmed up as a result of the physical exertion.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Discussions about the British Empire usually have sod all to do with the British Empire and everything to do with the person's views of the modern world.
Including when you discuss it? Or are you able to put all that aside?
I try not to discuss it
You are of course perfectly free to discuss it, but if you are trying not to, you are failing!
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Do you not think "white privilege" is a thing at all these days in the UK or is it more that you feel it is exaggerated?
Certainly not for the white working class and especially white working class boys.
The average British Indian or British Chinese for instance is both wealthier and better educated on average than the average British white working class male
Absolutely. The inequalities of class in the UK are probably greater than those of race. And we could look at gender too, of course. But none of this means that we do not have a degree of white privilege. It's surely undeniable that we do.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
I
a country.
I'm afraid I disagree with much of this I'm afraid. Windrush was Home Office bureaucratic pedantry over changed immigration law - not evidence of endemic racism. I can't speak for you but slavery was very clearly taught in my school and its lessons were very obvious. I'd be very careful about issue like "compensating the descendents", which has all sorts of vested self-interests in it and is ripe for abuse and creating further division.
Good on you for admitting your past failings and learning from them. It's good of you to share that. But there is no 'white supremacy' now and hasn't been for decades.
We need to move on from upping the ante on battles largely fought and won 30-40 years ago, and address any residual issues proportionately, or we'll fuel further culture wars in the West, you'll get another Trump (or worse) as a reaction to that and China will exploit the divisions and weaknesses as way of establishing its global domination.
Let's move on.
I don't think we can move on until we accept our problems and try to fix them. I don't know any person of colour living in this country who doesn't think we still have a problem of endemic and systematic racism in this country, often manifested in subtle ways and by no means absent in the attitudes of the liberal middle class. Of course most of them would say that things are better now than in the 1970s and 1980s, but how did that happen if not by challenging the attitudes prevalent at the time. Nobody wants a culture war, but the very fact that that is the reaction when these issues is raised is in itself an obvious manifestation of white supremacy and white privilege. In my experience, people who get angry when you bring up racism tend to be racists. (I am not talking about you).
Obviously racism should be stamped on but this "white privilege" stuff is absolute bollox. There are just as many whites discriminated against , redheads , fat people , you name it. Why does no one whine about fixing problems for the "under privileged whites", preferring to try and claim they are more under privileged etc etc. It is a nice easy crutch to pick up to cover ones own failings and undermines fixing real racism.
Matthew Goodwin is tremendous in so many ways - and this article is no exception. He is such a refreshing change from the conformist, cliche ridden and bogus leftism of academia.
However I think he under rates two things: SKS has the opportunity to rebuild the centre left around the issue of centrist social democratic competence; second he under rates the significance of the SNP who clearly would not go into partnership with the Conservatives, but must be a possibility in a centre left a Labour coalition.
The scope for the government being seen as not only the creature of Cummings, who will not be altogether forgotten, but also incompetent (and the criticism does not have to be fair - it just has to be believable, but the prospect of both of these is not remote) is high. As it always is when there are problems now and future which do not appear to have solutions and include unemployment for squillions.
(BTW What would we not give at this moment for a POTUS as boring as SKS?)
Looks like the IOW contact App won't now be fully working nationally until October
What a complete farce. This really shouldn’t be rocket science, how does it take until October to develop something that could be done by a couple of competent programmers in a month?
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
I
a country.
I'm afraid I disagree with much of this I'm afraid. Windrush was Home Office bureaucratic pedantry over changed immigration law - not evidence of endemic racism. I can't speak for you but slavery was very clearly taught in my school and its lessons were very obvious. I'd be very careful about issue like "compensating the descendents", which has all sorts of vested self-interests in it and is ripe for abuse and creating further division.
Good on you for admitting your past failings and learning from them. It's good of you to share that. But there is no 'white supremacy' now and hasn't been for decades.
We need to move on from upping the ante on battles largely fought and won 30-40 years ago, and address any residual issues proportionately, or we'll fuel further culture wars in the West, you'll get another Trump (or worse) as a reaction to that and China will exploit the divisions and weaknesses as way of establishing its global domination.
Let's move on.
I don't think we can move on until we accept our problems and try to fix them. I don't know any person of colour living in this country who doesn't think we still have a problem of endemic and systematic racism in this country, often manifested in subtle ways and by no means absent in the attitudes of the liberal middle class. Of course most of them would say that things are better now than in the 1970s and 1980s, but how did that happen if not by challenging the attitudes prevalent at the time. Nobody wants a culture war, but the very fact that that is the reaction when these issues is raised is in itself an obvious manifestation of white supremacy and white privilege. In my experience, people who get angry when you bring up racism tend to be racists. (I am not talking about you).
Obviously racism should be stamped on but this "white privilege" stuff is absolute bollox. There are just as many whites discriminated against , redheads , fat people , you name it. Why does no one whine about fixing problems for the "under privileged whites", preferring to try and claim they are more under privileged etc etc. It is a nice easy crutch to pick up to cover ones own failings and undermines fixing real racism.
More than one thing can be true at once.
White people in poor areas with low quality education and expectations are treated badly Minority groups are treated badly
Around Gloucestershire there has been a huge increase in the number of cyclists on the road. By and large the mototists have been cooperative. The main problem is the state of the roads; they are so potholed, especially in the verges, that cyclists have to shift to the centre and of course that makes them difficult to pass.
Improving the quality of the roads would be even more helpful than creating cycle lanes, but would probably be every bit as expensive.
The problem is that white privilege, as a term, itself is guilty of the lack of nuance you rightly cite. Black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Black criminality would rightly be lambasted as castigating a whole race based on a minority. Slapping a privilege label on a whole race, perhaps then used to then try and make them feel a dose of liberal guilt or to diminish their opinion, is simply wrong on both moral and intellectual levels.
As others have already pointed out, poor white boys do the worst in educational terms. The blanket approach of describing whites as privileged whitewashes, ahem, the educational situation.
Judging people based on the colour of their skin is a very unwise path.
Mr. kinabalu, you're aware that most white people didn't own slaves, right? And that many had terrible working conditions? But you want to judge all present day white people based on what a minority of white people did a few centuries ago?
Do you feel that critical about the black slave traders who sold their fellow Africans to the British Empire (prior to the slavery ban, whilst the trade continued to be perpetrated by Africans, Arabs, and others)? Or is it only white people worthy of this condemnation for the sins of a minority of their forefathers?
And how far back does this historical victimhood last? Can I claim it for the Harrowing of the North? The Roman invasion?
Trying to make people who have never had slaves feel guilty towards people who have never been slaves because of things that happened centuries ago and were done by other people that neither the non-slave owners nor the non-slaves have even met is madness.
Looks like the IOW contact App won't now be fully working nationally until October
What a complete farce. This really shouldn’t be rocket science, how does it take until October to develop something that could be done by a couple of competent programmers in a month?
Who have they got coding this? Neil Ferguson?
It comes from the top. Only world class will do. And delegate it to the minister already responsible for NHS, Care Homes, PPE, testing.
The best way is to separate the 3 modes - motorised, bike, pedestrian.
Eebs blur the distinction between the first two categories though. Where do you put those?
The line gets drawn in different places.
(Assuming an Eeeb is an ebike ie technically with electric assist up to 25kph.)
Ebikes as currently defined either on the EU or UK definition above aren't a problem as they run at normal cycling speeds. Faster ones ridden by hoons faster could be a real problem. You set your rules in a suitable place and use some of the police expansion fund for suitable officers.
I think the solution is a combination of culture (see Holland where the design standard has been 40kph for big cycle tracks, but people cycle slowly in mixed areas eg town centres), having a dominance of pushbikes in qty of users, and appropriate policing (cops of bikes or e-scooters).
I think petrol powered anything or Mopeds are taking it too far.
In Holland small mopeds are allowed on cycle tracks and it is a slightyl uncomfortable compromise, but is not a huge problem in most places.
Mr. Boy, white supremacy and privilege wasn't much in evidence in Rotherham, Telford, Oxford, Newcastle etc when it came to the industrial scale rape of white girls and boys, and the reaction of authorities to the accusations.
I'm sure racism is still all too commonplace, and it should not be tolerated. That includes turning a blind eye to the abuse of children because of their skin colour (and/or class). Terms like white supremacy or white privilege judge people according to their skin colour, propagating rather than opposing overt bigotry.
So we don't think the Empire left a legacy of white privilege that endures to this day then?
No, I think that puts the cart before the horse.
White privilege created Empire not the other way around.
It was guns and armies that created the empire , feck all to do with privilege. It was all down to who had the most and biggest guns.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
Why stop the slavery discussion there.
You could also add that for hundreds of years British people were enslaved by barbary pirates or that slavery continues in parts of Africa today.
Or for that matter that while the slaves were toiling away on the Jamaican plantations my ancestors were toiling away in the mines of Wales and the Midlands.
Slavery was a means of profiting from exploitation - the same profiting from exploitation which has always happened and continues to happen.
And there's very few people in this country who don't benefit from that.
Were your ancestors who toiled away in the mines allowed to choose their own names?
No.
Their surname was one they were born to and their first name was given by someone else.
And who typically was that someone else?
We are all slaves to our upbringing but with varying degrees of freedom afterwards.
That's as true now as it has always been throughout history.
Did my ancestors have a greater degree of freedom than slaves ? Certainly. But did they have as much freedom as others of their time ? Certainly not.
And similarly today depending on where and to whom people are born.
Who has the most freedom and 'privilege' today ? A child of a black doctor in the UK, a child of a black doctor in Jamaica, a child of a black doctor in Ghana ? Or their equivalents who have a bus driver as a parent ? Or their equivalents who have a white doctor or a white bus driver as a parent ?
Do people from racial minorities have fewer opportunities in life ? Very possibly.
Do people people from lower down the socioeconomic scale have fewer opportunities in life ? Almost certainly.
You can discuss the aspects of disability or sexuality or religion as well.
And now I have to go to work - we're not all on furlough or working from home
The problem is that white privilege, as a term, itself is guilty of the lack of nuance you rightly cite. Black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Black criminality would rightly be lambasted as castigating a whole race based on a minority. Slapping a privilege label on a whole race, perhaps then used to then try and make them feel a dose of liberal guilt or to diminish their opinion, is simply wrong on both moral and intellectual levels.
As others have already pointed out, poor white boys do the worst in educational terms. The blanket approach of describing whites as privileged whitewashes, ahem, the educational situation.
Judging people based on the colour of their skin is a very unwise path.
Mr. kinabalu, you're aware that most white people didn't own slaves, right? And that many had terrible working conditions? But you want to judge all present day white people based on what a minority of white people did a few centuries ago?
Do you feel that critical about the black slave traders who sold their fellow Africans to the British Empire (prior to the slavery ban, whilst the trade continued to be perpetrated by Africans, Arabs, and others)? Or is it only white people worthy of this condemnation for the sins of a minority of their forefathers?
And how far back does this historical victimhood last? Can I claim it for the Harrowing of the North? The Roman invasion?
Trying to make people who have never had slaves feel guilty towards people who have never been slaves because of things that happened centuries ago and were done by other people that neither the non-slave owners nor the non-slaves have even met is madness.
It is only a lack of nuance if people are only capable of considering one statement at a time. Surely anyone who can be bothered to enter a discussion isnt so blinded by the statement "White privilege exists" that they assume the other person means "White privilege exists, is the only thing that matters and all white people do better than all non white people"?
Wonders why so many people were quick to ditch the bicycle over the last 50 years.
Given the lack of hills in Bedford, cycling isn't a problem.
Will be interested to see where the tax revenue comes from cycling. Loss of VED, fuel duties, VAT on new cars, spares & services.
Think you will find it is down to cars, the way people drive and think that they are allowed to cut up cyclists, dive within mm of them etc and therefore the chance of being splattered by halfwits that has put people off. That and too many burgers , chips, pizzas etc
That - and shit British weather.
In Scotland, you can cycle with the attendant perils of either hypothermia or a respiratory tract constantly full of midge.
For sure you would need a wooly jumper
I've only been cold in my fingers and toes when cycling - the rest of me is warmed up as a result of the physical exertion.
You cycled much on a dreich day in west of Scotland. You can go out in sunshine and come back in hailstones, when its nice it is brilliant but when its bad it's really bad.
Those Ipsos-Mori numbers show more than anything else just what a drag Corbyn has been on Labour. Also, Johnson is incredibly polarising, while Starmer is not. All in all, quite encouraging.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Do you not think "white privilege" is a thing at all these days in the UK or is it more that you feel it is exaggerated?
Certainly not for the white working class and especially white working class boys.
The average British Indian or British Chinese for instance is both wealthier and better educated on average than the average British white working class male
Yes. The slogan is adopted, mindlessly, from the US, where the conditions are very different.
It tells you much more about American cultural dominance than it does about English realities.
Mr. Boy, white supremacy and privilege wasn't much in evidence in Rotherham, Telford, Oxford, Newcastle etc when it came to the industrial scale rape of white girls and boys, and the reaction of authorities to the accusations.
I'm sure racism is still all too commonplace, and it should not be tolerated. That includes turning a blind eye to the abuse of children because of their skin colour (and/or class). Terms like white supremacy or white privilege judge people according to their skin colour, propagating rather than opposing overt bigotry.
So we don't think the Empire left a legacy of white privilege that endures to this day then?
No, I think that puts the cart before the horse.
White privilege created Empire not the other way around.
It was guns and armies that created the empire , feck all to do with privilege. It was all down to who had the most and biggest guns.
You don't think having more and bigger guns puts you in a position of privilege?
Looks like the IOW contact App won't now be fully working nationally until October
What a complete farce. This really shouldn’t be rocket science, how does it take until October to develop something that could be done by a couple of competent programmers in a month?
Who have they got coding this? Neil Ferguson?
It comes from the top. Only world class will do. And delegate it to the minister already responsible for NHS, Care Homes, PPE, testing.
Vote for a clown for PM this is what we will get.
Nope, it's more we need to do it ourselves because we don't want to listen to the advice of the people who built the phones themselves.
The plan was to create a full on tracking system that would give the Government a dataset Cambridge Analytica and anyone else would kill for. The problem is that the phone companies have spent the last 10 years removing functionality for privacy reasons to stop the data the Government wishes to have from being usable.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
Why stop the slavery discussion there.
You could also add that for hundreds of years British people were enslaved by barbary pirates or that slavery continues in parts of Africa today.
Or for that matter that while the slaves were toiling away on the Jamaican plantations my ancestors were toiling away in the mines of Wales and the Midlands.
Slavery was a means of profiting from exploitation - the same profiting from exploitation which has always happened and continues to happen.
And there's very few people in this country who don't benefit from that.
Were your ancestors who toiled away in the mines allowed to choose their own names?
You do know that the English changed most Welsh names into anglicised versions....?
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Do you not think "white privilege" is a thing at all these days in the UK or is it more that you feel it is exaggerated?
Certainly not for the white working class and especially white working class boys.
The average British Indian or British Chinese for instance is both wealthier and better educated on average than the average British white working class male
Why would you not compare British Indian working class with White working class and British Indian middle class with White middle class if you were looking to see if there is a race aspect? The comparison itself is setting the expectation that certain racial groups should count themselves lucky if they are better than some in another group, not that they should aim for equality.
Of course there is a class apect there as well (which may be more or less important than the race aspect depending on the scenario).
The average British Indian or British Chinese person earns more per hour than the average British white person now overall too
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
I
a country.
I'm afraid I disagree with much of this I'm afraid. Windrush was Home Office bureaucratic pedantry over changed immigration law - not evidence of endemic racism. I can't speak for you but slavery was very clearly taught in my school and its lessons were very obvious. I'd be very careful about issue like "compensating the descendents", which has all sorts of vested self-interests in it and is ripe for abuse and creating further division.
Good on you for admitting your past failings and learning from them. It's good of you to share that. But there is no 'white supremacy' now and hasn't been for decades.
We need to move on from upping the ante on battles largely fought and won 30-40 years ago, and address any residual issues proportionately, or we'll fuel further culture wars in the West, you'll get another Trump (or worse) as a reaction to that and China will exploit the divisions and weaknesses as way of establishing its global domination.
Let's move on.
I don't think we can move on until we accept our problems and try to fix them. I don't know any person of colour living in this country who doesn't think we still have a problem of endemic and systematic racism in this country, often manifested in subtle ways and by no means absent in the attitudes of the liberal middle class. Of course most of them would say that things are better now than in the 1970s and 1980s, but how did that happen if not by challenging the attitudes prevalent at the time. Nobody wants a culture war, but the very fact that that is the reaction when these issues is raised is in itself an obvious manifestation of white supremacy and white privilege. In my experience, people who get angry when you bring up racism tend to be racists. (I am not talking about you).
Obviously racism should be stamped on but this "white privilege" stuff is absolute bollox. There are just as many whites discriminated against , redheads , fat people , you name it. Why does no one whine about fixing problems for the "under privileged whites", preferring to try and claim they are more under privileged etc etc. It is a nice easy crutch to pick up to cover ones own failings and undermines fixing real racism.
More than one thing can be true at once.
White people in poor areas with low quality education and expectations are treated badly Minority groups are treated badly
Why is this difficult?
I am not sure who it is difficult for , but trying to make out you are harder done to than some other group that is equally as hard done to seems crap to me. Even the way you structure it shows your bias , it is "white people" versus "minority groups". Both are equal but we don't see the wokes fighting for one of the badly treated groups do we.
White privilege is a term that understandably makes a lot of people bristle. But an example of it might be the assumptions made about you when people do not know anything about you except what the colour of your skin is. For example, if young black men are more likely to be stopped by the police than young white men, there is something going on there. There are, of course, ifs and buts and nucances and exceptions, but that is the kind of thing people mean.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Do you not think "white privilege" is a thing at all these days in the UK or is it more that you feel it is exaggerated?
Certainly not for the white working class and especially white working class boys.
The average British Indian or British Chinese for instance is both wealthier and better educated on average than the average British white working class male
Why would you not compare British Indian working class with White working class and British Indian middle class with White middle class if you were looking to see if there is a race aspect? The comparison itself is setting the expectation that certain racial groups should count themselves lucky if they are better than some in another group, not that they should aim for equality.
Of course there is a class apect there as well (which may be more or less important than the race aspect depending on the scenario).
The average British Indian or British Chinese person earns more per hour than the average British white person now overall too
I too love cycling. I was knocked off my bike in London on the way back from a job interview in the early 1980's and I see that the lovely Sophie Ellis-Bextor was taken to A&E this week for the same reason.
I'd love to see more and more infrastructure protecting cyclists and some stringent anti-driving measures, which won't happen under the tories.
p.s. I sold my car for environmental reasons and don't own one.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
Why stop the slavery discussion there.
You could also add that for hundreds of years British people were enslaved by barbary pirates or that slavery continues in parts of Africa today.
Or for that matter that while the slaves were toiling away on the Jamaican plantations my ancestors were toiling away in the mines of Wales and the Midlands.
Slavery was a means of profiting from exploitation - the same profiting from exploitation which has always happened and continues to happen.
And there's very few people in this country who don't benefit from that.
Were your ancestors who toiled away in the mines allowed to choose their own names?
No.
Their surname was one they were born to and their first name was given by someone else.
And who typically was that someone else?
We are all slaves to our upbringing but with varying degrees of freedom afterwards.
That's as true now as it has always been throughout history.
Did my ancestors have a greater degree of freedom than slaves ? Certainly. But did they have as much freedom as others of their time ? Certainly not.
And similarly today depending on where and to whom people are born.
Who has the most freedom and 'privilege' today ? A child of a black doctor in the UK, a child of a black doctor in Jamaica, a child of a black doctor in Ghana ? Or their equivalents who have a bus driver as a parent ? Or their equivalents who have a white doctor or a white bus driver as a parent ?
Do people from racial minorities have fewer opportunities in life ? Very possibly.
Do people people from lower down the socioeconomic scale have fewer opportunities in life ? Almost certainly.
You can discuss the aspects of disability or sexuality or religion as well.
And now I have to go to work - we're not all on furlough or working from home
There are indeed many things in existence both now and in the past that are nothing to do with white privilege.
I think this is fairly obvious but there is no harm in stating it - so thanks.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Do you not think "white privilege" is a thing at all these days in the UK or is it more that you feel it is exaggerated?
Certainly not for the white working class and especially white working class boys.
The average British Indian or British Chinese for instance is both wealthier and better educated on average than the average British white working class male
Why would you not compare British Indian working class with White working class and British Indian middle class with White middle class if you were looking to see if there is a race aspect? The comparison itself is setting the expectation that certain racial groups should count themselves lucky if they are better than some in another group, not that they should aim for equality.
Of course there is a class apect there as well (which may be more or less important than the race aspect depending on the scenario).
The average British Indian or British Chinese person earns more per hour than the average British white person now overall too
Facts that very often get overlooked. Interesting that mixed race average earnings are higher than White British too.
There's a reason why when certain people refer to ethnic minorities they don't mean Indians or Chinese etc - they're the "wrong" minorities to look at apparently.
Ebikes as currently defined either on the EU or UK definition above aren't a problem as they run at normal cycling speeds. Faster ones ridden by hoons faster could be a real problem. You set your rules in a suitable place and use some of the police expansion fund for suitable officers.
It is trivial to derestrict eebs though. I've done a few Bosch and Yamaha powered ones for people. Your average copper is as thick as fuck and is never going to work out if it is legal or not.
Matthew Goodwin is tremendous in so many ways - and this article is no exception. He is such a refreshing change from the conformist, cliche ridden and bogus leftism of academia.
However I think he under rates two things: SKS has the opportunity to rebuild the centre left around the issue of centrist social democratic competence; second he under rates the significance of the SNP who clearly would not go into partnership with the Conservatives, but must be a possibility in a centre left a Labour coalition.
The scope for the government being seen as not only the creature of Cummings, who will not be altogether forgotten, but also incompetent (and the criticism does not have to be fair - it just has to be believable, but the prospect of both of these is not remote) is high. As it always is when there are problems now and future which do not appear to have solutions and include unemployment for squillions.
(BTW What would we not give at this moment for a POTUS as boring as SKS?)
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
I
a country.
I'm afraid I disagree with much of this I'm afraid. Windrush was Home Office bureaucratic pedantry over changed immigration law - not evidence of endemic racism. I can't speak for you but slavery was very clearly taught in my school and its lessons were very obvious. I'd be very careful about issue like "compensating the descendents", which has all sorts of vested self-interests in it and is ripe for abuse and creating further division.
Good on you for admitting your past failings and learning from them. It's good of you to share that. But there is no 'white supremacy' now and hasn't been for decades.
We need to move on from upping the ante on battles largely fought and won 30-40 years ago, and address any residual issues proportionately, or we'll fuel further culture wars in the West, you'll get another Trump (or worse) as a reaction to that and China will exploit the divisions and weaknesses as way of establishing its global domination.
Let's move on.
I don't think we can move on until we accept our problems and try to fix them. I don't know any person of colour living in this country who doesn't think we still have a problem of endemic and systematic racism in this country, often manifested in subtle ways and by no means absent in the attitudes of the liberal middle class. Of course most of them would say that things are better now than in the 1970s and 1980s, but how did that happen if not by challenging the attitudes prevalent at the time. Nobody wants a culture war, but the very fact that that is the reaction when these issues is raised is in itself an obvious manifestation of white supremacy and white privilege. In my experience, people who get angry when you bring up racism tend to be racists. (I am not talking about you).
Obviously racism should be stamped on but this "white privilege" stuff is absolute bollox. There are just as many whites discriminated against , redheads , fat people , you name it. Why does no one whine about fixing problems for the "under privileged whites", preferring to try and claim they are more under privileged etc etc. It is a nice easy crutch to pick up to cover ones own failings and undermines fixing real racism.
Interesting to be told those opposed to racism are engaged, as you put it, in a “whine”.
The slogan is “Black Lives Matter” not “Only Black Lives Matter”. Doubtless white people who are poor, fat and red headed have their own share of problems. However, having been all of those things myself (hair faded to a more strawberry blond and grey these days, I certainly can’t plead poverty anymore, and my BMI is only “overweight” now) I can assure you that I have never faced prejudice on the scale that people of colour in this country, and globally, do. For example I have never been targeted by police for being a solo black man walking in a wealthy neighbourhood - as may of my friends have.
We can focus on the prejudices you refer to, such as they are, once we have fixed the ones we are looking at today. Today we are talking about racism.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
Why stop the slavery discussion there.
You could also add that for hundreds of years British people were enslaved by barbary pirates or that slavery continues in parts of Africa today.
Or for that matter that while the slaves were toiling away on the Jamaican plantations my ancestors were toiling away in the mines of Wales and the Midlands.
Slavery was a means of profiting from exploitation - the same profiting from exploitation which has always happened and continues to happen.
And there's very few people in this country who don't benefit from that.
Were your ancestors who toiled away in the mines allowed to choose their own names?
No.
Their surname was one they were born to and their first name was given by someone else.
And who typically was that someone else?
We are all slaves to our upbringing but with varying degrees of freedom afterwards.
That's as true now as it has always been throughout history.
Did my ancestors have a greater degree of freedom than slaves ? Certainly. But did they have as much freedom as others of their time ? Certainly not.
And similarly today depending on where and to whom people are born.
Who has the most freedom and 'privilege' today ? A child of a black doctor in the UK, a child of a black doctor in Jamaica, a child of a black doctor in Ghana ? Or their equivalents who have a bus driver as a parent ? Or their equivalents who have a white doctor or a white bus driver as a parent ?
Do people from racial minorities have fewer opportunities in life ? Very possibly.
Do people people from lower down the socioeconomic scale have fewer opportunities in life ? Almost certainly.
You can discuss the aspects of disability or sexuality or religion as well.
And now I have to go to work - we're not all on furlough or working from home
There are indeed many things in existence both now and in the past that are nothing to do with white privilege.
I think this is fairly obvious but there is no harm in stating it - so thanks.
Those of a Chinese ethnicity earn on average over 30% more than White British do on average. How is that "white privilege"?
Of course stereotypically the Chinese ethnicity is renowned for valuing education and having a strong work ethic - its a remarkable coincidence that education and work ethic coincide with higher earnings despite "white privilege" isn't it?
Wonders why so many people were quick to ditch the bicycle over the last 50 years.
Given the lack of hills in Bedford, cycling isn't a problem.
Will be interested to see where the tax revenue comes from cycling. Loss of VED, fuel duties, VAT on new cars, spares & services.
Think you will find it is down to cars, the way people drive and think that they are allowed to cut up cyclists, dive within mm of them etc and therefore the chance of being splattered by halfwits that has put people off. That and too many burgers , chips, pizzas etc
That - and shit British weather.
In Scotland, you can cycle with the attendant perils of either hypothermia or a respiratory tract constantly full of midge.
That's a bit of a myth. The vast majority of the time the weather is fine for cycling. See, for example, this analysis (which extends beyond Ireland):
Yup. That’s a complete myth bandied around people who understand nothing about cycling and even less about the weather (many tea leaf P-Corbynite forecasters on PB)
Statistically, in London, fewer than 15 morning commutes a year are rainy!
Looking at the data it seems Starmer isn't making much of an impression on the British public. That's not surprising, everything he's said so far is fairly negative and rather than offering solutions to a national crisis he's been carping from the sidelines with the benefit of hindsight.
Saying that white privilege is a problem is not saying that other forms of discrimination are ok. In fact, you will usually find that people who oppose white privilege are active in opposing other types of discrimination. Saying that white privilege is a problem is not saying that all white people are bad and all non white people are good. Hope that clears things up for the terminally confused. Thanks for confirming that racism is no longer a problem. I will let my non white friends and family know, I am sure they will be relieved to hear that their experiences are merely hallucinations.
Matthew Goodwin is tremendous in so many ways - and this article is no exception. He is such a refreshing change from the conformist, cliche ridden and bogus leftism of academia.
However I think he under rates two things: SKS has the opportunity to rebuild the centre left around the issue of centrist social democratic competence; second he under rates the significance of the SNP who clearly would not go into partnership with the Conservatives, but must be a possibility in a centre left a Labour coalition.
The scope for the government being seen as not only the creature of Cummings, who will not be altogether forgotten, but also incompetent (and the criticism does not have to be fair - it just has to be believable, but the prospect of both of these is not remote) is high. As it always is when there are problems now and future which do not appear to have solutions and include unemployment for squillions.
(BTW What would we not give at this moment for a POTUS as boring as SKS?)
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
I'm afraid I disagree with much of this I'm afraid. Windrush was Home Office bureaucratic pedantry over changed immigration law - not evidence of endemic racism. I can't speak for you but slavery was very clearly taught in my school and its lessons were very obvious. I'd be very careful about issue like "compensating the descendents", which has all sorts of vested self-interests in it and is ripe for abuse and creating further division.
Good on you for admitting your past failings and learning from them. It's good of you to share that. But there is no 'white supremacy' now and hasn't been for decades.
We need to move on from upping the ante on battles largely fought and won 30-40 years ago, and address any residual issues proportionately, or we'll fuel further culture wars in the West, you'll get another Trump (or worse) as a reaction to that and China will exploit the divisions and weaknesses as way of establishing its global domination.
Let's move on.
This may reflect where you personally are but it does not reflect our society. My daughter has made me think harder about this. She points out that there are many poor white kids from disadvantaged backgrounds who have most of the same problems as those who are black in this country. The one major difference is that they do not have the challenge created by the colour of their skin. That remains an issue and for so long as it does we have to accept that this is a racist society. We aspire to better but as a society we do not succeed. We cannot move on until we address this.
I disagree. I don't think racism is endemic in the way she (or you describe) and I don't think a poor black child from a disadvantaged background would be in a worse position for opportunity than a poor white child.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Do you not think "white privilege" is a thing at all these days in the UK or is it more that you feel it is exaggerated?
Certainly not for the white working class and especially white working class boys.
The average British Indian or British Chinese for instance is both wealthier and better educated on average than the average British white working class male
Why would you not compare British Indian working class with White working class and British Indian middle class with White middle class if you were looking to see if there is a race aspect? The comparison itself is setting the expectation that certain racial groups should count themselves lucky if they are better than some in another group, not that they should aim for equality.
Of course there is a class apect there as well (which may be more or less important than the race aspect depending on the scenario).
The average British Indian or British Chinese person earns more per hour than the average British white person now overall too
Facts that very often get overlooked. Interesting that mixed race average earnings are higher than White British too.
There's a reason why when certain people refer to ethnic minorities they don't mean Indians or Chinese etc - they're the "wrong" minorities to look at apparently.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under co Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. T End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Do you not think "white privilege" is a thing at all these days in the UK or is it more that you feel it is exaggerated?
I think it exists, but privilege based upon wealth, income, occupation, education is of far greater significance.
For example, I'd say that the life chances of a child born to an Asian family in Kenton or Hendon are going to be considerably better than the life chances of a child born to a white family in one of the "Red Wall" constituencies.
I agree that class inequality trumps race inequality in the UK.
I also note that people who are relatively relaxed about the one tend to also be relatively relaxed about the other.
The assumption by some others that racism is a thing done by whites but never to whites is part of the reason why authorities turned blind eyes to terrible abuses for the sake of 'cultural sensitivities'.
A huge number of whites are not remotely privileged. 'White privilege' is a stupid, unhelpful term.
Judging people based on the colour of their skin is nuts. And whether you intend it or not, referring to white privilege is applying that term to an entire group based on their skin colour.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
I
a country.
I'm afraid I disagree with much of this I'm afraid. Windrush was Home Office bureaucratic pedantry over changed immigration law - not evidence of endemic racism. I can't speak for you but slavery was very clearly taught in my school and its lessons were very obvious. I'd be very careful about issue like "compensating the descendents", which has all sorts of vested self-interests in it and is ripe for abuse and creating further division.
Good on you for admitting your past failings and learning from them. It's good of you to share that. But there is no 'white supremacy' now and hasn't been for decades.
We need to move on from upping the ante on battles largely fought and won 30-40 years ago, and address any residual issues proportionately, or we'll fuel further culture wars in the West, you'll get another Trump (or worse) as a reaction to that and China will exploit the divisions and weaknesses as way of establishing its global domination.
Let's move on.
I don't think we can move on until we accept our problems and try to fix them. I don't know any person of colour living in this country who doesn't think we still have a problem of endemic and systematic racism in this country, often manifested in subtle ways and by no means absent in the attitudes of the liberal middle class. Of course most of them would say that things are better now than in the 1970s and 1980s, but how did that happen if not by challenging the attitudes prevalent at the time. Nobody wants a culture war, but the very fact that that is the reaction when these issues is raised is in itself an obvious manifestation of white supremacy and white privilege. In my experience, people who get angry when you bring up racism tend to be racists. (I am not talking about you).
Obviously racism should be stamped on but this "white privilege" stuff is absolute bollox. There are just as many whites discriminated against , redheads , fat people , you name it. Why does no one whine about fixing problems for the "under privileged whites", preferring to try and claim they are more under privileged etc etc. It is a nice easy crutch to pick up to cover ones own failings and undermines fixing real racism.
Interesting to be told those opposed to racism are engaged, as you put it, in a “whine”.
The slogan is “Black Lives Matter” not “Only Black Lives Matter”. Doubtless white people who are poor, fat and red headed have their own share of problems. However, having been all of those things myself (hair faded to a more strawberry blond and grey these days, I certainly can’t plead poverty anymore, and my BMI is only “overweight” now) I can assure you that I have never faced prejudice on the scale that people of colour in this country, and globally, do. For example I have never been targeted by police for being a solo black man walking in a wealthy neighbourhood - as may of my friends have.
We can focus on the prejudices you refer to, such as they are, once we have fixed the ones we are looking at today. Today we are talking about racism.
Black Lives Matter is a responsible slogan to have in a country where black lives are being viciously terminated on a far too regular basis.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Discussions about the British Empire usually have sod all to do with the British Empire and everything to do with the person's views of the modern world.
The problem is that white privilege, as a term, itself is guilty of the lack of nuance you rightly cite. Black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Black criminality would rightly be lambasted as castigating a whole race based on a minority. Slapping a privilege label on a whole race, perhaps then used to then try and make them feel a dose of liberal guilt or to diminish their opinion, is simply wrong on both moral and intellectual levels.
As others have already pointed out, poor white boys do the worst in educational terms. The blanket approach of describing whites as privileged whitewashes, ahem, the educational situation.
Judging people based on the colour of their skin is a very unwise path.
Mr. kinabalu, you're aware that most white people didn't own slaves, right? And that many had terrible working conditions? But you want to judge all present day white people based on what a minority of white people did a few centuries ago?
Do you feel that critical about the black slave traders who sold their fellow Africans to the British Empire (prior to the slavery ban, whilst the trade continued to be perpetrated by Africans, Arabs, and others)? Or is it only white people worthy of this condemnation for the sins of a minority of their forefathers?
And how far back does this historical victimhood last? Can I claim it for the Harrowing of the North? The Roman invasion?
Trying to make people who have never had slaves feel guilty towards people who have never been slaves because of things that happened centuries ago and were done by other people that neither the non-slave owners nor the non-slaves have even met is madness.
It is only a lack of nuance if people are only capable of considering one statement at a time. Surely anyone who can be bothered to enter a discussion isnt so blinded by the statement "White privilege exists" that they assume the other person means "White privilege exists, is the only thing that matters and all white people do better than all non white people"?
Deeming some groups "privileged" and others "underprivileged" has political implications.
Most of us would accept that redistributing income from rich to poor is legitimate, given that the former are privileged and the latter are underprivileged. But, I think most would vehemently reject the idea of redistributing income on grounds of ethnicity.
And arguments about ethnic privilege get bound up with silly campaigns to remove statues or to "decolonise the curriculum."
I don't know what he's trying to do with his phone there but he should have been taken by the elbow and firmly escorted back with lots of firm: "SIR!"s. Not shoved to the ground (where he subsequently develops a nasty bleeding head wound).
I wonder if America has more of a policing problem than a racial problem sometimes.
More likely a consequence of the stark political divide that defines almost everything in the US nowadays. The police are mostly us and the demonstrators are mostly them (or vice versa). The lack of self control on the police side shown here is shocking and hopefully action will follow.
That's coming here too. Political divided are creeping into the workplace too and corporations...
I'm not convinced.
The Met showed, with their proportionate response to what was (given the current restrictions) an illegal demonstration, that we are, despite all out divisions, in a far better place than the US.
And the proportion of people who have simply given up completely on listening to their counterparts on the other side of the political divide is far smaller. I'm not even sure that a site like this, where even the headbangers, left and right, debate and are even on occasion polite to each other, could exist in the US.
I largely agree with this. Johnson is storing up big problems for the UK and for the Conservative Party, but it doesn't necessarily mean he will lose the next election. The corollary of Labour losing Red Walls in Scotland and Northern England is that the Brexit Party Tories are concentrating in the unsuccessful parts of England.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
I'm afraid I disagree with much of this I'm afraid. Windrush was Home Office bureaucratic pedantry over changed immigration law - not evidence of endemic racism. I can't speak for you but slavery was very clearly taught in my school and its lessons were very obvious. I'd be very careful about issue like "compensating the descendents", which has all sorts of vested self-interests in it and is ripe for abuse and creating further division.
Good on you for admitting your past failings and learning from them. It's good of you to share that. But there is no 'white supremacy' now and hasn't been for decades.
We need to move on from upping the ante on battles largely fought and won 30-40 years ago, and address any residual issues proportionately, or we'll fuel further culture wars in the West, you'll get another Trump (or worse) as a reaction to that and China will exploit the divisions and weaknesses as way of establishing its global domination.
Let's move on.
I don't think we can move on until we accept our problems and try to fix them. I don't know any person of colour living in this country who doesn't think we still have a problem of endemic and systematic racism in this country, often manifested in subtle ways and by no means absent in the attitudes of the liberal middle class. Of course most of them would say that things are better now than in the 1970s and 1980s, but how did that happen if not by challenging the attitudes prevalent at the time. Nobody wants a culture war, but the very fact that that is the reaction when these issues is raised is in itself an obvious manifestation of white supremacy and white privilege. In my experience, people who get angry when you bring up racism tend to be racists. (I am not talking about you).
I know several. They don't say racism is entirely eliminated - and neither do I - but they certainly don't say it's endemic and systemic.
I think countering those who disagree through simply dismissing them as being privileged white supremacists is an obvious sign of a dogmatic and weak argument, but given the risk it carries it does explain why I don't take the chance of challenging some of the more obvious absurdities at work.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
I broadly agree with this but we do seem to swing from one extreme to the other. When I was at school slavery was mentioned in the context of William WIlberforce, the moral superiority of us giving it up and the moral inferiority of the Confederacy for hanging on to it. When my kids studied it, it was almost exclusively about the greed, the inhumanity, the major role the UK played etc. It was every bit as unnuanced (although in fairness much closer to reality) than the nonsense I was taught. Nothing about the history of slavery in other cultures, the roles played by African tribesmen willing to sell those they had conquered and sometimes even their own people into captivity, the moral outrage in this country which slowly but ultimately successfully brought our own role to an end and the steps taken by the Navy thereafter. Slavery is a horrible blot on our history. It is bewildering it was ever thought morally acceptable. It was both brutal and brutalising. And it created a legacy of racism (as a means of self justification) that we still live with today.
At my primary school (founded by Wilbeforce as it happens) and secondary school, we were taught both about abolitionism and the horrors of the Atlantic Slave trade. Like you, I could find it astonishing that people could ever have tolerated such cruelty, but then I should not really, reflection. There are people who will inflict any level of cruelty if they can profit from it. The treatment of many factory workers during the early years of the Industrial Revolution was pretty awful too.
There's also a slightly darker side: that many humans enjoy thinking of creative and terrifying ways to be cruel, and get off on it.
Mr. Boy, white supremacy and privilege wasn't much in evidence in Rotherham, Telford, Oxford, Newcastle etc when it came to the industrial scale rape of white girls and boys, and the reaction of authorities to the accusations.
I'm sure racism is still all too commonplace, and it should not be tolerated. That includes turning a blind eye to the abuse of children because of their skin colour (and/or class). Terms like white supremacy or white privilege judge people according to their skin colour, propagating rather than opposing overt bigotry.
So we don't think the Empire left a legacy of white privilege that endures to this day then?
No, I think that puts the cart before the horse.
White privilege created Empire not the other way around.
It was guns and armies that created the empire , feck all to do with privilege. It was all down to who had the most and biggest guns.
You don't think having more and bigger guns puts you in a position of privilege?
The Arab world had bigger and better guns well before white Europeans and yet I don't see anyone making a claim for Arab privilege, because of course that would be ridiculous.
Are we really talking about technology somehow giving racial privilege? And people didn't believe me when I said this place has turned into a student union.
(2) British policy was to protect its trading interests, balance itself against other great powers, and ensure peace and stability. Yes, in its broader political and economic interests, but there was a moral imperative as well. It wasn't driven by ideological zeal to conquer and, in almost all instances, the policy was to ultimately move colonies and protectorates to self-rule - the only question being one of "readiness". Yes, there were serious social and political issues in the Empire - although I note most of these were present on the home islands as well - and they were addressed through progressive reforms throughout in the 19th and 20th Century. Was race the fault-line? In many places it was a fault-line, but not the overriding one - class was a bigger issue, which is why Gandhi and the Maharajahs could all be educated in Britain. The Brits weren't ideological about race nor proto-Nazis and it's insulting to suggest we were. And there was a healthy debate about the ethics, values, and issues of Empire throughout.
So, forgive me if I'm a little sceptical of claims we invented racism and are responsible for all the world's ills today. The world would be a darker place had it not been for the British, and it's time to stop beating ourselves up about it.
It depends who you mean by 'we'. My ancestors were busy chipping away at underground coal seams for next to nothing. In later generations my Welsh miner ancesters were in lockstep with Paul Robeson. I daresay they had no idea how their cigarettes, sugar and cotton clothing arrived in their possession.
If 'we' means those with an ancestry of Bristol slave traders, by all means don't beat yourselves up over the misdeeds of your forefathers, but neither do you have cause to celebrate their dubious "achievements".
Back on topic. If cycling were to be the most memorable legacy of the Johnson Premiership then the nation will be in a much happier state than it is in now. I am not holding my breath.
Yes, one of my points was that life wasn't all that rosy in the UK too as you describe. It's this central white privilege and black repression point that grates with me. It's far more complicated than that.
What's the bit I do celebrate? Spreading liberal democratic institutions around the world.
Countries like the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, modern India, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong wouldn't exist without the British empire, and it is for that I am grateful for.
I think our record in Ireland, the Middle East and North Africa is less exemplary. And we lost the plot a bit in South Africa, which could have gone much better and didn't need to go over to an Afrikaner reverse takeover.
So, like most things in history, complex and mixed. You have to judge it in the round and based upon what the alternatives were at the time, as well as critiquing wrongdoings and what could have been better.
Our history is what it is, for better or worse. What frustrates me are those who have no reading or understanding of the British Empire but are happy to wrap themselves in the flag and proclaim it's greatness..
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
I remember at the age of 9 or thereabouts being taught about the slave triangle (GB to Africa to Caribbean to GB) purely as an economic phenomenon - not even lip service paid to the possibility that moral questions were involved. I now find that extraordinary.
I remember that at primary school as well. Perhaps there was some form of National curriculum for 9 yr olds in 1970. It was only from an economic perspective and a reason for black people being in the Carribean.
Looking at the data it seems Starmer isn't making much of an impression on the British public. That's not surprising, everything he's said so far is fairly negative and rather than offering solutions to a national crisis he's been carping from the sidelines with the benefit of hindsight.
The data indicates a very clear reduction in unfavourable views of Labour. That may be Corbyn going rather than Starmer arriving (I suspect it is), but either way it's good news.
Wonders why so many people were quick to ditch the bicycle over the last 50 years.
Given the lack of hills in Bedford, cycling isn't a problem.
Will be interested to see where the tax revenue comes from cycling. Loss of VED, fuel duties, VAT on new cars, spares & services.
Think you will find it is down to cars, the way people drive and think that they are allowed to cut up cyclists, dive within mm of them etc and therefore the chance of being splattered by halfwits that has put people off. That and too many burgers , chips, pizzas etc
That - and shit British weather.
In Scotland, you can cycle with the attendant perils of either hypothermia or a respiratory tract constantly full of midge.
That's a bit of a myth. The vast majority of the time the weather is fine for cycling. See, for example, this analysis (which extends beyond Ireland):
Yup. That’s a complete myth bandied around people who understand nothing about cycling and even less about the weather (many tea leaf P-Corbynite forecasters on PB)
Statistically, in London, fewer than 15 morning commutes a year are rainy!
Lance once said that if he woke up on race day and it was pissing down he would just smile as he knew half the peloton would have mentally surrendered before the day started.
Black Lives Matter is a responsible slogan to have in a country where black lives are being viciously terminated on a far too regular basis.
I don't think it is. If you look at the statistics from the United States, the proportions of each race killed by the police are similar to their share of violent criminals overall. Some academics say that whites are proportionately more likely to be killed in some areas. I wouldn't go that far myself.
The problem is militarised policing more than racism.
All Lives Matter is a much better and less divisive slogan.
Looking at the data it seems Starmer isn't making much of an impression on the British public. That's not surprising, everything he's said so far is fairly negative and rather than offering solutions to a national crisis he's been carping from the sidelines with the benefit of hindsight.
The data indicates a very clear reduction in unfavourable views of Labour. That may be Corbyn going rather than Starmer arriving (I suspect it is), but either way it's good news.
But no increase in favourables, that's the lack of a positive vision. Everything he's said and done is negative so far, lawyerly carping will only get Labour so far.
My grandson's other grandmother is a 60-something, black nurse. She is routinely abused about the colour of her skin and has been spat on at work and in the street. When she talks about white privilege what she means is that her white colleagues just do not have to worry about that happening to them.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
I
a country.
I'm afraid I disagree with much of this I'm afraid. Windrush was Home Office bureaucratic pedantry over changed immigration law - not evidence of endemic racism. I can't speak for you but slavery was very clearly taught in my school and its lessons were very obvious. I'd be very careful about issue like "compensating the descendents", which has all sorts of vested self-interests in it and is ripe for abuse and creating further division.
Good on you for admitting your past failings and learning from them. It's good of you to share that. But there is no 'white supremacy' now and hasn't been for decades.
We need to move on from upping the ante on battles largely fought and won 30-40 years ago, and address any residual issues proportionately, or we'll fuel further culture wars in the West, you'll get another Trump (or worse) as a reaction to that and China will exploit the divisions and weaknesses as way of establishing its global domination.
Let's move on.
I don't think we can move on until we accept our problems and try to fix them. I don't know any person of colour living in this country who doesn't think we still have a problem of endemic and systematic racism in this country, often manifested in subtle ways and by no means absent in the attitudes of the liberal middle class. Of course most of them would say that things are better now than in the 1970s and 1980s, but how did that happen if not by challenging the attitudes prevalent at the time. Nobody wants a culture war, but the very fact that that is the reaction when these issues is raised is in itself an obvious manifestation of white supremacy and white privilege. In my experience, people who get angry when you bring up racism tend to be racists. (I am not talking about you).
Obviously racism should be stamped on but this "white privilege" stuff is absolute bollox. There are just as many whites discriminated against , redheads , fat people , you name it. Why does no one whine about fixing problems for the "under privileged whites", preferring to try and claim they are more under privileged etc etc. It is a nice easy crutch to pick up to cover ones own failings and undermines fixing real racism.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's pretty difficult (and probably pointless) to say very much about whether countries would have been better off today without the "benefits" of being ruled from a European capital, as hardly anywhere in the world wasn't at some point.
But Japan and Thailand are two examples, are they better or worse off than their neighbours who "benefited" from European rule?
In any case, anyone mentioning "railways" as a benefit of the British empire always strikes me as very silly. You do realise there are trains running in countries that were never ruled by Britain?
It's not silly at all. Infrastructure development is very important to a nations modern development. And there are plenty of nations were similar networks weren't developed, such as in sub-saharan Africa and parts of South America, that subsequently suffered from arrested economic development as a consequence.
I wonder how those countries never ruled by Britain managed to build railways without being part of the British Empire then. It is totally silly.
To me you sound exactly like Chinese government propaganda about all the wonderful progress (and yes they do always mention the railway!) Chinese rule has brought to Tibet.
It depends on whether the nation concerned (Japan, Russia etc. or European nations) could fund the investment. In the early years, it was usually British engineers and manufacturers who built them regardless and sometimes invested in them too through informal empire - witness Argentina.
But, for sustained investment and growth, as part of a development strategy, the Empire did facilitate this - like in Africa. Refuting this is as illogical as saying the Roman Empire had no similar effect on Britain c.2,000 years ago.
Finally, China are a repressive communist dictatorship looking to forcefully integrate and indoctrinate Tibet into their nation proper - they are not interested in building the institutions of progressive self-government leading to home rule. Not in Tibet, or even China.
Mr. Boy, white supremacy and privilege wasn't much in evidence in Rotherham, Telford, Oxford, Newcastle etc when it came to the industrial scale rape of white girls and boys, and the reaction of authorities to the accusations.
I'm sure racism is still all too commonplace, and it should not be tolerated. That includes turning a blind eye to the abuse of children because of their skin colour (and/or class). Terms like white supremacy or white privilege judge people according to their skin colour, propagating rather than opposing overt bigotry.
So we don't think the Empire left a legacy of white privilege that endures to this day then?
No, I think that puts the cart before the horse.
White privilege created Empire not the other way around.
It was guns and armies that created the empire , feck all to do with privilege. It was all down to who had the most and biggest guns.
You don't think having more and bigger guns puts you in a position of privilege?
The Arab world had bigger and better guns well before white Europeans and yet I don't see anyone making a claim for Arab privilege, because of course that would be ridiculous.
Are we really talking about technology somehow giving racial privilege? And people didn't believe me when I said this place has turned into a student union.
And that privilege they had in their day enabled them to conquer much of their known world in their day, just as the Mongols were able to in their day and the Romans were able to in their day.
Technological superiority is a massive privilege and it was having major technical superiority that led to the creation of Empire - not the other way around.
Matthew Goodwin is tremendous in so many ways - and this article is no exception. He is such a refreshing change from the conformist, cliche ridden and bogus leftism of academia.
However I think he under rates two things: SKS has the opportunity to rebuild the centre left around the issue of centrist social democratic competence; second he under rates the significance of the SNP who clearly would not go into partnership with the Conservatives, but must be a possibility in a centre left a Labour coalition.
The scope for the government being seen as not only the creature of Cummings, who will not be altogether forgotten, but also incompetent (and the criticism does not have to be fair - it just has to be believable, but the prospect of both of these is not remote) is high. As it always is when there are problems now and future which do not appear to have solutions and include unemployment for squillions.
(BTW What would we not give at this moment for a POTUS as boring as SKS?)
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
Still not convinced that won't change when the economic hardships bite even harder.
I would also suggest the rapid easing of lockdown in England has kept those that Goodwin is suggesting should be onboard with Labour in Boris' camp. The fact that Sunak has just handed them 'free' money may also be a factor.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
"White supremacy" implies a privileged white minority lording it over an oppressed underclass, but that really doesn't match up with life in this country.
Do you not think "white privilege" is a thing at all these days in the UK or is it more that you feel it is exaggerated?
Certainly not for the white working class and especially white working class boys.
The average British Indian or British Chinese for instance is both wealthier and better educated on average than the average British white working class male
Why would you not compare British Indian working class with White working class and British Indian middle class with White middle class if you were looking to see if there is a race aspect? The comparison itself is setting the expectation that certain racial groups should count themselves lucky if they are better than some in another group, not that they should aim for equality.
Of course there is a class apect there as well (which may be more or less important than the race aspect depending on the scenario).
The average British Indian or British Chinese person earns more per hour than the average British white person now overall too
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
Its history is far more balanced and complex. In fact, compromise and balance with local populations and rulers was usually British Government policy - it was local settlers who tended to be aggressive, and HMG tried to reign them in.
A treaty like this was one of the causal factors behind the American revolution (they didn't like the British Government reserving Indian lands to their west in the 1763 Treaty of Paris) and you can see the different attitudes to the treatment of native populations in the subsequent histories of Canada and the USA. There was a mass movement against slavery in England from the 1770s onwards, including it being abolished under common law in 1772, which was successful in banning the trade in 1807 and throughout the Empire in 1833 - pioneering for the world, particularly since so many politically influential Britons benefited from it. The Royal Navy spent much of the rest of the century suppressing it worldwide.
Then there's the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to protect Māori rights and lands and balance them with those of the colonists in New Zealand. In South Africa, the Boer republics broke away from Cape Colony because they found British rule too liberal as it granted blacks some voting rights on a property franchise (just as in the UK) and was therefore suffocating - they wanted their own policy towards natives. It was an Afrikaner party that introduced apartheid in 1948, not the British.
Then, you have the heavy investment in educational institutions in India, including mass infrastructure of railways, telegraphy, roads and ports, from the 1850s onwards, which led to the growth of democratic values (and Congress) and the development of progressive self-government in India from 1919. People mention Amritsar quite often (it was awful, and probably changed Indian history) but it's notable they struggle to think of many other examples. It was very much the exception, not the norm; that's why it shocked. And it's notable that, today, India today is the world's largest democracy, and the only vaguely democratic bastion of China (Hong Kong) is a legacy of British rule too.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
And it created a legacy of racism (as a means of self justification) that we still live with today.
At my primary school (founded by Wilbeforce as it happens) and secondary school, we were taught both about abolitionism and the horrors of the Atlantic Slave trade. Like you, I could find it astonishing that people could ever have tolerated such cruelty, but then I should not really, reflection. There are people who will inflict any level of cruelty if they can profit from it. The treatment of many factory workers during the early years of the Industrial Revolution was pretty awful too.
There's also a slightly darker side: that many humans enjoy thinking of creative and terrifying ways to be cruel, and get off on it.
That is not confined to one race.
Sure, it's awful enough to have people working others to death in places like 18th century Haiti.
But then you get the people like Madam Lelaurie and Vedius Pollio who as you say, get off on cruelty to slaves.
The problem is that white privilege, as a term, itself is guilty of the lack of nuance you rightly cite. Black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Black criminality would rightly be lambasted as castigating a whole race based on a minority. Slapping a privilege label on a whole race, perhaps then used to then try and make them feel a dose of liberal guilt or to diminish their opinion, is simply wrong on both moral and intellectual levels.
As others have already pointed out, poor white boys do the worst in educational terms. The blanket approach of describing whites as privileged whitewashes, ahem, the educational situation.
Judging people based on the colour of their skin is a very unwise path.
Mr. kinabalu, you're aware that most white people didn't own slaves, right? And that many had terrible working conditions? But you want to judge all present day white people based on what a minority of white people did a few centuries ago?
Do you feel that critical about the black slave traders who sold their fellow Africans to the British Empire (prior to the slavery ban, whilst the trade continued to be perpetrated by Africans, Arabs, and others)? Or is it only white people worthy of this condemnation for the sins of a minority of their forefathers?
And how far back does this historical victimhood last? Can I claim it for the Harrowing of the North? The Roman invasion?
Trying to make people who have never had slaves feel guilty towards people who have never been slaves because of things that happened centuries ago and were done by other people that neither the non-slave owners nor the non-slaves have even met is madness.
It is only a lack of nuance if people are only capable of considering one statement at a time. Surely anyone who can be bothered to enter a discussion isnt so blinded by the statement "White privilege exists" that they assume the other person means "White privilege exists, is the only thing that matters and all white people do better than all non white people"?
Deeming some groups "privileged" and others "underprivileged" has political implications.
Most of us would accept that redistributing income from rich to poor is legitimate, given that the former are privileged and the latter are underprivileged. But, I think most would vehemently reject the idea of redistributing income on grounds of ethnicity.
And arguments about ethnic privilege get bound up with silly campaigns to remove statues or to "decolonise the curriculum."
They do, but my worry is that those arguments will now gain currency.
What its proponents mean by "decolonise the curriculum" is "please teach my politics, and only my politics".
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
It's not a case of self flagellation, it's simply trying to have some kind of honest reckoning with our colonial history and its legacy, which remain woefully undercovered in the school history curriculum. Take slavery, for instance. How many of us really learned much about this at school? If we did, no doubt we learned about William Wilberforce and the abolitionists. Surely of greater relevance than the fact we abolished it is that we profited from it for over 200 years. We were one of the major players in probably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. When it ended, we compensated the slave owners. We've never compensated the slaves or their descendants. In fact until recently we were deporting the slaves' descendents, illegally, back to the same islands we dragged their ancestors to in chains all those years ago. In my view it is indisputable that the Windrush scandal would never have happened in a country that had come to a proper understanding of its past. I say all this not because I want people to be ashamed of their country. Personally, I am not ashamed to be British, and I don't think anyone should be. But until we have a proper reckoning with all of our history we will never move on as a country, and we will be doomed to relive a never ending cycle of prejudice, white privilege and black resentment. This matters to me a lot. When I was at primary school I once racially abused an Asian kid. In the heat of the moment, the word just came out. It wasn't something I had learned at home. It was the pervasive racist attitudes of the society I was living in, where racist attacks in our neighbourhood were a daily occurrance and attitudes of white supremacy were rampant. This is not to excuse my own moral failure - it is the thing I am most ashamed of. And the great irony is I now have three half Asian kids. I never want them to have to face the same prejudice. So I don't want to hear any more excuses. End white supremacy, teach our history, learn from our mistakes, and move on as a country.
Mr. Boy, white supremacy and privilege wasn't much in evidence in Rotherham, Telford, Oxford, Newcastle etc when it came to the industrial scale rape of white girls and boys, and the reaction of authorities to the accusations.
I'm sure racism is still all too commonplace, and it should not be tolerated. That includes turning a blind eye to the abuse of children because of their skin colour (and/or class). Terms like white supremacy or white privilege judge people according to their skin colour, propagating rather than opposing overt bigotry.
So we don't think the Empire left a legacy of white privilege that endures to this day then?
No, I think that puts the cart before the horse.
White privilege created Empire not the other way around.
It was guns and armies that created the empire , feck all to do with privilege. It was all down to who had the most and biggest guns.
Who were white.
I think you're wrong to dismiss white privilege, Malcolm.
Couple of vignettes from my own life -
1. My first wife was Indian. Family came over in the 60s. They treated me with pronounced deference because of ingrained "looking up to" the Brits. It was a legacy of British rule, no question, and it was awkward. Course, it changed after a while when they realized what a dick I was, but it was there, trust me, and it was not a good thing.
2. My dad, great guy, love him (sometimes), chatting to him one day about a visit to the doctor he'd just made the previous week. It was a new Doctor. How was he, I inquired. My dad replied, and I quote. "Yes, fine. He was an Indian fella but he seemed to know his stuff." So think about that "but" there. What did it signify?
So that's a couple of examples. Could offer many more. All nice people. Subconscious deep insidious racism inculcated by our colonialism. Felt on both sides. Superiority with my dad and inferiority with my in laws. Not of an overtly wicked nature, not at all, but very much there and in a sense all the more powerful for being subtle.
Mr. Boy, white supremacy and privilege wasn't much in evidence in Rotherham, Telford, Oxford, Newcastle etc when it came to the industrial scale rape of white girls and boys, and the reaction of authorities to the accusations.
I'm sure racism is still all too commonplace, and it should not be tolerated. That includes turning a blind eye to the abuse of children because of their skin colour (and/or class). Terms like white supremacy or white privilege judge people according to their skin colour, propagating rather than opposing overt bigotry.
So we don't think the Empire left a legacy of white privilege that endures to this day then?
No, I think that puts the cart before the horse.
White privilege created Empire not the other way around.
It was guns and armies that created the empire , feck all to do with privilege. It was all down to who had the most and biggest guns.
You don't think having more and bigger guns puts you in a position of privilege?
The Arab world had bigger and better guns well before white Europeans and yet I don't see anyone making a claim for Arab privilege, because of course that would be ridiculous.
Are we really talking about technology somehow giving racial privilege? And people didn't believe me when I said this place has turned into a student union.
And that privilege they had in their day enabled them to conquer much of their known world in their day, just as the Mongols were able to in their day and the Romans were able to in their day.
Technological superiority is a massive privilege and it was having major technical superiority that led to the creation of Empire - not the other way around.
Philip, I recommend to you Peter Frankenpan's excellent history book, The Silk Roads. It goes into great detail on exactly such matters and with a fresh and fascinating perspective.
One of its many plus points is that you can just read the sections that interest you most without destroying the overall narrative. The chapters on The Black Death and The Opium Wars are particularly good.
But it can and does happen to white people in other areas, (happened to me once or twice at school), and a blanket term that might seem like a simple shorthand for her is still unwise.
Black Lives Matter is a responsible slogan to have in a country where black lives are being viciously terminated on a far too regular basis.
I don't think it is. If you look at the statistics from the United States, the proportions of each race killed by the police are similar to their share of violent criminals overall. Some academics say that whites are proportionately more likely to be killed in some areas. I wouldn't go that far myself.
The problem is militarised policing more than racism.
All Lives Matter is a much better and less divisive slogan.
Isn't comparing numbers of a particular racial group killed by the police with numbers of violent criminals a causation/correlation thing? How many African Americans killed by the cops are 'violent criminals'?
Black Lives Matter is a responsible slogan to have in a country where black lives are being viciously terminated on a far too regular basis.
I don't think it is. If you look at the statistics from the United States, the proportions of each race killed by the police are similar to their share of violent criminals overall. Some academics say that whites are proportionately more likely to be killed in some areas. I wouldn't go that far myself.
The problem is militarised policing more than racism.
All Lives Matter is a much better and less divisive slogan.
Two wrongs don't make a right, the fact that there are more black criminals than white criminals doesn't take away from the fact that innocent blacks are far more likely than innocent whites to be killed.
And of course ending one type of abuse should feed through to ending the other too. Reducing tolerance of militarised policing and increased use of bodycams etc should help all parties.
Wonders why so many people were quick to ditch the bicycle over the last 50 years.
Given the lack of hills in Bedford, cycling isn't a problem.
Will be interested to see where the tax revenue comes from cycling. Loss of VED, fuel duties, VAT on new cars, spares & services.
Think you will find it is down to cars, the way people drive and think that they are allowed to cut up cyclists, dive within mm of them etc and therefore the chance of being splattered by halfwits that has put people off. That and too many burgers , chips, pizzas etc
That - and shit British weather.
In Scotland, you can cycle with the attendant perils of either hypothermia or a respiratory tract constantly full of midge.
That's a bit of a myth. The vast majority of the time the weather is fine for cycling. See, for example, this analysis (which extends beyond Ireland):
Yup. That’s a complete myth bandied around people who understand nothing about cycling and even less about the weather (many tea leaf P-Corbynite forecasters on PB)
Statistically, in London, fewer than 15 morning commutes a year are rainy!
Lance once said that if he woke up on race day and it was pissing down he would just smile as he knew half the peloton would have mentally surrendered before the day started.
Doesn't that rather prove the point, though...or are you suggesting that a few weather worries can be sorted with a quick course of pharmaceuticals ?
The problem is that white privilege, as a term, itself is guilty of the lack of nuance you rightly cite. Black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Black criminality would rightly be lambasted as castigating a whole race based on a minority. Slapping a privilege label on a whole race, perhaps then used to then try and make them feel a dose of liberal guilt or to diminish their opinion, is simply wrong on both moral and intellectual levels.
As others have already pointed out, poor white boys do the worst in educational terms. The blanket approach of describing whites as privileged whitewashes, ahem, the educational situation.
Judging people based on the colour of their skin is a very unwise path.
Mr. kinabalu, you're aware that most white people didn't own slaves, right? And that many had terrible working conditions? But you want to judge all present day white people based on what a minority of white people did a few centuries ago?
Do you feel that critical about the black slave traders who sold their fellow Africans to the British Empire (prior to the slavery ban, whilst the trade continued to be perpetrated by Africans, Arabs, and others)? Or is it only white people worthy of this condemnation for the sins of a minority of their forefathers?
And how far back does this historical victimhood last? Can I claim it for the Harrowing of the North? The Roman invasion?
Trying to make people who have never had slaves feel guilty towards people who have never been slaves because of things that happened centuries ago and were done by other people that neither the non-slave owners nor the non-slaves have even met is madness.
It is only a lack of nuance if people are only capable of considering one statement at a time. Surely anyone who can be bothered to enter a discussion isnt so blinded by the statement "White privilege exists" that they assume the other person means "White privilege exists, is the only thing that matters and all white people do better than all non white people"?
Deeming some groups "privileged" and others "underprivileged" has political implications.
Most of us would accept that redistributing income from rich to poor is legitimate, given that the former are privileged and the latter are underprivileged. But, I think most would vehemently reject the idea of redistributing income on grounds of ethnicity.
And arguments about ethnic privilege get bound up with silly campaigns to remove statues or to "decolonise the curriculum."
Whilst most of us would indeed vehemently reject the idea of redistributing income on ethnicity grounds it happens every single day when candidates with "foreign sounding" names are more likely to be rejected for even job interviews.
Im not saying its a top 5 issues problem, its not, we have one of the most tolerant and multi cultural big societies in the history of mankind here. I am saying that just acknowledging the problem exists is important.
Mr. Boy, white supremacy and privilege wasn't much in evidence in Rotherham, Telford, Oxford, Newcastle etc when it came to the industrial scale rape of white girls and boys, and the reaction of authorities to the accusations.
I'm sure racism is still all too commonplace, and it should not be tolerated. That includes turning a blind eye to the abuse of children because of their skin colour (and/or class). Terms like white supremacy or white privilege judge people according to their skin colour, propagating rather than opposing overt bigotry.
So we don't think the Empire left a legacy of white privilege that endures to this day then?
No, I think that puts the cart before the horse.
White privilege created Empire not the other way around.
It was guns and armies that created the empire , feck all to do with privilege. It was all down to who had the most and biggest guns.
You don't think having more and bigger guns puts you in a position of privilege?
The Arab world had bigger and better guns well before white Europeans and yet I don't see anyone making a claim for Arab privilege, because of course that would be ridiculous.
Are we really talking about technology somehow giving racial privilege? And people didn't believe me when I said this place has turned into a student union.
And that privilege they had in their day enabled them to conquer much of their known world in their day, just as the Mongols were able to in their day and the Romans were able to in their day.
Technological superiority is a massive privilege and it was having major technical superiority that led to the creation of Empire - not the other way around.
Philip, I recommend to you Peter Frankenpan's excellent history book, The Silk Roads. It goes into great detail on exactly such matters and with a fresh and fascinating perspective.
One of its many plus points is that you can just read the sections that interest you most without destroying the overall narrative. The chapters on The Black Death and The Opium Wars are particularly good.
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
There's certainly a long way to go. But the economic impact of COVID is being felt now. There's plenty of Tory incompetence and mendacity on display now. It doesn't seem to be shifting the polls much.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
My grandson's other grandmother is a 60-something, black nurse. She is routinely abused about the colour of her skin and has been spat on at work and in the street. When she talks about white privilege what she means is that her white colleagues just do not have to worry about that happening to them.
Yes, I doubt many on here have had the "Paki go home" experience or the "Fuck off terrorist" experience. There was a point in the mid 00's where this became much more common and I think as a younger much less emotionally stable person it could really have got me down. Luckily my parents sat me down and said the only way to beat these people is to not play their game and succeed in my own way, which I think I've done.
I don't think the UK is a racist society endemically or otherwise, I do think there are a small minority of racists who hate all non-whites and aren't scared to vocalise that hatred. However, it's completely unfair to tar all white people in the UK as racist because of this minority element. In the same way it's wrong to tar all minorities with some of he stereotypes that pervade society.
Comments
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1268818400891076609?s=20
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1268818752910626817?s=20
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1268819330512424960?s=20
The average British Indian or British Chinese for instance is both wealthier and better educated on average than the average British white working class male
Most people seem to accept that racial discrimination is wrong, and racial abuse is wrong. What they won't accept though, are liberal immigration policies, or schemes of wealth redistribution from white people to people of
colour. They will accept wealth redistribution from rich to poor.
The lack of response there of the 'anti-racists' was revealing.
So actually I do think they want a 'culture war' as indeed do other unpleasant people with different views.
Id see white supremacy as a descriptor for South Africa apartheid.
White privilege clearly exists in the UK but less than in many places and very importantly not in isolation.
The following non exhaustive list also give privilege:
Gender
Education
Class
Wealth
Studies even show things like height give significant privilege that will alter the personality and life success of a person. There will always be some forms of privilege conscious or subconscious in society, but it is part of societies job to try and minimise the impact of them.
As with most answers to difficult questions in 21st century society, most of us are leaping to one extreme (It doesnt exist) or the other (It is a disgrace and needs to stop asap) when the solution requires a more in depth and nuanced understanding of the problem.
Pre-existing racism allowed slavery to flourish, not the other way around. Racism is an evil in its own right and doesn't require slavery to happen or to be tackled.
http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/
This is a piccie of the "Western Cycle" corridor in Nottingham, where they now get 1000 cycle movements per day (ie double over several years), which is a a reasonable quality facility - but still about 20-25 years behind best continental practice.
One of my lockdown projects has been creating a local cycling group in my small town, and writing some proposals for the Council in the hope of improvements as we exit Corona. We are way behind the above though - especially that when things are done they are not connected up.
Of course there is a class apect there as well (which may be more or less important than the race aspect depending on the scenario).
White privilege created Empire not the other way around.
Its one of the reasons why I always get irritated by people lauding Agincourt as some great achievement - to me it reveals an unpleasant nationalist-militarist viewpoint.
Mind you, the IOW hospital ICU now has only one covid patient, and of the small number of identified cases, most of them seem to be in case homes. So it's not clear how effective the App would have been here anyway.
For example, I'd say that the life chances of a child born to an Asian family in Kenton or Hendon are going to be considerably better than the life chances of a child born to a white family in one of the "Red Wall" constituencies.
It is a nice easy crutch to pick up to cover ones own failings and undermines fixing real racism.
However I think he under rates two things: SKS has the opportunity to rebuild the centre left around the issue of centrist social democratic competence; second he under rates the significance of the SNP who clearly would not go into partnership with the Conservatives, but must be a possibility in a centre left a Labour coalition.
The scope for the government being seen as not only the creature of Cummings, who will not be altogether forgotten, but also incompetent (and the criticism does not have to be fair - it just has to be believable, but the prospect of both of these is not remote) is high. As it always is when there are problems now and future which do not appear to have solutions and include unemployment for squillions.
(BTW What would we not give at this moment for a POTUS as boring as SKS?)
White people in poor areas with low quality education and expectations are treated badly
Minority groups are treated badly
Why is this difficult?
Agree wholeheartedly with your theme.
Around Gloucestershire there has been a huge increase in the number of cyclists on the road. By and large the mototists have been cooperative. The main problem is the state of the roads; they are so potholed, especially in the verges, that cyclists have to shift to the centre and of course that makes them difficult to pass.
Improving the quality of the roads would be even more helpful than creating cycle lanes, but would probably be every bit as expensive.
The problem is that white privilege, as a term, itself is guilty of the lack of nuance you rightly cite. Black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Black criminality would rightly be lambasted as castigating a whole race based on a minority. Slapping a privilege label on a whole race, perhaps then used to then try and make them feel a dose of liberal guilt or to diminish their opinion, is simply wrong on both moral and intellectual levels.
As others have already pointed out, poor white boys do the worst in educational terms. The blanket approach of describing whites as privileged whitewashes, ahem, the educational situation.
Judging people based on the colour of their skin is a very unwise path.
Mr. kinabalu, you're aware that most white people didn't own slaves, right? And that many had terrible working conditions? But you want to judge all present day white people based on what a minority of white people did a few centuries ago?
Do you feel that critical about the black slave traders who sold their fellow Africans to the British Empire (prior to the slavery ban, whilst the trade continued to be perpetrated by Africans, Arabs, and others)? Or is it only white people worthy of this condemnation for the sins of a minority of their forefathers?
And how far back does this historical victimhood last? Can I claim it for the Harrowing of the North? The Roman invasion?
Trying to make people who have never had slaves feel guilty towards people who have never been slaves because of things that happened centuries ago and were done by other people that neither the non-slave owners nor the non-slaves have even met is madness.
Vote for a clown for PM this is what we will get.
(Assuming an Eeeb is an ebike ie technically with electric assist up to 25kph.)
Ebikes as currently defined either on the EU or UK definition above aren't a problem as they run at normal cycling speeds. Faster ones ridden by hoons faster could be a real problem. You set your rules in a suitable place and use some of the police expansion fund for suitable officers.
I think the solution is a combination of culture (see Holland where the design standard has been 40kph for big cycle tracks, but people cycle slowly in mixed areas eg town centres), having a dominance of pushbikes in qty of users, and appropriate policing (cops of bikes or e-scooters).
I think petrol powered anything or Mopeds are taking it too far.
In Holland small mopeds are allowed on cycle tracks and it is a slightyl uncomfortable compromise, but is not a huge problem in most places.
That's as true now as it has always been throughout history.
Did my ancestors have a greater degree of freedom than slaves ? Certainly. But did they have as much freedom as others of their time ? Certainly not.
And similarly today depending on where and to whom people are born.
Who has the most freedom and 'privilege' today ? A child of a black doctor in the UK, a child of a black doctor in Jamaica, a child of a black doctor in Ghana ? Or their equivalents who have a bus driver as a parent ? Or their equivalents who have a white doctor or a white bus driver as a parent ?
Do people from racial minorities have fewer opportunities in life ? Very possibly.
Do people people from lower down the socioeconomic scale have fewer opportunities in life ? Almost certainly.
You can discuss the aspects of disability or sexuality or religion as well.
And now I have to go to work - we're not all on furlough or working from home
It tells you much more about American cultural dominance than it does about English realities.
The plan was to create a full on tracking system that would give the Government a dataset Cambridge Analytica and anyone else would kill for. The problem is that the phone companies have spent the last 10 years removing functionality for privacy reasons to stop the data the Government wishes to have from being usable.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/articles/ethnicitypaygapsingreatbritain/2018
Even the way you structure it shows your bias , it is "white people" versus "minority groups".
Both are equal but we don't see the wokes fighting for one of the badly treated groups do we.
I think this is fairly obvious but there is no harm in stating it - so thanks.
There's a reason why when certain people refer to ethnic minorities they don't mean Indians or Chinese etc - they're the "wrong" minorities to look at apparently.
The slogan is “Black Lives Matter” not “Only Black Lives Matter”. Doubtless white people who are poor, fat and red headed have their own share of problems. However, having been all of those things myself (hair faded to a more strawberry blond and grey these days, I certainly can’t plead poverty anymore, and my BMI is only “overweight” now) I can assure you that I have never faced prejudice on the scale that people of colour in this country, and globally, do. For example I have never been targeted by police for being a solo black man walking in a wealthy neighbourhood - as may of my friends have.
We can focus on the prejudices you refer to, such as they are, once we have fixed the ones we are looking at today. Today we are talking about racism.
Of course stereotypically the Chinese ethnicity is renowned for valuing education and having a strong work ethic - its a remarkable coincidence that education and work ethic coincide with higher earnings despite "white privilege" isn't it?
Statistically, in London, fewer than 15 morning commutes a year are rainy!
Saying that white privilege is a problem is not saying that all white people are bad and all non white people are good.
Hope that clears things up for the terminally confused.
Thanks for confirming that racism is no longer a problem. I will let my non white friends and family know, I am sure they will be relieved to hear that their experiences are merely hallucinations.
I also note that people who are relatively relaxed about the one tend to also be relatively relaxed about the other.
The assumption by some others that racism is a thing done by whites but never to whites is part of the reason why authorities turned blind eyes to terrible abuses for the sake of 'cultural sensitivities'.
A huge number of whites are not remotely privileged. 'White privilege' is a stupid, unhelpful term.
Judging people based on the colour of their skin is nuts. And whether you intend it or not, referring to white privilege is applying that term to an entire group based on their skin colour.
That doesn't apply in this country - thankfully.
Most of us would accept that redistributing income from rich to poor is legitimate, given that the former are privileged and the latter are underprivileged. But, I think most would vehemently reject the idea of redistributing income on grounds of ethnicity.
And arguments about ethnic privilege get bound up with silly campaigns to remove statues or to "decolonise the curriculum."
The Met showed, with their proportionate response to what was (given the current restrictions) an illegal demonstration, that we are, despite all out divisions, in a far better place than the US.
And the proportion of people who have simply given up completely on listening to their counterparts on the other side of the political divide is far smaller.
I'm not even sure that a site like this, where even the headbangers, left and right, debate and are even on occasion polite to each other, could exist in the US.
I think countering those who disagree through simply dismissing them as being privileged white supremacists is an obvious sign of a dogmatic and weak argument, but given the risk it carries it does explain why I don't take the chance of challenging some of the more obvious absurdities at work.
That is not confined to one race.
Are we really talking about technology somehow giving racial privilege? And people didn't believe me when I said this place has turned into a student union.
I remember that at primary school as well. Perhaps there was some form of National curriculum for 9 yr olds in 1970. It was only from an economic perspective and a reason for black people being in the Carribean.
I walk around London a lot, and this really is becoming a problem. The police seem to do nothing about it at all.
The problem is militarised policing more than racism.
All Lives Matter is a much better and less divisive slogan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chavs:_The_Demonization_of_the_Working_Class
But, for sustained investment and growth, as part of a development strategy, the Empire did facilitate this - like in Africa. Refuting this is as illogical as saying the Roman Empire had no similar effect on Britain c.2,000 years ago.
Finally, China are a repressive communist dictatorship looking to forcefully integrate and indoctrinate Tibet into their nation proper - they are not interested in building the institutions of progressive self-government leading to home rule. Not in Tibet, or even China.
Big difference.
Technological superiority is a massive privilege and it was having major technical superiority that led to the creation of Empire - not the other way around.
I would also suggest the rapid easing of lockdown in England has kept those that Goodwin is suggesting should be onboard with Labour in Boris' camp. The fact that Sunak has just handed them 'free' money may also be a factor.
But then you get the people like Madam Lelaurie and Vedius Pollio who as you say, get off on cruelty to slaves.
What its proponents mean by "decolonise the curriculum" is "please teach my politics, and only my politics".
I think you're wrong to dismiss white privilege, Malcolm.
Couple of vignettes from my own life -
1. My first wife was Indian. Family came over in the 60s. They treated me with pronounced deference because of ingrained "looking up to" the Brits. It was a legacy of British rule, no question, and it was awkward. Course, it changed after a while when they realized what a dick I was, but it was there, trust me, and it was not a good thing.
2. My dad, great guy, love him (sometimes), chatting to him one day about a visit to the doctor he'd just made the previous week. It was a new Doctor. How was he, I inquired. My dad replied, and I quote. "Yes, fine. He was an Indian fella but he seemed to know his stuff." So think about that "but" there. What did it signify?
So that's a couple of examples. Could offer many more. All nice people. Subconscious deep insidious racism inculcated by our colonialism. Felt on both sides. Superiority with my dad and inferiority with my in laws. Not of an overtly wicked nature, not at all, but very much there and in a sense all the more powerful for being subtle.
One of its many plus points is that you can just read the sections that interest you most without destroying the overall narrative. The chapters on The Black Death and The Opium Wars are particularly good.
Do try it, if you haven't already.
But it can and does happen to white people in other areas, (happened to me once or twice at school), and a blanket term that might seem like a simple shorthand for her is still unwise.
I cycled everywhere when I lived in Barcelona. Great bike scheme, and the local government actually committed to making it workable.
I haven't been on a bike since returning to London. Way too scary. But it's not that hard to fix. All that's lacking is the political will.
This country really sucks in many respects.
And of course ending one type of abuse should feed through to ending the other too. Reducing tolerance of militarised policing and increased use of bodycams etc should help all parties.
https://twitter.com/piersmorgan/status/1268804925636608000?s=20
Im not saying its a top 5 issues problem, its not, we have one of the most tolerant and multi cultural big societies in the history of mankind here. I am saying that just acknowledging the problem exists is important.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
I don't think the UK is a racist society endemically or otherwise, I do think there are a small minority of racists who hate all non-whites and aren't scared to vocalise that hatred. However, it's completely unfair to tar all white people in the UK as racist because of this minority element. In the same way it's wrong to tar all minorities with some of he stereotypes that pervade society.