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.
Every single one of those actions is a specific criminal offence. We need far better law enforcement against this monstrous behaviour. Also it is incredible to think that even today the NHS does not take direct and immediate action about black staff being spat on in their premises.
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.
Anyone from the Philippines or Pakistan working in the middle East probably talks a lot about Arab privilege. Of course they do.
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.
Another cyclist here.
I used to commute every day using bike and train. You'd be very surprised how little it actually rains enough to be annoying, even in quite wet places. If you had to commute in Argyll it might get a bit irritating in winter, but most people don't live there.
Also, clothing these days is light years ahead of where it was. I just wore a simple thin non-waterproof jacket - over the suit and tie - and I can count on the number of fingers on one hand when I actually got wet enough to care over many 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.
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?
As I said, many many things are nothing to do with white privilege.
I'll say it again if it helps us not to plunge down blind alleys.
Many many things are nothing to do with white privilege.
On topic, completely agree with Mike. Cycling is a real pleasure, and practical too. The more people do it the better.
The amount of little journeys people take by car that could be done by bike is huge. And surely it is more pleasurable, and not much slower, than travelling by tube in zones 1&2?
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.
You are putting words in my mouth. I am not assuming racism is only done by whites and never to whites. I am not saying all whites are privileged.
Men are taller than women. That is a perfectly fair statement but if you then say well what about tall women and male pygmies it is no longer true. But anyone with a brain should be able to understand what "men are taller than women" means, similarly with white privilege in modern western society.
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.
On topic, completely agree with Mike. Cycling is a real pleasure, and practical too. The more people do it the better.
The amount of little journeys people take by car that could be done by bike is huge. And surely it is more pleasurable, and not much slower, than travelling by tube in zones 1&2?
Agreed, Sam. My first vist to Amsterdam brought home to me that if there are enough cyclists they get to rule the roads and that is generally a good thing.
We are well short of having that kind of weight of numbers here but maybe we are getting there.
I thought the gatherings were meant to be no more than 6 people, not no more than 6 friends?
If I was to invite 5 friends I know and told them to all invite a "plus one" that nobody else in the group knew, then am I allowed to have 12 in my gathering Piers since there's only six friends there?
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.
That is an excellent summary.
The problem is a desire by some on the extremes to make this an all or nothing scenario. That doesn't reflect this country.
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.
The facts are far more ambiguous than that according to studies I've read.
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.
And yet, as you point out, it was technological dominance that enabled the slave trade - and did not the racial 'science' of the nineteenth century, which was and is part and parcel of the racism of the modern era, emerge from the societal mindset necessary to maintaining the institutions of plantation slavery in the midst of civilised societies ?
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.
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!
The thing that really stood out to me is that Amsterdam had more wet commutes than London or Liverpool - so the idea that it's the weather that stops English people from cycling, while the Dutch enjoy better weather, is not supported.
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.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
I thought the gatherings were meant to be no more than 6 people, not no more than 6 friends?
If I was to invite 5 friends I know and told them to all invite a "plus one" that nobody else in the group knew, then am I allowed to have 12 in my gathering Piers since there's only six friends there?
That's it I'm going to break the rules. If Piers thinks lockdown is over then so d his 6 million twitter followers!
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.
You are making the assumption that "Black Lives Matter" seeks to exclude white people. It doesn't. It does not say "Only Black Lives Matter". Everyone accepts that all lives matter. That is not a debate. However, at the moment we are focussing on Black Lives because the fact that their lives matter appears to have been forgotten by police and much of the rest of society.
Take fatal police shootings in the US, a total 429 civilians have been shot by police in 2020, 88, some 20%, were Black. According the the US Census, though, non-Hispanic black people comprise 12.1% of the population. In 2016 (the most recent year for which I have been able to find statistics) the rate of fatal police shootings per million was 10.13 for Native Americans, 6.6 for black people, 3.23 for Hispanics; 2.9 for white people and 1.17 for Asians. So, in the context of Black people in the States being twice as likely to be fatally shot by police as white people, it is fair to concentrate (for the moment) on Black people.
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.
And yet, as you point out, it was technological dominance that enabled the slave trade - and did not the racial 'science' of the nineteenth century, which was and is part and parcel of the racism of the modern era, emerge from the societal mindset necessary to maintaining the institutions of plantation slavery in the midst of civilised societies ?
Surely slavery is a result of racism, seeing Blacks and Asians as lesser than European whites allowed the thinking to justify slavery in a moral sense - "it's not wrong because Blacks/Asians aren't people".
It's the same kind of thinking that allows slavery to pervade the Middle East and why slave markets operate across North Africa selling black Africans into slavery into the Middle East.
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.
Where is the proof for that? It is a statistical assertion that needs statistical support.
Many academics I've seen question it.
Seriously?
Its statistically demonstrated by the fact the proportion of killings is correlated with the proportion of suspects not the proportion of the races.
Given that not all suspects are guilty (as we know) that means that the proportion of innocent blacks that are getting killed correlates with the fact that other blacks are committing crimes, not due to their own personal guilt or innocence.
The only reason it wouldn't be true is if the Police weren't killing anyone that didn't need killing which isn't the case.
I thought the gatherings were meant to be no more than 6 people, not no more than 6 friends?
If I was to invite 5 friends I know and told them to all invite a "plus one" that nobody else in the group knew, then am I allowed to have 12 in my gathering Piers since there's only six friends there?
In a park there are often 1000+ people there. I have never understood why it matters if you know more than 1 or 5 or 6 of them. As long as they are socially distanced it really doesnt matter. If they are not socially distanced, not knowing them doesnt help either.
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.
And what does this have to do with ethnicity?
People have been beating each other with sticks since Adam and Eve. Literally everyone on planet earth alive today is descended from someone who had a bigger stick than someone else, otherwise they wouldn't be alive.
Also missing from this post is the point that more often than not the guns were trained on other people of the same ethnicity.
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.
The nearest I got to that, Max, was hearing a voice behind me loudly saying 'Scheiss Englander' but that was in Cologne in the summer of 1966, so perfectly understandable.
I think a white person like me gets a better sense of the feeling if they go to somewhere like West Virginia, where they can smell an 'East Coast Liberal' a mile off.
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.
Boris Johnson's paternal grandfather took an anglicised name, he was called Kamal. He took it when he was brought up by a grandmother (Johnson was her maiden name).
Boris is now mocked by some (de Piffle, I think was being used here this week) for having as a middle name the surname of the other set of grandparents.
So our current prime minister should be called Boris Kamal and his foreign sounding middle name is a subject of fun for people who think they know better.
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.
And I think that is the point which is overlooked by those who wouldn't even dream of doing such a thing. We all have persistent worries in our lives, but for most of us, racial abuse simply isn't one of 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.
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.
Big difference.
"as part of a development strategy" don't make me laugh. more like so they could take the loot out quicker.
and do you think the British Empire was created without the use of force?
I am from Britain. I don't feel "ashamed" of the British Empire. But people who think it's something to be proud of actually disgust me.
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.
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.
Oppositions oppose. The Tories are going to have to get used to that after having so many years without facing one. Labour has supported the lockdown and has supported the economic measures that Sunak has taken. It has also criticised some aspects of the government's strategy. This is all quite normal.
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.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
Why March? March was during a 'rally around the flag' moment as we saw everywhere worldwide. Even Trump saw his ratings improve massively at the end of March.
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.
If the meaning of 'white privilege' is that each individual white person is gliding though a life of ease and riches made possible only by their skin colour, it would indeed be a stupid and unhelpful term.
But the good news is this is not what it means. As the most rudimentary reading up and pondering on the matter would reveal.
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.
Agreed. I haven't cycled to work yet because I have seen how some drivers (not just private motorists) are willing to put cyclists' lives at risk in order to shave a second or two off their journey. My general philosophy is that the strong should give way to the weak: so cyclists should make way for pedestrians, and cars and other vehicles should make way for cyclists. Unfortunately, in this sphere as so many others, a might is right approach predominates. It takes government intervention to shift the terms of engagement, hopefully that will now happen.
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.
Labour has to do a bit more than just sit back and wait for the Conservatives to make mistakes.
Starmer has had a fair bit of help so far, and it has helped to close the gap, but he can't rely on that kind of thing indefinitely.
I thought the gatherings were meant to be no more than 6 people, not no more than 6 friends?
If I was to invite 5 friends I know and told them to all invite a "plus one" that nobody else in the group knew, then am I allowed to have 12 in my gathering Piers since there's only six friends there?
In a park there are often 1000+ people there. I have never understood why it matters if you know more than 1 or 5 or 6 of them. As long as they are socially distanced it really doesnt matter. If they are not socially distanced, not knowing them doesnt help either.
Which is the point. Gatherings are supposed to be limited to 6 and kept socially distanced. Having thousands together not socially distanced isn't suddenly within the rules just because the thousands are strangers.
If Piers were intellectually honest he should say "yes the COVID rules were broken but for a good cause that was more important" - but of course he's been arguing against the opposite for others for so long he can't be honest and just lies instead.
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.
Oppositions oppose. The Tories are going to have to get used to that after having so many years without facing one. Labour has supported the lockdown and has supported the economic measures that Sunak has taken. It has also criticised some aspects of the government's strategy. This is all quite normal.
I think that's true in normal times, but at this point in time the public expects all political parties to pull together and row in the same direction. Carping from the sidelines about what happened 4 weeks ago and at the same time not proposing a solution 4 weeks ago is playing worse than I expected, even among natural lefties I know.
I also think the lawyerly letters are not going down as well as he thinks.
This is the time for bold visions to be laid out about the future of the country, Labour is still a blank sheet of paper and so is Starmer.
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.
This has happened to my wife when applying for top jobs at law firms ten years ago.
Her maiden name ended in "rova" and the challenge from the Partner interviewing her was whether her English was good enough to be a corporate solicitor. To be fair, it's a legitimate concern but shouldn't be necessary after a CV sort, and several rounds of interviews.
She hasn't had this issue since taking my name. And she is white.
I too struggle with pronouncing and articulating some names I read. These include sub-saharan African names, original Chinese names and Irish names.
I don't think that makes me racist, and I do try to learn them quick, but I do struggle at first.
Mr. Above, I did specifically write 'some others' so as to try and make it plain I wasn't suggesting you felt that way. Apologies if that wasn't clear.
It's true that men are taller and stronger than women on average. Nobody thinks this confers huge advantages or disadvantages in most spheres of life, nor makes moral judgements based on these physical facts (although some seek to pretend they don't exist for transgender athletes, but that's another story).
Is it true that whites are privileged? We earn less on average than Indians and Chinese, and those of a lower class have recently discovered that white privilege doesn't extend to them. Our IQs average lower than everyone except blacks (Indians and Chinese once again doing better, and Jews being very impressive).
Blanket terms applied to race are unwise. It's an approach that seeks to simplify to a dumbed down level more complex matters, when race and gender and class may all intermingle. Compare the prison population rates for men and women, or likewise deaths by police action. Consider the educational challenges faced by poor white boys.
Would people blithely accept and then repeat terms like black criminality, and state that because black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population made that ok? I wouldn't support that. And I don't support the use of terms like white privilege. In a few years it may be discovered that overly simplistic language applying blanket terms to a whole race, judging people by their skin colour and making assumptions that way, might just turn out to lead to very negative consequences.
I thought the gatherings were meant to be no more than 6 people, not no more than 6 friends?
If I was to invite 5 friends I know and told them to all invite a "plus one" that nobody else in the group knew, then am I allowed to have 12 in my gathering Piers since there's only six friends there?
In a park there are often 1000+ people there. I have never understood why it matters if you know more than 1 or 5 or 6 of them. As long as they are socially distanced it really doesnt matter. If they are not socially distanced, not knowing them doesnt help either.
Which is the point. Gatherings are supposed to be limited to 6 and kept socially distanced. Having thousands together not socially distanced isn't suddenly within the rules just because the thousands are strangers.
If Piers were intellectually honest he should say "yes the COVID rules were broken but for a good cause that was more important" - but of course he's been arguing against the opposite for others for so long he can't be honest and just lies instead.
Or my son decided to attend a protest, that was his decision, he is his own man, but that was breaking the rules and I won't be doing so.
Instead after his hyperbolic reaction to every twist and turn of this crisis, he is now trying to defend his son for breaking the rules, in direct contrast to how he has roasted everybody else who he has set his sights on.
He is simply a massive hypocrite. And if we were going to go all "position of responsibility" ala Big Dom, he has a large platform which he is now using to excuse certain rule breaking, rather than make clear the potential dangers of such large gatherings (especially to BAME individuals, who it appears are more likely to be badly affected by this virus).
It doesn't matter really what we as white people think of the Empire, what we are dealing with is what the descendants of those we colonised think. All around they see the privileged of this country living off the labour of their ancestors while they are still the poor relation.
When we look at the British Empire, we have to put it in its broader context, with other periods of pre-eminence, short and long, enjoyed by other countries. Commercial exploitation, the strong enforcing their will over the weak, seem to be the inevitable result of the ability to do so. This certainly didn't begin with Britain, and it has certainly continued under a different name with America, and we'll have to see what it looks like under China. Even on a smaller scale, I would be interested to hear of any country that became more powerful than its near neighbours, and (if it wasn't stopped by a still greater power) did not end up exploiting it. Doing this enables us to assess the character of The British Empire slightly more even-handedly.
Here is one contemporary view quoted by Max Hastings in the DM: 'In 1922, the American philosopher George Santayana enthused: ‘Never since the days of heroic Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, churls and fanatics manage to supplant him.''
I don't really agree with that - I think what probably made the British Empire era more benign than the American Empire era (when taking into account the differences between the 19th and 20th centuries), was the fact that we were constrained in our actions by several other great world powers. We bullied the Chinese (as did the Americans) because we could. We couldn't have done it to the Russians, Germans, French, Americans, etc., so we didn't. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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.
The UK is great in many respects too, but there is a feeling of looking for excuses not to do things.
Don't build cycle routes because of the rain. Give up completely on contact tracing for a couple of months because we couldn't keep up with the infection rate. Whine about wind turbines not generating electricity when it isn't windy.
Even with Brexit the debate has been relentlessly negative. Either we have to leave because there's no way we can improve it and make it work for us, or we have to stay because we'd become a failed state without it.
I do wish sometimes that we'd do things confident in the knowledge that we could fix the problems that would come up.
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.
And yet, as you point out, it was technological dominance that enabled the slave trade - and did not the racial 'science' of the nineteenth century, which was and is part and parcel of the racism of the modern era, emerge from the societal mindset necessary to maintaining the institutions of plantation slavery in the midst of civilised societies ?
'Darwin's sacred cause' by Desmond and Moore is most interesting on this question and Charles Darwin.
As I recall, from this or elsewhere, the Southern States slaveowners fell with glad cries on the important zoologist Louis Agassiz when he emigrated to America and put forward his theories that black people (etc) were separately created from whites, ie a different species.
And there is Robert Knox of Edinburgh - keen on proving that black people and Irish people were inferior beings to Anglo-Saxons (though when he used a couple of Irish to collect corpses for his dissections,. he came a cropper when Messrs Burke and Hare didn't wait for the subjects to die first before acquiring them). But neither Agassiz nor Knox was (I think) a supporter of slavery per se, thoigh I'd need to check. Darwin wasn't - quite the opposite.
The Scottish Gaels also got the shitey end of the racism stick when it came to the Clearances era and being expected to work as the laird wanted or deported across the Atlantic, albeit not in chains - though that is also a complex story in its own right.
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.
And yet, as you point out, it was technological dominance that enabled the slave trade - and did not the racial 'science' of the nineteenth century, which was and is part and parcel of the racism of the modern era, emerge from the societal mindset necessary to maintaining the institutions of plantation slavery in the midst of civilised societies ?
Surely slavery is a result of racism, seeing Blacks and Asians as lesser than European whites allowed the thinking to justify slavery in a moral sense - "it's not wrong because Blacks/Asians aren't people".
It's the same kind of thinking that allows slavery to pervade the Middle East and why slave markets operate across North Africa selling black Africans into slavery into the Middle East.
I'm struggling a bit with the idea that us Brits invented the slave trade.
As I understand it, the term Slav is a corruption of the word 'slave' and reflects the trading enterprise of the Scandinavians who took prisoners for the specific purpose of selling them. Because they were valuable, they tended to look after the product, at least until the had been sold, or otherwise disposed of.
I also understand that the ancient Egyptians were a bit tough on the Nubians. No doubt PBers can offer other examples.
Why do we Brits get the credit for inventing the idea?
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.
Oppositions oppose. The Tories are going to have to get used to that after having so many years without facing one. Labour has supported the lockdown and has supported the economic measures that Sunak has taken. It has also criticised some aspects of the government's strategy. This is all quite normal.
I think that's true in normal times, but at this point in time the public expects all political parties to pull together and row in the same direction. Carping from the sidelines about what happened 4 weeks ago and at the same time not proposing a solution 4 weeks ago is playing worse than I expected, even among natural lefties I know.
I also think the lawyerly letters are not going down as well as he thinks.
This is the time for bold visions to be laid out about the future of the country, Labour is still a blank sheet of paper and so is Starmer.
The best thing I have seen from Starmer was his testing pledge, 24 hours to be traced and tested, 24 hours for the result. It was clear and it was correct. This is what we need. The worst thing is these silly "gotcha" letters claiming that there are inconsistencies between advice given weeks ago ignoring the caveats on that advice. Its the sort of thing that gives lawyers a bad name.
My conclusion is that he needs to get ahead of the game. To identify what we need to come out of lockdown (relatively) safely and what policies are going to mitigate the inevitable economic carnage. Frankly getting ahead of this government really shouldn't be too hard. If he does this regularly he can have an impact and create a persona of someone with a grip of what is needed leaving Boris blustering about why the actuality does not match up. If he simply criticises and tries to look wise after the event with hindsight he will get nowhere.
It doesn't matter really what we as white people think of the Empire, what we are dealing with is what the descendants of those we colonised think. All around they see the privileged of this country living off the labour of their ancestors while they are still the poor relation.
If that is the case, it's a perception, and a damaging one for anyone who makes that their reality.
Geoffrey Boycott appears to have commentated on his last match for BBC Test Match Special after the corporation announced its lineup of on-air talent for the summer and omitted the former England batsman.
When we look at the British Empire, we have to put it in its broader context, with other periods of pre-eminence, short and long, enjoyed by other countries. Commercial exploitation, the strong enforcing their will over the weak, seem to be the inevitable result of the ability to do so. This certainly didn't begin with Britain, and it has certainly continued under a different name with America, and we'll have to see what it looks like under China. Even on a smaller scale, I would be interested to hear of any country that became more powerful than its near neighbours, and (if it wasn't stopped by a still greater power) did not end up exploiting it. Doing this enables us to assess the character of The British Empire slightly more even-handedly.
Here is one contemporary view quoted by Max Hastings in the DM: 'In 1922, the American philosopher George Santayana enthused: ‘Never since the days of heroic Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, churls and fanatics manage to supplant him.''
I don't really agree with that - I think what probably made the British Empire era more benign than the American Empire era (when taking into account the differences between the 19th and 20th centuries), was the fact that we were constrained in our actions by several other great world powers. We bullied the Chinese (as did the Americans) because we could. We couldn't have done it to the Russians, Germans, French, Americans, etc., so we didn't. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The opium wars were a decidedly questionable starting point but don’t forget that a economic megacentre and bastion of democracy was created out of it, in Hong Kong, which had (and still has) the potential to influence the whole of China for the better.
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.
This has happened to my wife when applying for top jobs at law firms ten years ago.
Her maiden name ended in "rova" and the challenge from the Partner interviewing her was whether her English was good enough to be a corporate solicitor. To be fair, it's a legitimate concern but shouldn't be necessary after a CV sort, and several rounds of interviews.
She hasn't had this issue since taking my name. And she is white.
I too struggle with pronouncing and articulating some names I read. These include sub-saharan African names, original Chinese names and Irish names.
I don't think that makes me racist, and I do try to learn them quick, but I do struggle at first.
Of course someone struggling to pronounce unfamiliar names does not make them racist. I am bewildered as to why you think it might do.
Racism/racist are clearly amongst the least precise commonly used, important words in our language. They mean quite different things to different people so people get upset and confused, not always but often, simply because they misunderstand or misinterpret what the other person is saying. We need better and more precise descriptors here.
* El Presidente runs to a bunker beneath his palace in the capital city.
* El Presidente orders the use of a military helicopter against unarmed demonstrators outside his palace so that he can strut to a church to have his photo taken holding a bible.
* El Presidente orders troops from the 82nd airborne division to the capital.
* Defence Minister orders an investigation into the helicopter action and declares that now is NOT a time to use the military against US citizens.
* The troops are removed.
* Defence Minister stays in office.
...And some people think the president will still be in office in five months' time?
Few love Trump, and few now fear him either. In any future SHTF event he is unlikely to have control of the military, at the very least while Mark Esper remains in office - and if he could have sacked Esper who has so obviously dissed him, he would have done. He's a lame duck.
Oxford University’s potential Covid-19 vaccine will be tested in Brazil as scientists rush to find places with high enough rates of infection to determine whether their inoculations work.
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.
Oppositions oppose. The Tories are going to have to get used to that after having so many years without facing one. Labour has supported the lockdown and has supported the economic measures that Sunak has taken. It has also criticised some aspects of the government's strategy. This is all quite normal.
I think that's true in normal times, but at this point in time the public expects all political parties to pull together and row in the same direction. Carping from the sidelines about what happened 4 weeks ago and at the same time not proposing a solution 4 weeks ago is playing worse than I expected, even among natural lefties I know.
I also think the lawyerly letters are not going down as well as he thinks.
This is the time for bold visions to be laid out about the future of the country, Labour is still a blank sheet of paper and so is Starmer.
The best thing I have seen from Starmer was his testing pledge, 24 hours to be traced and tested, 24 hours for the result. It was clear and it was correct. This is what we need. The worst thing is these silly "gotcha" letters claiming that there are inconsistencies between advice given weeks ago ignoring the caveats on that advice. Its the sort of thing that gives lawyers a bad name.
My conclusion is that he needs to get ahead of the game. To identify what we need to come out of lockdown (relatively) safely and what policies are going to mitigate the inevitable economic carnage. Frankly getting ahead of this government really shouldn't be too hard. If he does this regularly he can have an impact and create a persona of someone with a grip of what is needed leaving Boris blustering about why the actuality does not match up. If he simply criticises and tries to look wise after the event with hindsight he will get nowhere.
Did that come from Starmer? I thought it was an exchange between Hunt and Boris that got the 24h pledge not Starmer?
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.
I agree.
So do I.
Me too. Which perhaps illustrates my earlier point about there being considerably more room for consensus in our society than the US.
As someone who’s family came to the UK as a result of anti-jewish pogroms, and thus has zero “British” blood, the Empire is a complete irrelevance outside pure historical fascination. I am neither proud of it, nor am I ashamed of it. It had nothing to do with me.
Mr. Above, I did specifically write 'some others' so as to try and make it plain I wasn't suggesting you felt that way. Apologies if that wasn't clear.
It's true that men are taller and stronger than women on average. Nobody thinks this confers huge advantages or disadvantages in most spheres of life, nor makes moral judgements based on these physical facts (although some seek to pretend they don't exist for transgender athletes, but that's another story).
Try reading mumsnet and you will absolutely find lots of women do think this and some of their examples will show it quite clearly.
Male gender is a privilege in our society in many ways. For the avoidance of doubt, not in all cases, and in many scenarios female gender can be the more privileged one too - and the situation is far better than it has historically been but to deny its existence is wrong.
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.
Very true, it's easy to lift terms and arguments from the US and apply them elsewhere - but the US has a very different cultural history, and very recent history of active racism to most other countries.
IMO the biggest issue in the UK is class rather than race. There are huge numbers of middle classes of all races, but also huge numbers of a white underclass with few opportunities.
The issues around policing are more difficult, and there needs to be a careful balance drawn. It must be very annoying for an upstanding citizen to match the description of local gang members and be constantly questioned - but how do we avoid going too far the other way, hamstringing the effectiveness of the police by asking them to stop every granny when they're looking for young black men?
When we look at the British Empire, we have to put it in its broader context, with other periods of pre-eminence, short and long, enjoyed by other countries. Commercial exploitation, the strong enforcing their will over the weak, seem to be the inevitable result of the ability to do so. This certainly didn't begin with Britain, and it has certainly continued under a different name with America, and we'll have to see what it looks like under China. Even on a smaller scale, I would be interested to hear of any country that became more powerful than its near neighbours, and (if it wasn't stopped by a still greater power) did not end up exploiting it. Doing this enables us to assess the character of The British Empire slightly more even-handedly.
Here is one contemporary view quoted by Max Hastings in the DM: 'In 1922, the American philosopher George Santayana enthused: ‘Never since the days of heroic Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, churls and fanatics manage to supplant him.''
I don't really agree with that - I think what probably made the British Empire era more benign than the American Empire era (when taking into account the differences between the 19th and 20th centuries), was the fact that we were constrained in our actions by several other great world powers. We bullied the Chinese (as did the Americans) because we could. We couldn't have done it to the Russians, Germans, French, Americans, etc., so we didn't. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
One factor may have been that our power derived very largely from naval superiority. Can't easily turn the navy into an oppressive land Army.
I think the problem with the whole “X privilege” debate is that it is easy to examine these things when you are comfortable. It is easy to “acknowledge your privilege” when you are comfortable.
If you are personally struggling either financially, physically, or socially, it is not exactly a rational response to declare “I AM IN A PRIVILEGED POSITION”, regardless whether your “race” or “gender” is on the whole privileged.
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.
And yet, as you point out, it was technological dominance that enabled the slave trade - and did not the racial 'science' of the nineteenth century, which was and is part and parcel of the racism of the modern era, emerge from the societal mindset necessary to maintaining the institutions of plantation slavery in the midst of civilised societies ?
Surely slavery is a result of racism, seeing Blacks and Asians as lesser than European whites allowed the thinking to justify slavery in a moral sense - "it's not wrong because Blacks/Asians aren't people".
It's the same kind of thinking that allows slavery to pervade the Middle East and why slave markets operate across North Africa selling black Africans into slavery into the Middle East.
I'm struggling a bit with the idea that us Brits invented the slave trade.
As I understand it, the term Slav is a corruption of the word 'slave' and reflects the trading enterprise of the Scandinavians who took prisoners for the specific purpose of selling them. Because they were valuable, they tended to look after the product, at least until the had been sold, or otherwise disposed of.
I also understand that the ancient Egyptians were a bit tough on the Nubians. No doubt PBers can offer other examples.
Why do we Brits get the credit for inventing the idea?
It is part of British exceptionalism to claim credit for everything!
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.
Oppositions oppose. The Tories are going to have to get used to that after having so many years without facing one. Labour has supported the lockdown and has supported the economic measures that Sunak has taken. It has also criticised some aspects of the government's strategy. This is all quite normal.
I think that's true in normal times, but at this point in time the public expects all political parties to pull together and row in the same direction. Carping from the sidelines about what happened 4 weeks ago and at the same time not proposing a solution 4 weeks ago is playing worse than I expected, even among natural lefties I know.
I also think the lawyerly letters are not going down as well as he thinks.
This is the time for bold visions to be laid out about the future of the country, Labour is still a blank sheet of paper and so is Starmer.
The best thing I have seen from Starmer was his testing pledge, 24 hours to be traced and tested, 24 hours for the result. It was clear and it was correct. This is what we need. The worst thing is these silly "gotcha" letters claiming that there are inconsistencies between advice given weeks ago ignoring the caveats on that advice. Its the sort of thing that gives lawyers a bad name.
My conclusion is that he needs to get ahead of the game. To identify what we need to come out of lockdown (relatively) safely and what policies are going to mitigate the inevitable economic carnage. Frankly getting ahead of this government really shouldn't be too hard. If he does this regularly he can have an impact and create a persona of someone with a grip of what is needed leaving Boris blustering about why the actuality does not match up. If he simply criticises and tries to look wise after the event with hindsight he will get nowhere.
Did that come from Starmer? I thought it was an exchange between Hunt and Boris that got the 24h pledge not Starmer?
I saw a Labour party poster on here. They may have pinched it but it was good, clear messaging.
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.
Oppositions oppose. The Tories are going to have to get used to that after having so many years without facing one. Labour has supported the lockdown and has supported the economic measures that Sunak has taken. It has also criticised some aspects of the government's strategy. This is all quite normal.
I think that's true in normal times, but at this point in time the public expects all political parties to pull together and row in the same direction. Carping from the sidelines about what happened 4 weeks ago and at the same time not proposing a solution 4 weeks ago is playing worse than I expected, even among natural lefties I know.
I also think the lawyerly letters are not going down as well as he thinks.
This is the time for bold visions to be laid out about the future of the country, Labour is still a blank sheet of paper and so is Starmer.
I am not seeing bold visions from anyone right now. I have no idea what the government's one is or how it will be paid for.
Given that Labour's favourability ratings are improving, I am not sure that it is acting in a way that the country finds particularly reprehensible. As for the letters, I am not sure why so many Tories are so fixated on them. They are hepful devices, but I doubt many people have noticed them.
States prod nursing homes to take more Covid-19 patients https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/04/states-nursing-homes-coronavirus-302134 Programs designed to help elderly people with coronavirus are creating a perverse financial incentive for nursing homes with bad track records to bring in sick patients, raising the risks of spreading infections and substandard care for seriously ill patients, according to advocates for the elderly and industry experts.....
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.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
Why March? March was during a 'rally around the flag' moment as we saw everywhere worldwide. Even Trump saw his ratings improve massively at the end of March.
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.
The police act with impunity there (guaranteed by Supreme Court precedent) but you cant separate the two.
I think the problem with the whole “X privilege” debate is that it is easy to examine these things when you are comfortable. It is easy to “acknowledge your privilege” when you are comfortable.
If you are personally struggling either financially, physically, or socially, it is not exactly a rational response to declare “I AM IN A PRIVILEGED POSITION”, regardless whether your “race” or “gender” is on the whole privileged.
AIUI it is not saying every white person is privileged (although admittedly there is a fringe who think so), the mainstream interpretation and the one I would agree with is on average white people are more privileged.
And yes, it should be discussed and prioritised in conjunction with other factors such as education, class, gender, etc with might make it a top 5 issue in the US but only a top 20 issue in the Uk.
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.
You see lots of Arab privilege if you live in Arabia!
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.
Oppositions oppose. The Tories are going to have to get used to that after having so many years without facing one. Labour has supported the lockdown and has supported the economic measures that Sunak has taken. It has also criticised some aspects of the government's strategy. This is all quite normal.
I think that's true in normal times, but at this point in time the public expects all political parties to pull together and row in the same direction. Carping from the sidelines about what happened 4 weeks ago and at the same time not proposing a solution 4 weeks ago is playing worse than I expected, even among natural lefties I know.
I also think the lawyerly letters are not going down as well as he thinks.
This is the time for bold visions to be laid out about the future of the country, Labour is still a blank sheet of paper and so is Starmer.
I am not seeing bold visions from anyone right now. I have no idea what the government's one is or how it will be paid for.
Given that Labour's favourability ratings are improving, I am not sure that it is acting in a way that the country finds particularly reprehensible. As for the letters, I am not sure why so many Tories are so fixated on them. They are hepful devices, but I doubt many people have noticed them.
They're an attempted gotcha without an "I told you so". At the best of times it is hard to pull off, without the forewarning it's basically impossible and just looks like unhelpful carping during a national crisis. As one of my lefty friends put it "he'd be writing a letter to Winston Churchill saying that the types of boats used in Dunkirk didn't meet regulatory standards four weeks after the event because 3 of them sank".
I think that's why the favourables are not going up.
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.
Oppositions oppose. The Tories are going to have to get used to that after having so many years without facing one. Labour has supported the lockdown and has supported the economic measures that Sunak has taken. It has also criticised some aspects of the government's strategy. This is all quite normal.
I think that's true in normal times, but at this point in time the public expects all political parties to pull together and row in the same direction. Carping from the sidelines about what happened 4 weeks ago and at the same time not proposing a solution 4 weeks ago is playing worse than I expected, even among natural lefties I know.
I also think the lawyerly letters are not going down as well as he thinks.
This is the time for bold visions to be laid out about the future of the country, Labour is still a blank sheet of paper and so is Starmer.
The best thing I have seen from Starmer was his testing pledge, 24 hours to be traced and tested, 24 hours for the result. It was clear and it was correct. This is what we need. The worst thing is these silly "gotcha" letters claiming that there are inconsistencies between advice given weeks ago ignoring the caveats on that advice. Its the sort of thing that gives lawyers a bad name.
My conclusion is that he needs to get ahead of the game. To identify what we need to come out of lockdown (relatively) safely and what policies are going to mitigate the inevitable economic carnage. Frankly getting ahead of this government really shouldn't be too hard. If he does this regularly he can have an impact and create a persona of someone with a grip of what is needed leaving Boris blustering about why the actuality does not match up. If he simply criticises and tries to look wise after the event with hindsight he will get nowhere.
Did that come from Starmer? I thought it was an exchange between Hunt and Boris that got the 24h pledge not Starmer?
I saw a Labour party poster on here. They may have pinched it but it was good, clear messaging.
It is but I don't think it was anything to do with Labour. Not sure when you saw the poster but at PMQs this week Starmer didn't bring it up. Hunt did after and Boris immediately replied with the 24h pledge.
My impression of the exchange was that Hunt and Boris had probably had a conversation beforehand leading up to that exchange. It seemed coordinated to me.
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.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
The Tories are polling exactly where they ended up at the 2019 general election. Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
When we look at the British Empire, we have to put it in its broader context, with other periods of pre-eminence, short and long, enjoyed by other countries. Commercial exploitation, the strong enforcing their will over the weak, seem to be the inevitable result of the ability to do so. This certainly didn't begin with Britain, and it has certainly continued under a different name with America, and we'll have to see what it looks like under China. Even on a smaller scale, I would be interested to hear of any country that became more powerful than its near neighbours, and (if it wasn't stopped by a still greater power) did not end up exploiting it. Doing this enables us to assess the character of The British Empire slightly more even-handedly.
Here is one contemporary view quoted by Max Hastings in the DM: 'In 1922, the American philosopher George Santayana enthused: ‘Never since the days of heroic Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, churls and fanatics manage to supplant him.''
I don't really agree with that - I think what probably made the British Empire era more benign than the American Empire era (when taking into account the differences between the 19th and 20th centuries), was the fact that we were constrained in our actions by several other great world powers. We bullied the Chinese (as did the Americans) because we could. We couldn't have done it to the Russians, Germans, French, Americans, etc., so we didn't. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
One factor may have been that our power derived very largely from naval superiority. Can't easily turn the navy into an oppressive land Army.
Yes, that's an interesting factor to consider. Another is the fact that Britain is historically a trading nation (as opposed to having a big domestic market) so had an interest in world stability that was notably absent from US policy.
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.
You see lots of Arab privilege if you live in Arabia!
Nothing to do with guns, everything to do with money.
Now we have high blood pressure and being bald as additional risk factors for suffering the worse form of the infection.
Apparently the prostrate medication, Finasteride, which has the side effect of reversing male pattern baldness to a certain effect, is being tested for its anti-C19 properties.
That's funny because I was taking that for a month and then my whole household got sick with Covid 19, and whilst I felt a bit nauseous I was the only one who didn't get most of the symptoms usually associated with 19.....
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.
Oppositions oppose. The Tories are going to have to get used to that after having so many years without facing one. Labour has supported the lockdown and has supported the economic measures that Sunak has taken. It has also criticised some aspects of the government's strategy. This is all quite normal.
I think that's true in normal times, but at this point in time the public expects all political parties to pull together and row in the same direction. Carping from the sidelines about what happened 4 weeks ago and at the same time not proposing a solution 4 weeks ago is playing worse than I expected, even among natural lefties I know.
I also think the lawyerly letters are not going down as well as he thinks.
This is the time for bold visions to be laid out about the future of the country, Labour is still a blank sheet of paper and so is Starmer.
I am not seeing bold visions from anyone right now. I have no idea what the government's one is or how it will be paid for.
Given that Labour's favourability ratings are improving, I am not sure that it is acting in a way that the country finds particularly reprehensible. As for the letters, I am not sure why so many Tories are so fixated on them. They are hepful devices, but I doubt many people have noticed them.
A bold vision needs to be centred on environment and biotech - those are two areas where we can transform not just our lives for the better but gain long lasting global competitive advantages based on our current assets.
When we look at the British Empire, we have to put it in its broader context, with other periods of pre-eminence, short and long, enjoyed by other countries. Commercial exploitation, the strong enforcing their will over the weak, seem to be the inevitable result of the ability to do so. This certainly didn't begin with Britain, and it has certainly continued under a different name with America, and we'll have to see what it looks like under China. Even on a smaller scale, I would be interested to hear of any country that became more powerful than its near neighbours, and (if it wasn't stopped by a still greater power) did not end up exploiting it. Doing this enables us to assess the character of The British Empire slightly more even-handedly.
Here is one contemporary view quoted by Max Hastings in the DM: 'In 1922, the American philosopher George Santayana enthused: ‘Never since the days of heroic Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, churls and fanatics manage to supplant him.''
I don't really agree with that - I think what probably made the British Empire era more benign than the American Empire era (when taking into account the differences between the 19th and 20th centuries), was the fact that we were constrained in our actions by several other great world powers. We bullied the Chinese (as did the Americans) because we could. We couldn't have done it to the Russians, Germans, French, Americans, etc., so we didn't. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
One factor may have been that our power derived very largely from naval superiority. Can't easily turn the navy into an oppressive land Army.
Yes, that's an interesting factor to consider. Another is the fact that Britain is historically a trading nation (as opposed to having a big domestic market) so had an interest in world stability that was notably absent from US policy.
Yes, that's a good point. It's amazing how few people we needed to run India in the colonial period.
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.
And yet, as you point out, it was technological dominance that enabled the slave trade - and did not the racial 'science' of the nineteenth century, which was and is part and parcel of the racism of the modern era, emerge from the societal mindset necessary to maintaining the institutions of plantation slavery in the midst of civilised societies ?
Surely slavery is a result of racism, seeing Blacks and Asians as lesser than European whites allowed the thinking to justify slavery in a moral sense - "it's not wrong because Blacks/Asians aren't people".
It's the same kind of thinking that allows slavery to pervade the Middle East and why slave markets operate across North Africa selling black Africans into slavery into the Middle East.
Historically, not necessarily. The Romans took slaves from all over - and were quite happy to give citizenship to all ethnicities, too.
Sure, racism is often an element of it, but there is something particular about the racism that arose from nineteenth century plantation slavery that is quite distinct. The coexistence of industrialised brutality perpetrated on a particular set of people, alongside societies that were developing liberal democracy and respect for human rights is an odd thing, and required a peculiar mindset.
Britain squared the circle, up to a point, with its abolition of slavery; the US not so much.
Absolutely. A great move with the cycling from Boris. Park Lane for example is now one big cycle lane with a bit of room for buses and the odd private car.
Good news, sounds like we are making real progress if slower than elsewhere. At this rate it should be close to wiped out by the end of summer.
My concern would be a second wave happening once restrictions are removed, people get complacent and the cold/flu season restarts in autumn.
It's a massive assumption, but IF that rate of decline continues, then it would be effectively extinct by the end of summer.
Assume 67,000 people are wandering around in the general population of the UK who are infected, and that's down from 161,000 last week.
Next week it would be down to 28,000 (as long as we continue doing what is working). In four weeks, it would be down to 2,100. In eight weeks, down to 65. At which point, it's pretty much down to individuals. But the epidemic in the UK could pretty much be over by then. Especially if you can identify and track the majority of them.
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.
That is an excellent summary.
The problem is a desire by some on the extremes to make this an all or nothing scenario. That doesn't reflect this country.
Agreed.
But also the failure by some - either deliberately or through lack of cognitive ability - to recognize the problem at all.
Edit: Sorry I see that is the point you are making too.
Johnson has never had a bike that wasn't utterly shit and rides s-l-o-w-l-y. As a flahute I find it hard to identify with him as a cyclist.
Boris bikes are awful. Heavy, lumbering things, ridden at death-slow speeds by wobbly non-helmet wearers who can barely ride a bike.
That's much better than the boy-racer types (and quite a few girl-racers) riding at 40mph through red lights without bothering about pedestrians.
I walk around London a lot, and this really is becoming a problem. The police seem to do nothing about it at all.
As a matter of interest, has any PBer ever seen or heard of a cyclist being nicked for speeding?
In London, the limit is 20mph in most boroughs and when complying with it I am often overtaken by cyclists. Never seen one done for it.
It feels much more dangerous driving (from cyclists pov not mine in the case) where the speed limit is 20mph and cyclists are overtaking cars, sometimes simultaneously on the inside and outside, than in 30mph zones. (I might be overweighting the chance of collision and not giving enough weight to the different speed and force when there is a collision).
I thought the gatherings were meant to be no more than 6 people, not no more than 6 friends?
If I was to invite 5 friends I know and told them to all invite a "plus one" that nobody else in the group knew, then am I allowed to have 12 in my gathering Piers since there's only six friends there?
In a park there are often 1000+ people there. I have never understood why it matters if you know more than 1 or 5 or 6 of them. As long as they are socially distanced it really doesnt matter. If they are not socially distanced, not knowing them doesnt help either.
Which is the point. Gatherings are supposed to be limited to 6 and kept socially distanced. Having thousands together not socially distanced isn't suddenly within the rules just because the thousands are strangers.
If Piers were intellectually honest he should say "yes the COVID rules were broken but for a good cause that was more important" - but of course he's been arguing against the opposite for others for so long he can't be honest and just lies instead.
Or my son decided to attend a protest, that was his decision, he is his own man, but that was breaking the rules and I won't be doing so.
Instead after his hyperbolic reaction to every twist and turn of this crisis, he is now trying to defend his son for breaking the rules, in direct contrast to how he has roasted everybody else who he has set his sights on.
He is simply a massive hypocrite. And if we were going to go all "position of responsibility" ala Big Dom, he has a large platform which he is now using to excuse certain rule breaking, rather than make clear the potential dangers of such large gatherings (especially to BAME individuals, who it appears are more likely to be badly affected by this virus).
Can we just stipulate that Piers Morgan is an arse ?
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.
A wise friend once observed that in Britain, class trumps race, while in America race trumps class.
Of course in America so many African Americans are poor that it may be slightly moot - but one thing I noticed staying in Washington DC was the number of middle class black families dining and being served by white waitstaff - a surprising and pleasant reversal of the usual situation (the hotel did have some African American staff).
Even in it's history America cannot face the truth. Jamestown - a reconstruction of an early colonial settlement has actors wandering round in period costume. 90% of them are white. Jamestown was over 50% black.
In Britain we beat ourselves up over racism (and we should), but in a global perspective we are one of the least racist countries on the planet - in South East Asia educated upper middle class people regularly express sentiments that would have barely passed muster in 1960s Britain. And then there's Japan....China, Korea...
As someone who’s family came to the UK as a result of anti-jewish pogroms, and thus has zero “British” blood, the Empire is a complete irrelevance outside pure historical fascination. I am neither proud of it, nor am I ashamed of it. It had nothing to do with me.
Huh? When was this? This morning? You are here, you are British.
I think the problem with the whole “X privilege” debate is that it is easy to examine these things when you are comfortable. It is easy to “acknowledge your privilege” when you are comfortable.
If you are personally struggling either financially, physically, or socially, it is not exactly a rational response to declare “I AM IN A PRIVILEGED POSITION”, regardless whether your “race” or “gender” is on the whole privileged.
AIUI it is not saying every white person is privileged (although admittedly there is a fringe who think so), the mainstream interpretation and the one I would agree with is on average white people are more privileged.
And yes, it should be discussed and prioritised in conjunction with other factors such as education, class, gender, etc with might make it a top 5 issue in the US but only a top 20 issue in the Uk.
My understanding is different. Privilege in this system is defined relatively. We're not trying to measure an absolute scale of priviliege out of 100, with say Jeff Bezos or the Duke of Westminster in the high 90s, and Rohyngia refugees somewhere below 10. Instead, the point is that if you have two people in the UK or US who are otherwise identical but one is white and the other black, the white person will have a better experience because they will not encounter racism. They may both have problems, maybe even serious problems, but the white person is relatively privileged because they have one less problem than the black person.
This is precisely why it's a tricky conversation, because if you're using an absolute scale and I'm talking in relative terms, pretty soon one of us will say something that sounds insane to the other, and we'll end up assuming that the other is incorrigibly racist/woke (delete as applicable).
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.
And yet, as you point out, it was technological dominance that enabled the slave trade - and did not the racial 'science' of the nineteenth century, which was and is part and parcel of the racism of the modern era, emerge from the societal mindset necessary to maintaining the institutions of plantation slavery in the midst of civilised societies ?
Surely slavery is a result of racism, seeing Blacks and Asians as lesser than European whites allowed the thinking to justify slavery in a moral sense - "it's not wrong because Blacks/Asians aren't people".
It's the same kind of thinking that allows slavery to pervade the Middle East and why slave markets operate across North Africa selling black Africans into slavery into the Middle East.
I'm struggling a bit with the idea that us Brits invented the slave trade.
As I understand it, the term Slav is a corruption of the word 'slave' and reflects the trading enterprise of the Scandinavians who took prisoners for the specific purpose of selling them. Because they were valuable, they tended to look after the product, at least until the had been sold, or otherwise disposed of.
I also understand that the ancient Egyptians were a bit tough on the Nubians. No doubt PBers can offer other examples.
Why do we Brits get the credit for inventing the idea?
It is part of British exceptionalism to claim credit for everything!
It's an amusing point, but quite a telling one. For many of the hard-core devotees of the imperialism / colonialism / racism / privilege narratives, Britain is the fons et origo of all those evils - thus ironically failing to credit and therefore eliding (one of their favourite words) millennium after millennium of myriad non-whites and non-Europeans building huge empires and conquering and enslaving those they considered their inferiors long before the inhabitants of the British Isles got around to discovering woad, thank you very much!
Comments
https://twitter.com/cricketwyvern/status/1268835213561470980?s=20
https://twitter.com/cricketwyvern/status/1268835214853357569?s=20
I used to commute every day using bike and train. You'd be very surprised how little it actually rains enough to be annoying, even in quite wet places. If you had to commute in Argyll it might get a bit irritating in winter, but most people don't live there.
Also, clothing these days is light years ahead of where it was. I just wore a simple thin non-waterproof jacket - over the suit and tie - and I can count on the number of fingers on one hand when I actually got wet enough to care over many years.
The problem is not the weather, it is cars.
I'll say it again if it helps us not to plunge down blind alleys.
Many many things are nothing to do with white privilege.
https://datausa.io/profile/soc/police-officers#demographics
In London, the limit is 20mph in most boroughs and when complying with it I am often overtaken by cyclists. Never seen one done for it.
The amount of little journeys people take by car that could be done by bike is huge. And surely it is more pleasurable, and not much slower, than travelling by tube in zones 1&2?
Men are taller than women. That is a perfectly fair statement but if you then say well what about tall women and male pygmies it is no longer true. But anyone with a brain should be able to understand what "men are taller than women" means, similarly with white privilege in modern western society.
We are well short of having that kind of weight of numbers here but maybe we are getting there.
If I was to invite 5 friends I know and told them to all invite a "plus one" that nobody else in the group knew, then am I allowed to have 12 in my gathering Piers since there's only six friends there?
The problem is a desire by some on the extremes to make this an all or nothing scenario. That doesn't reflect this country.
I've been done for 56km/h on a 30km/h path in Eindhoven. 85€ fine. Fuckers.
Take fatal police shootings in the US, a total 429 civilians have been shot by police in 2020, 88, some 20%, were Black. According the the US Census, though, non-Hispanic black people comprise 12.1% of the population. In 2016 (the most recent year for which I have been able to find statistics) the rate of fatal police shootings per million was 10.13 for Native Americans, 6.6 for black people, 3.23 for Hispanics; 2.9 for white people and 1.17 for Asians. So, in the context of Black people in the States being twice as likely to be fatally shot by police as white people, it is fair to concentrate (for the moment) on Black people.
It's the same kind of thinking that allows slavery to pervade the Middle East and why slave markets operate across North Africa selling black Africans into slavery into the Middle East.
Its statistically demonstrated by the fact the proportion of killings is correlated with the proportion of suspects not the proportion of the races.
Given that not all suspects are guilty (as we know) that means that the proportion of innocent blacks that are getting killed correlates with the fact that other blacks are committing crimes, not due to their own personal guilt or innocence.
The only reason it wouldn't be true is if the Police weren't killing anyone that didn't need killing which isn't the case.
People have been beating each other with sticks since Adam and Eve. Literally everyone on planet earth alive today is descended from someone who had a bigger stick than someone else, otherwise they wouldn't be alive.
Also missing from this post is the point that more often than not the guns were trained on other people of the same ethnicity.
I think a white person like me gets a better sense of the feeling if they go to somewhere like West Virginia, where they can smell an 'East Coast Liberal' a mile off.
Boris is now mocked by some (de Piffle, I think was being used here this week) for having as a middle name the surname of the other set of grandparents.
So our current prime minister should be called Boris Kamal and his foreign sounding middle name is a subject of fun for people who think they know better.
And it's not as though it's just a problem of older generations...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/04/white-youths-arrested-for-bullying-black-boy-in-west-yorkshire
and do you think the British Empire was created without the use of force?
I am from Britain. I don't feel "ashamed" of the British Empire. But people who think it's something to be proud of actually disgust me.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
But the good news is this is not what it means. As the most rudimentary reading up and pondering on the matter would reveal.
My general philosophy is that the strong should give way to the weak: so cyclists should make way for pedestrians, and cars and other vehicles should make way for cyclists. Unfortunately, in this sphere as so many others, a might is right approach predominates. It takes government intervention to shift the terms of engagement, hopefully that will now happen.
Starmer has had a fair bit of help so far, and it has helped to close the gap, but he can't rely on that kind of thing indefinitely.
If Piers were intellectually honest he should say "yes the COVID rules were broken but for a good cause that was more important" - but of course he's been arguing against the opposite for others for so long he can't be honest and just lies instead.
My concern would be a second wave happening once restrictions are removed, people get complacent and the cold/flu season restarts in autumn.
I also think the lawyerly letters are not going down as well as he thinks.
This is the time for bold visions to be laid out about the future of the country, Labour is still a blank sheet of paper and so is Starmer.
Her maiden name ended in "rova" and the challenge from the Partner interviewing her was whether her English was good enough to be a corporate solicitor. To be fair, it's a legitimate concern but shouldn't be necessary after a CV sort, and several rounds of interviews.
She hasn't had this issue since taking my name. And she is white.
I too struggle with pronouncing and articulating some names I read. These include sub-saharan African names, original Chinese names and Irish names.
I don't think that makes me racist, and I do try to learn them quick, but I do struggle at first.
It's true that men are taller and stronger than women on average. Nobody thinks this confers huge advantages or disadvantages in most spheres of life, nor makes moral judgements based on these physical facts (although some seek to pretend they don't exist for transgender athletes, but that's another story).
Is it true that whites are privileged? We earn less on average than Indians and Chinese, and those of a lower class have recently discovered that white privilege doesn't extend to them. Our IQs average lower than everyone except blacks (Indians and Chinese once again doing better, and Jews being very impressive).
Blanket terms applied to race are unwise. It's an approach that seeks to simplify to a dumbed down level more complex matters, when race and gender and class may all intermingle. Compare the prison population rates for men and women, or likewise deaths by police action. Consider the educational challenges faced by poor white boys.
Would people blithely accept and then repeat terms like black criminality, and state that because black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population made that ok? I wouldn't support that. And I don't support the use of terms like white privilege. In a few years it may be discovered that overly simplistic language applying blanket terms to a whole race, judging people by their skin colour and making assumptions that way, might just turn out to lead to very negative consequences.
#progressiveslavery
Instead after his hyperbolic reaction to every twist and turn of this crisis, he is now trying to defend his son for breaking the rules, in direct contrast to how he has roasted everybody else who he has set his sights on.
He is simply a massive hypocrite. And if we were going to go all "position of responsibility" ala Big Dom, he has a large platform which he is now using to excuse certain rule breaking, rather than make clear the potential dangers of such large gatherings (especially to BAME individuals, who it appears are more likely to be badly affected by this virus).
Here is one contemporary view quoted by Max Hastings in the DM: 'In 1922, the American philosopher George Santayana enthused: ‘Never since the days of heroic Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, churls and fanatics manage to supplant him.''
I don't really agree with that - I think what probably made the British Empire era more benign than the American Empire era (when taking into account the differences between the 19th and 20th centuries), was the fact that we were constrained in our actions by several other great world powers. We bullied the Chinese (as did the Americans) because we could. We couldn't have done it to the Russians, Germans, French, Americans, etc., so we didn't. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We have appeared to forego the dangers of Coronavirus.
Don't build cycle routes because of the rain. Give up completely on contact tracing for a couple of months because we couldn't keep up with the infection rate. Whine about wind turbines not generating electricity when it isn't windy.
Even with Brexit the debate has been relentlessly negative. Either we have to leave because there's no way we can improve it and make it work for us, or we have to stay because we'd become a failed state without it.
I do wish sometimes that we'd do things confident in the knowledge that we could fix the problems that would come up.
As I recall, from this or elsewhere, the Southern States slaveowners fell with glad cries on the important zoologist Louis Agassiz when he emigrated to America and put forward his theories that black people (etc) were separately created from whites, ie a different species.
And there is Robert Knox of Edinburgh - keen on proving that black people and Irish people were inferior beings to Anglo-Saxons (though when he used a couple of Irish to collect corpses for his dissections,. he came a cropper when Messrs Burke and Hare didn't wait for the subjects to die first before acquiring them). But neither Agassiz nor Knox was (I think) a supporter of slavery per se, thoigh I'd need to check. Darwin wasn't - quite the opposite.
The Scottish Gaels also got the shitey end of the racism stick when it came to the Clearances era and being expected to work as the laird wanted or deported across the Atlantic, albeit not in chains - though that is also a complex story in its own right.
As I understand it, the term Slav is a corruption of the word 'slave' and reflects the trading enterprise of the Scandinavians who took prisoners for the specific purpose of selling them. Because they were valuable, they tended to look after the product, at least until the had been sold, or otherwise disposed of.
I also understand that the ancient Egyptians were a bit tough on the Nubians. No doubt PBers can offer other examples.
Why do we Brits get the credit for inventing the idea?
The worst thing is these silly "gotcha" letters claiming that there are inconsistencies between advice given weeks ago ignoring the caveats on that advice. Its the sort of thing that gives lawyers a bad name.
My conclusion is that he needs to get ahead of the game. To identify what we need to come out of lockdown (relatively) safely and what policies are going to mitigate the inevitable economic carnage. Frankly getting ahead of this government really shouldn't be too hard. If he does this regularly he can have an impact and create a persona of someone with a grip of what is needed leaving Boris blustering about why the actuality does not match up. If he simply criticises and tries to look wise after the event with hindsight he will get nowhere.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/jun/04/geoffrey-boycotts-time-on-bbc-test-match-special-looks-to-be-at-an-end
Absolutely worth it.
Racism/racist are clearly amongst the least precise commonly used, important words in our language. They mean quite different things to different people so people get upset and confused, not always but often, simply because they misunderstand or misinterpret what the other person is saying. We need better and more precise descriptors here.
* El Presidente runs to a bunker beneath his palace in the capital city.
* El Presidente orders the use of a military helicopter against unarmed demonstrators outside his palace so that he can strut to a church to have his photo taken holding a bible.
* El Presidente orders troops from the 82nd airborne division to the capital.
* Defence Minister orders an investigation into the helicopter action and declares that now is NOT a time to use the military against US citizens.
* The troops are removed.
* Defence Minister stays in office.
...And some people think the president will still be in office in five months' time?
Few love Trump, and few now fear him either. In any future SHTF event he is unlikely to have control of the military, at the very least while Mark Esper remains in office - and if he could have sacked Esper who has so obviously dissed him, he would have done. He's a lame duck.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/oxford-vaccine-team-chases-virus-to-brazil-89zwtqtp2
They say by August that they plan to say yah or nah on if to go for this vaccine for the coming winter.
Which perhaps illustrates my earlier point about there being considerably more room for consensus in our society than the US.
Male gender is a privilege in our society in many ways. For the avoidance of doubt, not in all cases, and in many scenarios female gender can be the more privileged one too - and the situation is far better than it has historically been but to deny its existence is wrong.
IMO the biggest issue in the UK is class rather than race. There are huge numbers of middle classes of all races, but also huge numbers of a white underclass with few opportunities.
The issues around policing are more difficult, and there needs to be a careful balance drawn. It must be very annoying for an upstanding citizen to match the description of local gang members and be constantly questioned - but how do we avoid going too far the other way, hamstringing the effectiveness of the police by asking them to stop every granny when they're looking for young black men?
If you are personally struggling either financially, physically, or socially, it is not exactly a rational response to declare “I AM IN A PRIVILEGED POSITION”, regardless whether your “race” or “gender” is on the whole privileged.
Given that Labour's favourability ratings are improving, I am not sure that it is acting in a way that the country finds particularly reprehensible. As for the letters, I am not sure why so many Tories are so fixated on them. They are hepful devices, but I doubt many people have noticed them.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/04/states-nursing-homes-coronavirus-302134
Programs designed to help elderly people with coronavirus are creating a perverse financial incentive for nursing homes with bad track records to bring in sick patients, raising the risks of spreading infections and substandard care for seriously ill patients, according to advocates for the elderly and industry experts.....
And yes, it should be discussed and prioritised in conjunction with other factors such as education, class, gender, etc with might make it a top 5 issue in the US but only a top 20 issue in the Uk.
I think that's why the favourables are not going up.
My impression of the exchange was that Hunt and Boris had probably had a conversation beforehand leading up to that exchange. It seemed coordinated to me.
Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
Lol
The Romans took slaves from all over - and were quite happy to give citizenship to all ethnicities, too.
Sure, racism is often an element of it, but there is something particular about the racism that arose from nineteenth century plantation slavery that is quite distinct.
The coexistence of industrialised brutality perpetrated on a particular set of people, alongside societies that were developing liberal democracy and respect for human rights is an odd thing, and required a peculiar mindset.
Britain squared the circle, up to a point, with its abolition of slavery; the US not so much.
Absolutely. A great move with the cycling from Boris. Park Lane for example is now one big cycle lane with a bit of room for buses and the odd private car.
What happens in mid-winter we shall see.
Assume 67,000 people are wandering around in the general population of the UK who are infected, and that's down from 161,000 last week.
Next week it would be down to 28,000 (as long as we continue doing what is working).
In four weeks, it would be down to 2,100.
In eight weeks, down to 65.
At which point, it's pretty much down to individuals. But the epidemic in the UK could pretty much be over by then. Especially if you can identify and track the majority of them.
But also the failure by some - either deliberately or through lack of cognitive ability - to recognize the problem at all.
Edit: Sorry I see that is the point you are making too.
This ought not to be controversial.
Do you want to sell flavoured water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the
worldlicence fee?Of course in America so many African Americans are poor that it may be slightly moot - but one thing I noticed staying in Washington DC was the number of middle class black families dining and being served by white waitstaff - a surprising and pleasant reversal of the usual situation (the hotel did have some African American staff).
Even in it's history America cannot face the truth. Jamestown - a reconstruction of an early colonial settlement has actors wandering round in period costume. 90% of them are white. Jamestown was over 50% black.
In Britain we beat ourselves up over racism (and we should), but in a global perspective we are one of the least racist countries on the planet - in South East Asia educated upper middle class people regularly express sentiments that would have barely passed muster in 1960s Britain. And then there's Japan....China, Korea...
This is precisely why it's a tricky conversation, because if you're using an absolute scale and I'm talking in relative terms, pretty soon one of us will say something that sounds insane to the other, and we'll end up assuming that the other is incorrigibly racist/woke (delete as applicable).
I'm not saying that either perspective is right or wrong, but the academic sense in which "privilege" is used, for example in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Privilege:_Unpacking_the_Invisible_Knapsack is definitely "relative" and not "absolute". A lot of confusion arises from this not being clear.