This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
Since 'whitesplaining' is clearly being frowned upon, here's some blacksplaining from Dr Martin Luther King: 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' Until we see skin colour as entirely incidental, we won't have learned this lesson. Sadly efforts to do so are hampered by well-meaning attempts like the one above to sympathise and understand, and perhaps somehow mitigate the circumstances, of not being white.
As for the atrocities of the past, which we can do little to change, we might do better to concentrate on the atrocities of now. In Nigeria for example, 600 black Christians have been killed since the beginning of 2020 - victims of persecution by Jihadist groups. I might be missing them, but I don't see the mass protests demanding we do something about this. The African continent is utterly forgotten in all this, and if I were a Nigerian Christian, I would be feeling quite angry about the whole BLM movement, which in Britain at any rate, is seems to be toxically self-indulgent and obsessed with trivialities.
My grandson’s black grandmother gets called a nigger in the street. She has been spat on, solely because of the colour of her skin. These are not trivialities.
Disgusting behaviour like that is not going to be affected one jot by divisive protests during the current lockdown. Indeed I suspect they give succour to racist groups.
The cohesiveness of society is strengthened when we focus on what we have in common, not our differences.
Black people in the UK experience prejudice that only they experience. We could all unite to understand that. This could help strengthen cohesion.
I would prefer to eradicate it, to render it utterly irrelevant, a silly relic of the past. And that is going to happen when we all turn our attention from it, toward other things, and move on from it. It can not be solved not by relentless focus on it, which can do no more than make people feel temporarily appeased.
You think you defeat racism by ignoring it.
That is certainly a take.
What other problems can you defeat by ignoring them? Fascism? Boulders rolling down hills? Gravity?
Sectarianism would be a good example. Daniel Defoe 'There is no Protestant or Catholic in a good bargain' - Sectarianism was all but eradicated in swathes of Britain and lessened where it still exists, because people became more interested in commerce.
Still alive and kicking in west of Scotland unfortunately.
So I understand.
I've obviously not ignored the100+ a year Orange Walks in Glasgow enough. A couple more decades of blind eyes turned and deefies slung should sort it though.
Your solution when Catholics and Protestants had been killing each other in their hundreds within living memory would have been to focus on it more. What actually happened was that people's focus shifted, toward making the most of the new opportunities that the 18th century offered. The vestiges that still exist can be troubling (although uniforms and symbols only have the power that we ascribe to them), but again, even they will pass as focus shifts. And quite frankly, no, you haven't ignored it enough.
I hope that Northern Ireland remains within the UK, and my best hope for it, now that its immediate political future will be as a halfway house between UK and EU, is that it sees a new influx of commerce, and this becomes more important than its sectarian divisions.
Like Scotland it is a certainty that it will go , only a case of when.
So you say Malcolm, but I disagree - and despite the quarrels we're beset with, I see a wonderful future ahead for our country.
One of the things I find revealing about PB discussions on racism is that it seems there aren't any black people posting here
Yes, that is a very valid point, though of course we do not know everyone ethnicity.
Ms @The_Apocalypse is dual heritage I believe, but I havent seen her for a few weeks.
To pick up your point I've just watched a video of protestors shaming Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for not defunding the police and lettng anarchy loose on the streets of his city.
That protest looks pretty white to me (though the masking admittedly makes it more difficult to tell).
Are these protests being hi-jacked by comfortably off middle class white liberals who still can't believe America voted for Trump or Britain voted to leave the EU?
There's plenty of people in the US and the UK who until recently have never had to deal with not getting their way, politically or socially. When it happened, they have not coped well.
Having seen approximately 30 years of non-Conservative governments in the last 75 years your comment is beyond parody.
He is talking more about social liberals than economic liberals
No, he is trolling a wide spectrum of opinion holders, something at which he excels.
You HYUFD on the other hand say it as you see it, which is why, although I mainly disagree with you, I very much respect your opinion.
Excellent article, Alistair. Your gentle suggestion at the end seems to have provoked vehement opposition.
Yes it is a good article. And it can be very hard to understand - if you do not have experience of it - what it must be like for people to make assumptions about you or treat you in a particular way because of some inalterable characteristic like the colour of your skin. So we should certainly try to understand.
The points Alastair makes about what it is like to live in a world made and dominated by others could equally be made with just as much force by women, who have endured all sorts of injustices and violence and harassment and dismissal of their concerns, fears etc - and still do - from men, of all types. This is far wider than the Me Too Movement. Life is certainly better for women now than it was when I was growing up, as it is for ethnic minorities or gay people. But that is no reason to pretend that serious issues still do not exist and need to be addressed.
What worries me about the BLM movement is that I do not hear any practical proposals being put forward. Changing the name of a road or college or removing a statue strikes me as patronising. A gesture which does nothing to aid understanding of history and nothing practical to help those being discriminated against.
Exactly. Just as diversity advisors argue for strawman to be replaced by strawperson in workplaces.
It's entirely cosmetic, pointless and risks undermining the very serious issues it seeks to fix by making it a point of ridicule.
This is one reason the BLM protests are far more likely to bring transformative change themselves in the US than here. There are all sorts of pretty simple concrete actions that can be taken to halt some of the absurd injustices in the states. Stop arming police like they're in a bad action movie. Less impunity when using force. The bail system. Moving towards policing by consent. Not rolling back key bits of voting rights as the GOP seem keen to do. Etc. etc. That we don't have these concrete moves to make doesn't mean the injustice that's protested about doesn't exist, as AM outlines, it's just going to take quieter reforms and changes of culture to achieve. Arguably, some of the more concrete moves relate to treatment of immigrants (Yarl's Wood etc.) which are tied up with race but not identical to it. Our version of racism is often a lot more connected to xenophobia and the idea people don't belong (perhaps tied to empire in that we 'offshored' our worst actions that happened thousands of miles away) than the US, whose large African-American population is as old as the country itself.
That's why I think it can sometimes seems not as good a fit here, and a transposition of an American movement that doesn't quite work. It's not that there's no prejudice that needs addressing in Britain, but it's our own different version of it that isn't quite captured by the language and methods of African-American struggles.
""It seems to be clear now, when you talk to specialists in the field," he continued, "that there seems to be a considerable amount of people who don't develop antibodies, but still seem to be immune."
I wonder if it will now be followed by a bunch of almost exclusively male pale & stale posters seeking in their different ways - some by absurdly reductive simplification, some by convoluted whataboutery, some by outright head-in-sand denial - to downplay or deny the enduring racist legacy of our colonialism?
I'd want 1.01 on Betfair before I lumped on that possibility.
Nice example of the toxic nature of the debate, which makes it hard for lots of people to join in.
I reject (!) the charge. My comment is in the spirit of the Header - that we ought to try listening to black concerns rather than explaining why they have things all confused and out of perspective.
In the days before 16 September 1992, the Tories were about level with Labour (some polls had them ahead, some had them behind). All of the polls that followed had Labour ahead. By November Labour were 20 points clear.
A loose comment.
If you look carefully at the polls in autumn 1992 you will in fact see that the slide in Conservative support happened nowhere near so fast as the Cummings saga.
Black Wednesday was 16th September 1992. Conservative leads in the month leading up to that date were:
-6 -3 -4 2
(A mean Labour lead of +3)
The slide did not happen immediately. The polls in the month after were:
-8 -2 -4 -5 -7 -6 0 -9
(A mean Labour lead of +4)
The first big poll shift occurred exactly a month after Black Wednesday on 19th October 1992 when Gallup had Labour on a lead of +22. Thereafter the polls mostly started to show substantial Labour leads, although not all did.
Since 'whitesplaining' is clearly being frowned upon, here's some blacksplaining from Dr Martin Luther King: 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' Until we see skin colour as entirely incidental, we won't have learned this lesson. Sadly efforts to do so are hampered by well-meaning attempts like the one above to sympathise and understand, and perhaps somehow mitigate the circumstances, of not being white.
As for the atrocities of the past, which we can do little to change, we might do better to concentrate on the atrocities of now. In Nigeria for example, 600 black Christians have been killed since the beginning of 2020 - victims of persecution by Jihadist groups. I might be missing them, but I don't see the mass protests demanding we do something about this. The African continent is utterly forgotten in all this, and if I were a Nigerian Christian, I would be feeling quite angry about the whole BLM movement, which in Britain at any rate, is seems to be toxically self-indulgent and obsessed with trivialities.
My grandson’s black grandmother gets called a nigger in the street. She has been spat on, solely because of the colour of her skin. These are not trivialities.
Disgusting behaviour like that is not going to be affected one jot by divisive protests during the current lockdown. Indeed I suspect they give succour to racist groups.
The cohesiveness of society is strengthened when we focus on what we have in common, not our differences.
Black people in the UK experience prejudice that only they experience. We could all unite to understand that. This could help strengthen cohesion.
I would prefer to eradicate it, to render it utterly irrelevant, a silly relic of the past. And that is going to happen when we all turn our attention from it, toward other things, and move on from it. It can not be solved not by relentless focus on it, which can do no more than make people feel temporarily appeased.
You think you defeat racism by ignoring it.
That is certainly a take.
What other problems can you defeat by ignoring them? Fascism? Boulders rolling down hills? Gravity?
Sectarianism would be a good example. Daniel Defoe 'There is no Protestant or Catholic in a good bargain' - Sectarianism was all but eradicated in swathes of Britain and lessened where it still exists, because people became more interested in commerce.
Still alive and kicking in west of Scotland unfortunately.
So I understand.
I've obviously not ignored the100+ a year Orange Walks in Glasgow enough. A couple more decades of blind eyes turned and deefies slung should sort it though.
Your solution when Catholics and Protestants had been killing each other in their hundreds within living memory would have been to focus on it more. What actually happened was that people's focus shifted, toward making the most of the new opportunities that the 18th century offered. The vestiges that still exist can be troubling (although uniforms and symbols only have the power that we ascribe to them), but again, even they will pass as focus shifts. And quite frankly, no, you haven't ignored it enough.
I hope that Northern Ireland remains within the UK, and my best hope for it, now that its immediate political future will be as a halfway house between UK and EU, is that it sees a new influx of commerce, and this becomes more important than its sectarian divisions.
Like Scotland it is a certainty that it will go , only a case of when.
So you say Malcolm, but I disagree - and despite the quarrels we're beset with, I see a wonderful future ahead for our country.
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
One of the things I find revealing about PB discussions on racism is that it seems there aren't any black people posting here
Yes, that is a very valid point, though of course we do not know everyone ethnicity.
Ms @The_Apocalypse is dual heritage I believe, but I havent seen her for a few weeks.
And Plato pbuh.
I do not know the ethnicity of most of the people posting on here. But the overwhelming majority are male. There are very very few women: me, @Beibheirli_C, @Mysticrose and @The_Apocalypse (though she has not been on for a while).
Curious. Maybe this affects the perspectives and discussions on here?
Gender is bound to affect perspectives, as is race, even when acknowledging that individuals of any specific gender or race may not align to the most commonly held views of others of that race or gender. I'm not sure, however, of the significance of the affect on the perspectives, or how it can be addressed, since one cannot disregard a view on the basis that if more of X or Y were present their might be a different view.
One of the things I find revealing about PB discussions on racism is that it seems there aren't any black people posting here
Yes, that is a very valid point, though of course we do not know everyone ethnicity.
Ms @The_Apocalypse is dual heritage I believe, but I havent seen her for a few weeks.
To pick up your point I've just watched a video of protestors shaming Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for not defunding the police and lettng anarchy loose on the streets of his city.
That protest looks pretty white to me (though the masking admittedly makes it more difficult to tell).
Are these protests being hi-jacked by comfortably off middle class white liberals who still can't believe America voted for Trump or Britain voted to leave the EU?
The one in Leicester was pretty diverse, if young.
Why is it that you want to delegitimise the protests this way? What is it about recognising structural racism that disturbs you?
I suppose because I'm not sure Britain is structurally racist. How can it be when some of the most powerful people in our country are immigrants of colour?
Or are you suggesting Sunak and Patel are the beneficiaries of tokenism?
They are exceptions not the norm, it’s interesting that successful conservative politicians of color are praised whilst their equivalents in the Labour Party are derided and often abused.
Wouldn't that indicate that people regard party allegiance as a dividing line rather than race? So long as someone is of the right political tribe people don't care about race. Reminds me of (most) football fans now.
"I think we should just ignore this and it will all go away"
Martin Luther King and his movement wanted to achieve something positive. They focused on that goal, and did it. What they did was quite different to focusing on a problem.
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
Starmer's Westminster Scottish polling is irrelevant given the SNP are Labour's mini me at Westminster level and will put Starmer in office not Boris.
It is English and Welsh polling Starmer needs to worry about and there the Labour voteshare is up on 2019.
The Holyrood voteshare is far more relevant for all the unionist parties if they are to get a Unionist majority next year to block indyref2
Why is a unionist majority at Holyrood relevant when Boris is just going to crush any dissent with the Army anyway, apparently? What difference does it make?
Interesting thread Mr Meeks - I agree that the Empire’s history is complex and poorly taught - and so too are some of the simplistic explanations of its crimes. Many independence movements created their own “national myths” of virtuous opposition to British venality. And there too, the history is far more complex than “Us good, them bad.” Any study of imperialism should surely take in not our own, but others.
Imperialism is certainly not just a white thing. Many of the powers that Europeans defeated were aggressively imperialistic in their own right.
The Japanese actions in China and South Korea up until the 1940s were definitely racist. And what are the actions of the CCP towards the Uighur Muslims today?
I'd have more time for those who criticise something Britain did or didn't do (far too late, in their eyes) 200 years ago if they would also focus on the injustices and instances of real racism and slavery today.
There's something, ironically, very inward looking and self-obsessive about this movement as if it's what happens and has happened in Britain and the West alone that matters, and incidents everywhere else are excusable for "understandable reasons".
I agree with you strongly about China’s treatment of the Uighur Muslims. You will recall my header about it last December, on the back of a Panorama programme. But Uighurs do not have a voice here or anyone to speak up for them - any more than the poor Yazidis too - so we forget about them, if we ever think about them at all.
I think there are two main reasons, one good, one bad, for why the West beats itself up.
One - it has a culture at some deep level infused with Christian concepts of “guilt”. Couple that with a belief that it is or still should be “top dog” plus an inclination to deny moral agency to others, itself possibly a remnant of a racist belief that others are “lesser people”, and it is easy to see how the West can hold itself responsible for everything.
Added to that is an expectation that we should be better than we are, that we are falling below the high standards we set ourselves. This is particularly true for the US with the Declaration of Independence which sets an admirable standard and a gap between what it says and how the country has treated its black population.
The second is that we don’t protest about Chinese treatment of the Uighurs or other injustices perpetrated by Russians or other dictators because we are afraid, we wan’t to curry favour with them or we know they won’t care. It is a form of actual and moral cowardice. So we turn our ire on democratic leaders who are much more likely to listen or be shamed into changing their behaviour.
Add a third reason - laziness. Why protest about it? Very few of us know Uighurs or Yazidis so there is no personal element for most people and they often have too many problems in their own life to worry about strangers they will never meet on the other side of the planet.
I am not saying that is how it should be, but currently, that is how it is.
It is why we need govts to lead on such issues.
True.
But much as I deplore the killing of George Floyd I do not feel the need to protest about it here. There are plenty of people taking action in the US, the police officers have now been charged etc as a result of those protests in the US and nothing said here will affect this one iota. It feels self-indulgent.
The issue of Covid-19 and its impact on ethnic minorities is a real issue here, which does need to be looked properly and addressed. I can’t help feeling that having a lot of people packed together shouting themselves hoarse has the potential to make that issue a whole lot worse. The stupid comment by Dawn Butler that people who put themselves at risk by behaving in such a silly way should not be held responsible for their actions makes one despair.
Yes, that one struck me as a particularly infantilising comment. I presume her main point was about the general truth that the government, like all government, will seek to avoid blame for anything however it can, but sometimes things really are not the government's fault, and if people take a choice with no excuse for not knowing potential risks, then it robs them of agency to pretend they would not be responsible for their own choices.
One of the things I find revealing about PB discussions on racism is that it seems there aren't any black people posting here
Yes, that is a very valid point, though of course we do not know everyone ethnicity.
Ms @The_Apocalypse is dual heritage I believe, but I havent seen her for a few weeks.
To pick up your point I've just watched a video of protestors shaming Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for not defunding the police and lettng anarchy loose on the streets of his city.
That protest looks pretty white to me (though the masking admittedly makes it more difficult to tell).
Are these protests being hi-jacked by comfortably off middle class white liberals who still can't believe America voted for Trump or Britain voted to leave the EU?
There's plenty of people in the US and the UK who until recently have never had to deal with not getting their way, politically or socially. When it happened, they have not coped well.
Having seen approximately 30 years of non-Conservative governments in the last 75 years your comment is beyond parody.
He is talking more about social liberals than economic liberals
No, he is trolling a wide spectrum of opinion holders, something at which he excels.
You HYUFD on the other hand say it as you see it, which is why, although I mainly disagree with you, I very much respect your opinion.
Thanks, to be fair though I have a friend who lives in New York who liked Cameron and Romney but despises Boris and Trump.
People who hate Boris the most are often wealthy liberals who backed Remain
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
Hmm, I think I look at race issues with rather more scepticism than most having lived through a lot of the issues personally.
I think an unthinking acceptance of BLM and their points isn't the right thing to do. They make a lot of fair and valid points about policing and there's a lot to reform wrt race within the police.
However, outside of that the UK is, IMO, fairly good a providing people with opportunities to succeed, it's up to the individual (or in the case of children, their parents) to grab those opportunities. Usually that means education. We live in a country that has pretty good free education from primary all the way to 18. I think what any study needs to focus on is the outcome differences between different backgrounds at schools and what the main driver behind that is. I'd be fairly happy to bet a large amount of money that parenting (or lack of) will be the primary differentiator between success at school or not. Success at school is the foundation of a successful life and everyone, black, brown, white or otherwise, has their own ability to do well at school.
Is Britain a racist society? On balance no. Is there a vast gap in outcomes between different racial backgrouds? Yes. Both of these statements are true and I say this as someone from a working class immigrant background.
There was a viral video doing the rounds yesterday of gang members in LA protesting together and everyone thought it was a great show of unity. Yet in a couple of weeks these two gangs will be back to killing each other over territory and recruiting young black boys to be hoppers and lookouts depriving them of any chance of getting a decent education. That's the larger issue no one wants to approach, and the same is true here with the county lines/postcode gangs.
So yes, there are huge racial issues in the UK and elsewhere in the western world. However, to pin the blame on slavery or anything else is a simplistic look that really isn't going to help solve the problems, it will just get people more entrenched.
Mr. kinabalu, it's ironic that you complain about the potential of people to downplay racism whilst at the same time mocking them as 'male pale and stale' and mocking their skin colour (and gender).
Oh I do apologize Mr MD. But not to worry, easily corrected.
"Male, white, not in the first flush".
There. That better now? Is it no longer offensive or even worse ironic?
Interesting thread Mr Meeks - I agree that the Empire’s history is complex and poorly taught - and so too are some of the simplistic explanations of its crimes. Many independence movements created their own “national myths” of virtuous opposition to British venality. And there too, the history is far more complex than “Us good, them bad.” Any study of imperialism should surely take in not our own, but others.
Imperialism is certainly not just a white thing. Many of the powers that Europeans defeated were aggressively imperialistic in their own right.
The Japanese actions in China and South Korea up until the 1940s were definitely racist. And what are the actions of the CCP towards the Uighur Muslims today?
I'd have more time for those who criticise something Britain did or didn't do (far too late, in their eyes) 200 years ago if they would also focus on the injustices and instances of real racism and slavery today.
There's something, ironically, very inward looking and self-obsessive about this movement as if it's what happens and has happened in Britain and the West alone that matters, and incidents everywhere else are excusable for "understandable reasons".
I agree with you strongly about China’s treatment of the Uighur Muslims. You will recall my header about it last December, on the back of a Panorama programme. But Uighurs do not have a voice here or anyone to speak up for them - any more than the poor Yazidis too - so we forget about them, if we ever think about them at all.
I think there are two main reasons, one good, one bad, for why the West beats itself up.
One - it has a culture at some deep level infused with Christian concepts of “guilt”. Couple that with a belief that it is or still should be “top dog” plus an inclination to deny moral agency to others, itself possibly a remnant of a racist belief that others are “lesser people”, and it is easy to see how the West can hold itself responsible for everything.
Added to that is an expectation that we should be better than we are, that we are falling below the high standards we set ourselves. This is particularly true for the US with the Declaration of Independence which sets an admirable standard and a gap between what it says and how the country has treated its black population.
The second is that we don’t protest about Chinese treatment of the Uighurs or other injustices perpetrated by Russians or other dictators because we are afraid, we wan’t to curry favour with them or we know they won’t care. It is a form of actual and moral cowardice. So we turn our ire on democratic leaders who are much more likely to listen or be shamed into changing their behaviour.
I'd add a third. Moral relativism. The idea that it's "their culture" and therefore, not our place to criticise it.
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
Starmer's Westminster Scottish polling is irrelevant given the SNP are Labour's mini me at Westminster level and will put Starmer in office not Boris.
It is English and Welsh polling Starmer needs to worry about and there the Labour voteshare is up on 2019.
The Holyrood voteshare is far more relevant for all the unionist parties if they are to get a Unionist majority next year to block indyref2
Why is a unionist majority at Holyrood relevant when Boris is just going to crush any dissent with the Army anyway, apparently? What difference does it make?
As it means even if Starmer became PM in 2024 he also could ignore indyref2 given the SNP are not going to put the Tories in
One of the things I find revealing about PB discussions on racism is that it seems there aren't any black people posting here
Yes, that is a very valid point, though of course we do not know everyone ethnicity.
Ms @The_Apocalypse is dual heritage I believe, but I havent seen her for a few weeks.
To pick up your point I've just watched a video of protestors shaming Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for not defunding the police and lettng anarchy loose on the streets of his city.
That protest looks pretty white to me (though the masking admittedly makes it more difficult to tell).
Are these protests being hi-jacked by comfortably off middle class white liberals who still can't believe America voted for Trump or Britain voted to leave the EU?
The one in Leicester was pretty diverse, if young.
Why is it that you want to delegitimise the protests this way? What is it about recognising structural racism that disturbs you?
I suppose because I'm not sure Britain is structurally racist. How can it be when some of the most powerful people in our country are immigrants of colour?
Or are you suggesting Sunak and Patel are the beneficiaries of tokenism?
They are exceptions not the norm, it’s interesting that successful conservative politicians of color are praised whilst their equivalents in the Labour Party are derided and often abused.
By definition, any cabinet minister is exceptional. It's no surprise that rightward-leaning posters would praise Conservatives and criticise left wingers.
Black and Asian Conservative politicians have a very different, and no less valid, outlook to the campaigners of BLM, on matters of racial injustice.
If the UK were dissolved, it would help us to see the British Empire objectively as a historical phenomenon rather than something we have a knee-jerk tendency to defend.
The British Empire is the biggest straw man out there. Nobody venerates it uncritically or wants it back. Our conduct in places like India is indefensible and shameful. Africa too.
Actually over 25% of British voters would still like an Empire, including 40% of Leave voters.
60% of Jamaicans think they'd be better off in the Empire, apparently.
I've heard Irishmen, Indians, Hong Kongers and even Americans say similar things, usually out of frustration at their current government. And I've talked to South Americans and Filipinos who wished they had been colonised by the British rather than the Spanish.
Jamaica of course is one of the few former British colonies where the Queen is still Head of State
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
Starmer's Westminster Scottish polling is irrelevant given the SNP are Labour's mini me at Westminster level and will put Starmer in office not Boris.
It is English and Welsh polling Starmer needs to worry about and there the Labour voteshare is up on 2019.
The Holyrood voteshare is far more relevant for all the unionist parties if they are to get a Unionist majority next year to block indyref2
Why is a unionist majority at Holyrood relevant when Boris is just going to crush any dissent with the Army anyway, apparently? What difference does it make?
As it means even if Starmer became PM in 2024 he also could ignore indyref2 given the SNP are not going to put the Tories in
Labour are unlikely to ignore indyref2 if there’s a nationalist majority with a clear mandate. Labour are not hypocrites unlike the Tories.
V pleased to hear Bercow not happy about . his non peerage. Apparently he is a county standard tennis player and i read somewhere he duffed up Boris 6-0 6-0 6-0. ..not very charitable if true... how to win friends and influence people eh...
If the report that Framk Field is being ennobled is correct, I don't understand why Bercow was blocked, not because of any real or imagined faults of behaviour, but on the grounds that Corbyn had nominated a non-Labour candidate. Why is it then OK for the Government to nominate an ex-Labour independent, apart from mischief?
I say that as someone who quite likes Frank and I don't oppose his nomination. But either all party leaders should be able to nominate people outside their parties or none should.
Not wanting to have a sharp disagreement at this time on a Sunday, I am not aware that Field has an unresolved / incomplete investigation into his credibly alleged bullying of his own staff that he has suppressed by exploiting his own position.
Though I'll give you that Field has become quite bullying in his handling of witnesses, and more kneejerk in how he deals with evidence against his own view, in his Chairmanship of Select Committees in recent years.
When some years ago I moved to Acton, west London one of things I had to do was find a barber’s. As it happened there was one very near where I lived on the high street: walk in, extremely popular. The barbers and the clientele were exclusively black - mainly young men; indeed, so popular was it that it appeared also to function as an informal community centre. As a middle-aged white man, I thought this place is not for me. I just wouldn’t feel comfortable going there - and though, if I had, I would have hoped to have had a friendly welcome, I felt too nervous to put it to the test. Fortunately, for me there were plenty of other options nearby.
But this was for me a moment of revelation. The feeling I had experienced for the first time in my life, is almost certainly experienced by black people pretty much every day of their lives.
Fantastic article, btw. One of the very best that’s ever appeared on PB.
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
Starmer's Westminster Scottish polling is irrelevant given the SNP are Labour's mini me at Westminster level and will put Starmer in office not Boris.
It is English and Welsh polling Starmer needs to worry about and there the Labour voteshare is up on 2019.
The Holyrood voteshare is far more relevant for all the unionist parties if they are to get a Unionist majority next year to block indyref2
Why is a unionist majority at Holyrood relevant when Boris is just going to crush any dissent with the Army anyway, apparently? What difference does it make?
As it means even if Starmer became PM in 2024 he also could ignore indyref2 given the SNP are not going to put the Tories in
Labour are unlikely to ignore indyref2 if there’s a nationalist majority with a clear mandate. Labour are not hypocrites unlike the Tories.
Yes but if there is a Unionist majority at Holyrood next year there would be no nationalist majority with a mandate.
Excellent piece, Alastair, and a super YouTube clip. It doesn't say anything new of course but it does illustrate the problem graphically. I particularly liked the way it didn't define privilege in terms of race, but class and status too. Any serious attempt to grapple with these problems has to understand how they are intertwined.
We could throw religion into the mix too, I suppose, but it's complex enough already.
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
Starmer's Westminster Scottish polling is irrelevant given the SNP are Labour's mini me at Westminster level and will put Starmer in office not Boris.
It is English and Welsh polling Starmer needs to worry about and there the Labour voteshare is up on 2019.
The Holyrood voteshare is far more relevant for all the unionist parties if they are to get a Unionist majority next year to block indyref2
Why is a unionist majority at Holyrood relevant when Boris is just going to crush any dissent with the Army anyway, apparently? What difference does it make?
As it means even if Starmer became PM in 2024 he also could ignore indyref2 given the SNP are not going to put the Tories in
Labour are unlikely to ignore indyref2 if there’s a nationalist majority with a clear mandate. Labour are not hypocrites unlike the Tories.
Yes but if there is a Unionist majority at Holyrood next year there would be no nationalist majority with a mandate.
That is the whole point
Are you saying that a nationalist majority in Holyrood next year would provide a mandate for a referendum?
I wonder if it will now be followed by a bunch of almost exclusively male pale & stale posters seeking in their different ways - some by absurdly reductive simplification, some by convoluted whataboutery, some by outright head-in-sand denial - to downplay or deny the enduring racist legacy of our colonialism?
I'd want 1.01 on Betfair before I lumped on that possibility.
Well the best thing we stale and pale people can do is listen to their concerns without thinking they've just got a chip on their shoulder.
But these BLM protests haven't helped the cause at all, at risk of sounding like a 60s American talking about MLK. All I've seen on my Facebook is the small number of left wing friends I have uncritically singing its praise and the vast majority seemingly being pushed further to the right.
I wonder if it will now be followed by a bunch of almost exclusively male pale & stale posters seeking in their different ways - some by absurdly reductive simplification, some by convoluted whataboutery, some by outright head-in-sand denial - to downplay or deny the enduring racist legacy of our colonialism?
I'd want 1.01 on Betfair before I lumped on that possibility.
Nice example of the toxic nature of the debate, which makes it hard for lots of people to join in.
I reject (!) the charge. My comment is in the spirit of the Header - that we ought to try listening to black concerns rather than explaining why they have things all confused and out of perspective.
In the days before 16 September 1992, the Tories were about level with Labour (some polls had them ahead, some had them behind). All of the polls that followed had Labour ahead. By November Labour were 20 points clear.
A loose comment.
If you look carefully at the polls in autumn 1992 you will in fact see that the slide in Conservative support happened nowhere near so fast as the Cummings saga.
Black Wednesday was 16th September 1992. Conservative leads in the month leading up to that date were:
-6 -3 -4 2
(A mean Labour lead of +3)
The slide did not happen immediately. The polls in the month after were:
-8 -2 -4 -5 -7 -6 0 -9
(A mean Labour lead of +4)
The first big poll shift occurred exactly a month after Black Wednesday on 19th October 1992 when Gallup had Labour on a lead of +22. Thereafter the polls mostly started to show substantial Labour leads, although not all did.
Scottish independence rising as a political force rather than being destroyed by devolution is a matter of public record, and as is the increase in migration (notably by no transitional limits on new EU member states), with the desire to rub the right's face in diversity thereby revealed through leaks.
If you meant I was either too ambiguous or broad brush over the culture war comment then fair enough, that could've been more precise.
Your comment, "Labour's hiking of migration to rub the right's face in" is arrant nonsense.
It's softhead conspiracy theory nonsense to believe this was the driver of New Labour's immigration policy. It was merely a potential side benefit. The driver was the economy.
I'll give you a similar example from the other side to prove my objectivity (although this ought to be beyond doubt by now).
Thatcher selling off council houses. The reason for it was exactly as she said - because she believed owning your own home met a fundamental human aspiration. You get some of the more foamy people on the left saying she did it for cynical partisan benefit - to "rub the left's nose" in a bunch of new Tory voters (the nostrum being home owners vote Tory and council tenants vote Labour). Again, conspiracy theory tosh. That was just a side benefit.
Thatcher's housing policy was driven by a perceived need for more home ownership. Labour's immigration policy was driven by a perceived need for more workers.
Cheaper workers.
OK. Some of that, yes. But they introduced the minimum wage too, remember.
One of the things I find revealing about PB discussions on racism is that it seems there aren't any black people posting here
Yes, that is a very valid point, though of course we do not know everyone ethnicity.
Ms @The_Apocalypse is dual heritage I believe, but I havent seen her for a few weeks.
And Plato pbuh.
I do not know the ethnicity of most of the people posting on here. But the overwhelming majority are male. There are very very few women: me, @Beibheirli_C, @Mysticrose and @The_Apocalypse (though she has not been on for a while).
Curious. Maybe this affects the perspectives and discussions on here?
Of course it massively impacts the discussions, I sometimes read mumsnet for a different perspective, and it is completely different.
I admire you. I tried it a few times and found it unbearable, like being trapped outside the school gates by a certain type of “Mummy”.
Mumsnet is a terrible place. My version of Hell would be an eternity of Mumsnet.
Since 'whitesplaining' is clearly being frowned upon, here's some blacksplaining from Dr Martin Luther King: 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' Until we see skin colour as entirely incidental, we won't have learned this lesson. Sadly efforts to do so are hampered by well-meaning attempts like the one above to sympathise and understand, and perhaps somehow mitigate the circumstances, of not being white.
As for the atrocities of the past, which we can do little to change, we might do better to concentrate on the atrocities of now. In Nigeria for example, 600 black Christians have been killed since the beginning of 2020 - victims of persecution by Jihadist groups. I might be missing them, but I don't see the mass protests demanding we do something about this. The African continent is utterly forgotten in all this, and if I were a Nigerian Christian, I would be feeling quite angry about the whole BLM movement, which in Britain at any rate, is seems to be toxically self-indulgent and obsessed with trivialities.
My grandson’s black grandmother gets called a nigger in the street. She has been spat on, solely because of the colour of her skin. These are not trivialities.
Disgusting behaviour like that is not going to be affected one jot by divisive protests during the current lockdown. Indeed I suspect they give succour to racist groups.
The cohesiveness of society is strengthened when we focus on what we have in common, not our differences.
Black people in the UK experience prejudice that only they experience. We could all unite to understand that. This could help strengthen cohesion.
I would prefer to eradicate it, to render it utterly irrelevant, a silly relic of the past. And that is going to happen when we all turn our attention from it, toward other things, and move on from it. It can not be solved not by relentless focus on it, which can do no more than make people feel temporarily appeased.
You think you defeat racism by ignoring it.
That is certainly a take.
What other problems can you defeat by ignoring them? Fascism? Boulders rolling down hills? Gravity?
Sectarianism would be a good example. Daniel Defoe 'There is no Protestant or Catholic in a good bargain' - Sectarianism was all but eradicated in swathes of Britain and lessened where it still exists, because people became more interested in commerce.
Still alive and kicking in west of Scotland unfortunately.
So I understand.
I've obviously not ignored the100+ a year Orange Walks in Glasgow enough. A couple more decades of blind eyes turned and deefies slung should sort it though.
Your solution when Catholics and Protestants had been killing each other in their hundreds within living memory would have been to focus on it more. What actually happened was that people's focus shifted, toward making the most of the new opportunities that the 18th century offered. The vestiges that still exist can be troubling (although uniforms and symbols only have the power that we ascribe to them), but again, even they will pass as focus shifts. And quite frankly, no, you haven't ignored it enough.
I hope that Northern Ireland remains within the UK, and my best hope for it, now that its immediate political future will be as a halfway house between UK and EU, is that it sees a new influx of commerce, and this becomes more important than its sectarian divisions.
You're a great one for constructing a tottering pile of what you think my 'solution' is based on an (admittedly flippant) comment.
My utilitarian solution to that particular problem is for Police Scotland to offer subsidised policing for say five Orange Marches a year and require the LOL to pay for the entirety of the policing for the rest, cash up front.
Of course there's no marching going on at all atm aside from restless pacing up and down the Axminster. I wonder if that will produce more withering on the vine or if it'll be Marching Season II: Back With a Vengeance? The latter I suspect.
I wonder if it will now be followed by a bunch of almost exclusively male pale & stale posters seeking in their different ways - some by absurdly reductive simplification, some by convoluted whataboutery, some by outright head-in-sand denial - to downplay or deny the enduring racist legacy of our colonialism?
I'd want 1.01 on Betfair before I lumped on that possibility.
Well the best thing we stale and pale people can do is listen to their concerns without thinking they've just got a chip on their shoulder.
But these BLM protests haven't helped the cause at all, at risk of sounding like a 60s American talking about MLK. All I've seen on my Facebook is the small number of left wing friends I have uncritically singing its praise and the vast majority seemingly being pushed further to the right.
Yes sadly whatever the rights and wrongs of the protests, the ones in the UK are unlikely to have helped anyone. There are clearly better protest options available to the protesters here than the ones chosen this weekend during a pandemic.
The US situation is very different and I dont know enough about it to criticise the protesters there for their methods.
I think the earliest lesson in race I got was from my dad, "don't blame white people for your problems, it might be easy or even true, but it isn't going to change anything". Basically I've lived my whole life in that manner and instead of wasting energy on bitching about how difficult white people make it to be not white I got on with my own life. It's worked very well. My sister would also agree.
I think it's a lesson all non-whites need to learn.
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
Starmer's Westminster Scottish polling is irrelevant given the SNP are Labour's mini me at Westminster level and will put Starmer in office not Boris.
It is English and Welsh polling Starmer needs to worry about and there the Labour voteshare is up on 2019.
The Holyrood voteshare is far more relevant for all the unionist parties if they are to get a Unionist majority next year to block indyref2
Why is a unionist majority at Holyrood relevant when Boris is just going to crush any dissent with the Army anyway, apparently? What difference does it make?
As it means even if Starmer became PM in 2024 he also could ignore indyref2 given the SNP are not going to put the Tories in
Labour are unlikely to ignore indyref2 if there’s a nationalist majority with a clear mandate. Labour are not hypocrites unlike the Tories.
Gallowgate, I hate to contradict you, and I have great respect for you, but a party that:
1) poses as anti-racist while being led by Jeremy Corbyn; 2) Fumes about tax and tax avoidance while having Ian Lavery in a senior position; 3) Criticises the Liberal Democrats for not respecting the result of a referendum while saying they would try and reverse it;
is not really demonstrating that they 'are not hypocrites.'
All political parties are of course hypocritical to some degree. This is because in a serious party when reality collides with ideology, reality wins. (This doesn't apply to the Republicans, but they forfeited the right to be considered a serious political party some time ago.)
But one of the key problems Starmer has to sort out if Labour is to stand any chance of returning to power in the medium term is that they appear to be one of the worst sets of hypocrites and chancers around.
I think the earliest lesson in race I got was from my dad, "don't blame white people for your problems, it might be easy or even true, but it isn't going to change anything". Basically I've lived my whole life in that manner and instead of wasting energy on bitching about how difficult white people make it to be not white I got on with my own life. It's worked very well. My sister would also agree.
I think it's a lesson all non-whites need to learn.
As practical advice its very sound. But it does rely on access to good parenting and good education. So probably doesnt work for most non white Americans, even if it does for most non white Brits.
When some years ago I moved to Acton, west London one of things I had to do was find a barber’s. As it happened there was one very near where I lived on the high street: walk in, extremely popular. The barbers and the clientele were exclusively black - mainly young men; indeed, so popular was it that it appeared also to function as an informal community centre. As a middle-aged white man, I thought this place is not for me. I just wouldn’t feel comfortable going there - and though, if I had, I would have hoped to have had a friendly welcome, I felt too nervous to put it to the test. Fortunately, for me there were plenty of other options nearby.
But this was for me a moment of revelation. The feeling I had experienced for the first time in my life, is almost certainly experienced by black people pretty much every day of their lives.
Fantastic article, btw. One of the very best that’s ever appeared on PB.
There was an interesting profile on R4 yesterday of the rapper Killer Mike who gave that impromptu but powerful speech last weekend. One of his social investment initiatives is to opening barbershops, so important does he think they are to the social fabric of black communities, particularly for young black men. The whole thing is worth a listen.
One of the things I find revealing about PB discussions on racism is that it seems there aren't any black people posting here
Yes, that is a very valid point, though of course we do not know everyone ethnicity.
Ms @The_Apocalypse is dual heritage I believe, but I havent seen her for a few weeks.
And Plato pbuh.
I do not know the ethnicity of most of the people posting on here. But the overwhelming majority are male. There are very very few women: me, @Beibheirli_C, @Mysticrose and @The_Apocalypse (though she has not been on for a while).
Curious. Maybe this affects the perspectives and discussions on here?
Of course it massively impacts the discussions, I sometimes read mumsnet for a different perspective, and it is completely different.
I admire you. I tried it a few times and found it unbearable, like being trapped outside the school gates by a certain type of “Mummy”.
Mumsnet is a terrible place. My version of Hell would be an eternity of Mumsnet.
We can't have that at all....you can spent eternity on ConservativeHome.
In the days before 16 September 1992, the Tories were about level with Labour (some polls had them ahead, some had them behind). All of the polls that followed had Labour ahead. By November Labour were 20 points clear.
A loose comment.
If you look carefully at the polls in autumn 1992 you will in fact see that the slide in Conservative support happened nowhere near so fast as the Cummings saga.
Black Wednesday was 16th September 1992. Conservative leads in the month leading up to that date were:
-6 -3 -4 2
(A mean Labour lead of +3)
The slide did not happen immediately. The polls in the month after were:
-8 -2 -4 -5 -7 -6 0 -9
(A mean Labour lead of +4)
The first big poll shift occurred exactly a month after Black Wednesday on 19th October 1992 when Gallup had Labour on a lead of +22. Thereafter the polls mostly started to show substantial Labour leads, although not all did.
The issue across the US with police funding is that it has continued to rise above inflation at the same time as other social spending in cities has fallen. In large parts of the US police forces tend to be seen, and tend to behave as an occupying force rather than policing with consent. Changing the attitudes of police forces is going to be a hard task; the power of the purse is one of the stronger levers available to local governments.
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
Starmer's Westminster Scottish polling is irrelevant given the SNP are Labour's mini me at Westminster level and will put Starmer in office not Boris.
It is English and Welsh polling Starmer needs to worry about and there the Labour voteshare is up on 2019.
The Holyrood voteshare is far more relevant for all the unionist parties if they are to get a Unionist majority next year to block indyref2
Why is a unionist majority at Holyrood relevant when Boris is just going to crush any dissent with the Army anyway, apparently? What difference does it make?
As it means even if Starmer became PM in 2024 he also could ignore indyref2 given the SNP are not going to put the Tories in
Labour are unlikely to ignore indyref2 if there’s a nationalist majority with a clear mandate. Labour are not hypocrites unlike the Tories.
Yes but if there is a Unionist majority at Holyrood next year there would be no nationalist majority with a mandate.
That is the whole point
Are you saying that a nationalist majority in Holyrood next year would provide a mandate for a referendum?
For a Labour government after 2024 yes, not for the current Tory government elected on a manifesto commitment to no indyref2 for a generation
I think part of the British interest in Hong Kong was as a trading port for selling opium in return for Chinese tea. In South Africa of course most of the leaders pursuing Apartheid were Afrikaans of Dutch origin rather than British origin.
None of that excuses the crimes of the Empire but Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1999. Nobody is suggesting Hong Kong should return to British control, they just want China to respect the liberties and freedoms and democracy given to Hong Kongers under the 'one country, two systems' set out in the handover
Rhodesia was essentially an apartheid state and was run almost exclusively by people of white British origin.
I wonder if it will now be followed by a bunch of almost exclusively male pale & stale posters seeking in their different ways - some by absurdly reductive simplification, some by convoluted whataboutery, some by outright head-in-sand denial - to downplay or deny the enduring racist legacy of our colonialism?
I'd want 1.01 on Betfair before I lumped on that possibility.
Well the best thing we stale and pale people can do is listen to their concerns without thinking they've just got a chip on their shoulder.
But these BLM protests haven't helped the cause at all, at risk of sounding like a 60s American talking about MLK. All I've seen on my Facebook is the small number of left wing friends I have uncritically singing its praise and the vast majority seemingly being pushed further to the right.
Yes sadly whatever the rights and wrongs of the protests, the ones in the UK are unlikely to have helped anyone. There are clearly better protest options available to the protesters here than the ones chosen this weekend during a pandemic.
The US situation is very different and I dont know enough about it to criticise the protesters there for their methods.
I haven't commented on these protests up to now but I feel that some sort of riposte is needed to this article.
What really irritates me about this notion of "white privilege" is that it implies that the ancestors of black people suffered horribly while the ancestors of white people all sat around drinking cups of tea like the cast of a Jane Austen novel,
The reality is that that the profits of Empire accrued to a very small group of people, while the ancestors of most white people had hard and difficult lives as well.
I have done a lot of genealogy of my own family that backs this up. One ancestor died in the workhouse while another was blinded in a mining accident. Another was transported to Australia for stealing a sheep. One ancestral couple had 9 of their 11 children die before adulthood. Diseases like typhus and cholera were rampant, while many women died in childbirth.
If you go to a poor white city like Stoke you won't find much white privilege there and I doubt they even had any to start with.
The reality is that slavery ended nearly 200 years ago in the British Empire and 150 years ago in the US. There is nobody alive today who can remember slavery. The Empire ended for the most part over 50 years ago. How long can you go on blaming the wrongs of the past for today's problems?
You mention the Chinese and the opium wars. It is interesting that despite this Chinese Britons have the highest rates of educational success of all ethnic groups? Why do you think this is?
It is also worth pointing out that many immigrants came from the subcontinent in the 60s and 70s and also suffered racism and colonialism and yet many of them have gone on to do very well for themselves financially. Again why do you think this is?
I would argue that wallowing in the past may nurture a sense of grievance but is unlikely to allow anyone to move forward.
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
Starmer's Westminster Scottish polling is irrelevant given the SNP are Labour's mini me at Westminster level and will put Starmer in office not Boris.
It is English and Welsh polling Starmer needs to worry about and there the Labour voteshare is up on 2019.
The Holyrood voteshare is far more relevant for all the unionist parties if they are to get a Unionist majority next year to block indyref2
Why is a unionist majority at Holyrood relevant when Boris is just going to crush any dissent with the Army anyway, apparently? What difference does it make?
As it means even if Starmer became PM in 2024 he also could ignore indyref2 given the SNP are not going to put the Tories in
Labour are unlikely to ignore indyref2 if there’s a nationalist majority with a clear mandate. Labour are not hypocrites unlike the Tories.
Yes but if there is a Unionist majority at Holyrood next year there would be no nationalist majority with a mandate.
That is the whole point
Are you saying that a nationalist majority in Holyrood next year would provide a mandate for a referendum?
For a Labour government after 2024 yes, not for the current Tory government elected on a manifesto commitment to no indyref2 for a generation
On come off it - you remind me of someone I knew whose atttitude to me was that either she was right or I was wrong.
In the days before 16 September 1992, the Tories were about level with Labour (some polls had them ahead, some had them behind). All of the polls that followed had Labour ahead. By November Labour were 20 points clear.
A loose comment.
If you look carefully at the polls in autumn 1992 you will in fact see that the slide in Conservative support happened nowhere near so fast as the Cummings saga.
Black Wednesday was 16th September 1992. Conservative leads in the month leading up to that date were:
-6 -3 -4 2
(A mean Labour lead of +3)
The slide did not happen immediately. The polls in the month after were:
-8 -2 -4 -5 -7 -6 0 -9
(A mean Labour lead of +4)
The first big poll shift occurred exactly a month after Black Wednesday on 19th October 1992 when Gallup had Labour on a lead of +22. Thereafter the polls mostly started to show substantial Labour leads, although not all did.
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
Starmer's Westminster Scottish polling is irrelevant given the SNP are Labour's mini me at Westminster level and will put Starmer in office not Boris.
It is English and Welsh polling Starmer needs to worry about and there the Labour voteshare is up on 2019.
The Holyrood voteshare is far more relevant for all the unionist parties if they are to get a Unionist majority next year to block indyref2
Why is a unionist majority at Holyrood relevant when Boris is just going to crush any dissent with the Army anyway, apparently? What difference does it make?
As it means even if Starmer became PM in 2024 he also could ignore indyref2 given the SNP are not going to put the Tories in
Labour are unlikely to ignore indyref2 if there’s a nationalist majority with a clear mandate. Labour are not hypocrites unlike the Tories.
Yes but if there is a Unionist majority at Holyrood next year there would be no nationalist majority with a mandate.
That is the whole point
You are, yet again, confusing the SNP with the pro-independence parties. You are forgetting that there is already a pro-independence majority at Holyrood, which was there before and after your precious party manife3sto - which was rejected by the Scots massively.
And picking the fiddled voting system which favours your party in Scotland while ignoring the one in Westminster.
What are you arguing? That English voters should always, always, override Scots voters?
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
Since 'whitesplaining' is clearly being frowned upon, here's some blacksplaining from Dr Martin Luther King: 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' Until we see skin colour as entirely incidental, we won't have learned this lesson. Sadly efforts to do so are hampered by well-meaning attempts like the one above to sympathise and understand, and perhaps somehow mitigate the circumstances, of not being white.
As for the atrocities of the past, which we can do little to change, we might do better to concentrate on the atrocities of now. In Nigeria for example, 600 black Christians have been killed since the beginning of 2020 - victims of persecution by Jihadist groups. I might be missing them, but I don't see the mass protests demanding we do something about this. The African continent is utterly forgotten in all this, and if I were a Nigerian Christian, I would be feeling quite angry about the whole BLM movement, which in Britain at any rate, is seems to be toxically self-indulgent and obsessed with trivialities.
My grandson’s black grandmother gets called a nigger in the street. She has been spat on, solely because of the colour of her skin. These are not trivialities.
Disgusting behaviour like that is not going to be affected one jot by divisive protests during the current lockdown. Indeed I suspect they give succour to racist groups.
The cohesiveness of society is strengthened when we focus on what we have in common, not our differences.
Black people in the UK experience prejudice that only they experience. We could all unite to understand that. This could help strengthen cohesion.
I would prefer to eradicate it, to render it utterly irrelevant, a silly relic of the past. And that is going to happen when we all turn our attention from it, toward other things, and move on from it. It can not be solved not by relentless focus on it, which can do no more than make people feel temporarily appeased.
You think you defeat racism by ignoring it.
That is certainly a take.
What other problems can you defeat by ignoring them? Fascism? Boulders rolling down hills? Gravity?
Sectarianism would be a good example. Daniel Defoe 'There is no Protestant or Catholic in a good bargain' - Sectarianism was all but eradicated in swathes of Britain and lessened where it still exists, because people became more interested in commerce.
Still alive and kicking in west of Scotland unfortunately.
So I understand.
I've obviously not ignored the100+ a year Orange Walks in Glasgow enough. A couple more decades of blind eyes turned and deefies slung should sort it though.
Your solution when Catholics and Protestants had been killing each other in their hundreds within living memory would have been to focus on it more. What actually happened was that people's focus shifted, toward making the most of the new opportunities that the 18th century offered. The vestiges that still exist can be troubling (although uniforms and symbols only have the power that we ascribe to them), but again, even they will pass as focus shifts. And quite frankly, no, you haven't ignored it enough.
I hope that Northern Ireland remains within the UK, and my best hope for it, now that its immediate political future will be as a halfway house between UK and EU, is that it sees a new influx of commerce, and this becomes more important than its sectarian divisions.
You're a great one for constructing a tottering pile of what you think my 'solution' is based on an (admittedly flippant) comment.
My utilitarian solution to that particular problem is for Police Scotland to offer subsidised policing for say five Orange Marches a year and require the LOL to pay for the entirety of the policing for the rest, cash up front.
Of course there's no marching going on at all atm aside from restless pacing up and down the Axminster. I wonder if that will produce more withering on the vine or if it'll be Marching Season II: Back With a Vengeance? The latter I suspect.
To add to the tottering pile a bit more...
1. We're discussing two different things. I am discussing moving from a situation of very real sectarian violence affecting everyone at all levels of society from King/s down, throughout Britain, and how we moved past it. You're discussing its leftovers.
2. The principle remains the same. To whatever extent you find Orange marches and the like frustrating, distasteful, and even distressing, I would definitely recommend removing your attention from them and focusing on something that you do like. It feels to me like you don't really want sectarianism to end because you seem to quite enjoy raging against the 'orrible specimens of Glasgow Protestants waving Union flags that you show us here on a fairly frequent basis.
3. The opposition to the marches is probably half the motivation for even going on them. So literally, by ignoring them, they would stop - or certainly stop being anything more than a quaint sideshow.
I haven't commented on these protests up to now but I feel that some sort of riposte is needed to this article.
What really irritates me about this notion of "white privilege" is that it implies that the ancestors of black people suffered horribly while the ancestors of white people all sat around drinking cups of tea like the cast of a Jane Austen novel,
The reality is that that the profits of Empire accrued to a very small group of people, while the ancestors of most white people had hard and difficult lives as well.
I have done a lot of genealogy of my own family that backs this up. One ancestor died in the workhouse while another was blinded in a mining accident. Another was transported to Australia for stealing a sheep. One ancestral couple had 9 of their 11 children die before adulthood. Diseases like typhus and cholera were rampant, while many women died in childbirth.
If you go to a poor white city like Stoke you won't find much white privilege there and I doubt they even had any to start with.
The reality is that slavery ended nearly 200 years ago in the British Empire and 150 years ago in the US. There is nobody alive today who can remember slavery. The Empire ended for the most part over 50 years ago. How long can you go on blaming the wrongs of the past for today's problems?
You mention the Chinese and the opium wars. It is interesting that despite this Chinese Britons have the highest rates of educational success of all ethnic groups? Why do you think this is?
It is also worth pointing out that many immigrants came from the subcontinent in the 60s and 70s and also suffered racism and colonialism and yet many of them have gone on to do very well for themselves financially. Again why do you think this is?
I would argue that wallowing in the past may nurture a sense of grievance but is unlikely to allow anyone to move forward.
White people in the UK will almost never experience discrimination or abuse based on the colour of their skin. That should not be a privilege, but until you can say the same for black people it is.
That does not mean all white people are racist. Neither does it mean that large numbers of white people do not experience significant hardships or institutional harms. However, like for like, at every level, a black skin subjects you to higher levels of prejudice than your white-skinned contemporaries.
There is a comment in the header about walking down streets named after slave owners and indeed many prominent buildings are also named after slave owners. However as Historic England points out "Contrary to what many people now believe, streets were not named after people because they were slavers. They were honoured in this way because they were landowners, decision makers, politicians, patrons of the arts and powerful business people". In Liverpool for example the Liverpool Dispensary for the Sick, providing medicine for the poor, was founded by slave traders.
We should not conceal our historical record and seek to hide away the awkward bits by changing names to suit agendas.
Since 'whitesplaining' is clearly being frowned upon, here's some blacksplaining from Dr Martin Luther King: 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' Until we see skin colour as entirely incidental, we won't have learned this lesson. Sadly efforts to do so are hampered by well-meaning attempts like the one above to sympathise and understand, and perhaps somehow mitigate the circumstances, of not being white.
As for the atrocities of the past, which we can do little to change, we might do better to concentrate on the atrocities of now. In Nigeria for example, 600 black Christians have been killed since the beginning of 2020 - victims of persecution by Jihadist groups. I might be missing them, but I don't see the mass protests demanding we do something about this. The African continent is utterly forgotten in all this, and if I were a Nigerian Christian, I would be feeling quite angry about the whole BLM movement, which in Britain at any rate, is seems to be toxically self-indulgent and obsessed with trivialities.
My grandson’s black grandmother gets called a nigger in the street. She has been spat on, solely because of the colour of her skin. These are not trivialities.
Disgusting behaviour like that is not going to be affected one jot by divisive protests during the current lockdown. Indeed I suspect they give succour to racist groups.
The cohesiveness of society is strengthened when we focus on what we have in common, not our differences.
Black people in the UK experience prejudice that only they experience. We could all unite to understand that. This could help strengthen cohesion.
I would prefer to eradicate it, to render it utterly irrelevant, a silly relic of the past. And that is going to happen when we all turn our attention from it, toward other things, and move on from it. It can not be solved not by relentless focus on it, which can do no more than make people feel temporarily appeased.
You think you defeat racism by ignoring it.
That is certainly a take.
What other problems can you defeat by ignoring them? Fascism? Boulders rolling down hills? Gravity?
Sectarianism would be a good example. Daniel Defoe 'There is no Protestant or Catholic in a good bargain' - Sectarianism was all but eradicated in swathes of Britain and lessened where it still exists, because people became more interested in commerce.
Still alive and kicking in west of Scotland unfortunately.
So I understand.
I've obviously not ignored the100+ a year Orange Walks in Glasgow enough. A couple more decades of blind eyes turned and deefies slung should sort it though.
Your solution when Catholics and Protestants had been killing each other in their hundreds within living memory would have been to focus on it more. What actually happened was that people's focus shifted, toward making the most of the new opportunities that the 18th century offered. The vestiges that still exist can be troubling (although uniforms and symbols only have the power that we ascribe to them), but again, even they will pass as focus shifts. And quite frankly, no, you haven't ignored it enough.
I hope that Northern Ireland remains within the UK, and my best hope for it, now that its immediate political future will be as a halfway house between UK and EU, is that it sees a new influx of commerce, and this becomes more important than its sectarian divisions.
You're a great one for constructing a tottering pile of what you think my 'solution' is based on an (admittedly flippant) comment.
My utilitarian solution to that particular problem is for Police Scotland to offer subsidised policing for say five Orange Marches a year and require the LOL to pay for the entirety of the policing for the rest, cash up front.
Of course there's no marching going on at all atm aside from restless pacing up and down the Axminster. I wonder if that will produce more withering on the vine or if it'll be Marching Season II: Back With a Vengeance? The latter I suspect.
To add to the tottering pile a bit more...
1. We're discussing two different things. I am discussing moving from a situation of very real sectarian violence affecting everyone at all levels of society from King/s down, throughout Britain, and how we moved past it. You're discussing its leftovers.
2. The principle remains the same. To whatever extent you find Orange marches and the like frustrating, distasteful, and even distressing, I would definitely recommend removing your attention from them and focusing on something that you do like. It feels to me like you don't really want sectarianism to end because you seem to quite enjoy raging against the 'orrible specimens of Glasgow Protestants waving Union flags that you show us here on a fairly frequent basis.
3. The opposition to the marches is probably half the motivation for even going on them. So literally, by ignoring them, they would stop - or certainly stop being anything more than a quaint sideshow.
Incidentally, Hong Kong is a city I happen to know fairly well. I haven't lived there, but I have visited a dozen times and have friends there. If anyone is there and wants to find out more about its history, I recommend the absolutely excellent Hong Kong Museum of History in Kowloon. It doesn't whitewash the Empire, but it certainly shows why and how it turned a pirate-infested island into one of the world's great metropolises. It deals with, but doesn't dwell unduly upon, the Opium Wars, then it focuses on Hong Kong's role as a beacon of freedom to Chinese fleeing the madness of China's civil wars and then Maoist dictatorships, and how the Chinese government tried to destabilise it with riots in the 1960s. It is also good on how much of China's current success is due to Hong Kong: Shenzhen, where China's current boom started, exists because of Hong Kong.
Also worth visiting are the Sun Yat-sen Museum and the Coastal Defence Museum, which was a fort which failed to defend Hong Kong against the Japanese.
When I first went to Hong Kong twenty years ago, the differences with the mainland were much starker. I took a train to the border at Lo Wu and tried to imagine standing there in 1968, with the barbarity and insanity of Maoist China just across the fence, and only the British flag protecting me from the most murderous dictatorship ever.
I wonder if it will now be followed by a bunch of almost exclusively male pale & stale posters seeking in their different ways - some by absurdly reductive simplification, some by convoluted whataboutery, some by outright head-in-sand denial - to downplay or deny the enduring racist legacy of our colonialism?
I'd want 1.01 on Betfair before I lumped on that possibility.
Well the best thing we stale and pale people can do is listen to their concerns without thinking they've just got a chip on their shoulder.
But these BLM protests haven't helped the cause at all, at risk of sounding like a 60s American talking about MLK. All I've seen on my Facebook is the small number of left wing friends I have uncritically singing its praise and the vast majority seemingly being pushed further to the right.
There's a PR downside to BLM activism here. I agree with that.
But my frustration is when people refuse to accept that there is an enduring racist legacy from colonialism. To me, this is an absurd denial of a palpable truth.
Which is a real shame. Because when it comes to discussing how serious racism is today in the UK, how it manifests, what (if anything) can and should be done about it, this is a conversation that necessarily involves many shades of opinion. The racism debate is really important and needs different perspectives. About the only perspective it doesn't need is the one which starts from "there is no racist legacy from colonialism so we don't need to think or talk about that at all." That kills it stone dead.
And, btw, I extend the same dim view to the other extreme of "everything that's wrong about race relations in the here and now is because of slavery and Empire." But we hear less of that on here than we do the denial. Or it seems we do anyway. Perhaps I am projecting or noticing one more than the other. This is possible.
My Scottish ancestors were impoverished and made homeless by the clearances, so set off to the mines and farms of the Antipodes. They prospered there, and never forgot their roots. They did benefit though from having land that was cleared of aboriginals by the Empire. My Welsh ancestors moved to Manchester to work in the cotton Mills. Terrible working conditions, but working slave produced cotton, and selling it to an Indian Colony, where its own industry was penalised.
Victims or beneficiaries of Empire? A bit of both really, and I suspect the same is true of most Britons.
One of the things I find revealing about PB discussions on racism is that it seems there aren't any black people posting here
Yes, that is a very valid point, though of course we do not know everyone ethnicity.
Ms @The_Apocalypse is dual heritage I believe, but I havent seen her for a few weeks.
And Plato pbuh.
I do not know the ethnicity of most of the people posting on here. But the overwhelming majority are male. There are very very few women: me, @Beibheirli_C, @Mysticrose and @The_Apocalypse (though she has not been on for a while).
Curious. Maybe this affects the perspectives and discussions on here?
Of course it massively impacts the discussions, I sometimes read mumsnet for a different perspective, and it is completely different.
I admire you. I tried it a few times and found it unbearable, like being trapped outside the school gates by a certain type of “Mummy”.
Mumsnet is a terrible place. My version of Hell would be an eternity of Mumsnet.
We can't have that at all....you can spent eternity on ConservativeHome.
... interesting to think back on the blogs one used to look.at .. dizzy thinks .. he made it onto newsnight iirc. Guido.. iain dale. ??? Monkey.. red rag Labourlist boulton and co benedict brogan john redwood diary paul waugh at the standard. Red box peston tom harris .and so on and so forth. I never read any blogs anymore ....
I haven't commented on these protests up to now but I feel that some sort of riposte is needed to this article.
What really irritates me about this notion of "white privilege" is that it implies that the ancestors of black people suffered horribly while the ancestors of white people all sat around drinking cups of tea like the cast of a Jane Austen novel,
The reality is that that the profits of Empire accrued to a very small group of people, while the ancestors of most white people had hard and difficult lives as well.
I have done a lot of genealogy of my own family that backs this up. One ancestor died in the workhouse while another was blinded in a mining accident. Another was transported to Australia for stealing a sheep. One ancestral couple had 9 of their 11 children die before adulthood. Diseases like typhus and cholera were rampant, while many women died in childbirth.
If you go to a poor white city like Stoke you won't find much white privilege there and I doubt they even had any to start with.
The reality is that slavery ended nearly 200 years ago in the British Empire and 150 years ago in the US. There is nobody alive today who can remember slavery. The Empire ended for the most part over 50 years ago. How long can you go on blaming the wrongs of the past for today's problems?
You mention the Chinese and the opium wars. It is interesting that despite this Chinese Britons have the highest rates of educational success of all ethnic groups? Why do you think this is?
It is also worth pointing out that many immigrants came from the subcontinent in the 60s and 70s and also suffered racism and colonialism and yet many of them have gone on to do very well for themselves financially. Again why do you think this is?
I would argue that wallowing in the past may nurture a sense of grievance but is unlikely to allow anyone to move forward.
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
Starmer's Westminster Scottish polling is irrelevant given the SNP are Labour's mini me at Westminster level and will put Starmer in office not Boris.
It is English and Welsh polling Starmer needs to worry about and there the Labour voteshare is up on 2019.
The Holyrood voteshare is far more relevant for all the unionist parties if they are to get a Unionist majority next year to block indyref2
Why is a unionist majority at Holyrood relevant when Boris is just going to crush any dissent with the Army anyway, apparently? What difference does it make?
As it means even if Starmer became PM in 2024 he also could ignore indyref2 given the SNP are not going to put the Tories in
Labour are unlikely to ignore indyref2 if there’s a nationalist majority with a clear mandate. Labour are not hypocrites unlike the Tories.
Yes but if there is a Unionist majority at Holyrood next year there would be no nationalist majority with a mandate.
V pleased to hear Bercow not happy about . his non peerage. Apparently he is a county standard tennis player and i read somewhere he duffed up Boris 6-0 6-0 6-0. ..not very charitable if true... how to win friends and influence people eh...
If the report that Framk Field is being ennobled is correct, I don't understand why Bercow was blocked, not because of any real or imagined faults of behaviour, but on the grounds that Corbyn had nominated a non-Labour candidate. Why is it then OK for the Government to nominate an ex-Labour independent, apart from mischief?
I say that as someone who quite likes Frank and I don't oppose his nomination. But either all party leaders should be able to nominate people outside their parties or none should.
Not wanting to have a sharp disagreement at this time on a Sunday, I am not aware that Field has an unresolved / incomplete investigation into his credibly alleged bullying of his own staff that he has suppressed by exploiting his own position.
Though I'll give you that Field has become quite bullying in his handling of witnesses, and more kneejerk in how he deals with evidence against his own view, in his Chairmanship of Select Committees in recent years.
Also not in argumentative mood! But we're told that Bercow wasn't blocked because of allegations about bullying, but because it was inappropriate for a Labour leader to nominate a non-Lanour person. I'm merely saying it's inconsistent with Frank being nominated.
Personally, I think it's a silly rule and all party leaders should be able to nominate anybody they like. If they choose to use a slot for someone who isn't a party hack, that's actually a good thing, not something to punish.
""It seems to be clear now, when you talk to specialists in the field," he continued, "that there seems to be a considerable amount of people who don't develop antibodies, but still seem to be immune."
(Telegraph)
It's always seemed to be clear to him that there were a considerable amount of people who were immune. It was shown by testing that far fewer people than he thought had antibodies. I've seen comments by him in which he apparently admitted he had overestimated the amount of immunity. Now apparently he's claiming they're immune anyway.
It seems to be clear that Mr Tegnell doesn't know his arse from his elbow.
Since 'whitesplaining' is clearly being frowned upon, here's some blacksplaining from Dr Martin Luther King: 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' Until we see skin colour as entirely incidental, we won't have learned this lesson. Sadly efforts to do so are hampered by well-meaning attempts like the one above to sympathise and understand, and perhaps somehow mitigate the circumstances, of not being white.
As for the atrocities of the past, which we can do little to change, we might do better to concentrate on the atrocities of now. In Nigeria for example, 600 black Christians have been killed since the beginning of 2020 - victims of persecution by Jihadist groups. I might be missing them, but I don't see the mass protests demanding we do something about this. The African continent is utterly forgotten in all this, and if I were a Nigerian Christian, I would be feeling quite angry about the whole BLM movement, which in Britain at any rate, is seems to be toxically self-indulgent and obsessed with trivialities.
My grandson’s black grandmother gets called a nigger in the street. She has been spat on, solely because of the colour of her skin. These are not trivialities.
Disgusting behaviour like that is not going to be affected one jot by divisive protests during the current lockdown. Indeed I suspect they give succour to racist groups.
The cohesiveness of society is strengthened when we focus on what we have in common, not our differences.
Black people in the UK experience prejudice that only they experience. We could all unite to understand that. This could help strengthen cohesion.
I would prefer to eradicate it, to render it utterly irrelevant, a silly relic of the past. And that is going to happen when we all turn our attention from it, toward other things, and move on from it. It can not be solved not by relentless focus on it, which can do no more than make people feel temporarily appeased.
You think you defeat racism by ignoring it.
That is certainly a take.
What other problems can you defeat by ignoring them? Fascism? Boulders rolling down hills? Gravity?
Sectarianism would be a good example. Daniel Defoe 'There is no Protestant or Catholic in a good bargain' - Sectarianism was all but eradicated in swathes of Britain and lessened where it still exists, because people became more interested in commerce.
Still alive and kicking in west of Scotland unfortunately.
So I understand.
I've obviously not ignored the100+ a year Orange Walks in Glasgow enough. A couple more decades of blind eyes turned and deefies slung should sort it though.
Your solution when Catholics and Protestants had been killing each other in their hundreds within living memory would have been to focus on it more. What actually happened was that people's focus shifted, toward making the most of the new opportunities that the 18th century offered. The vestiges that still exist can be troubling (although uniforms and symbols only have the power that we ascribe to them), but again, even they will pass as focus shifts. And quite frankly, no, you haven't ignored it enough.
I hope that Northern Ireland remains within the UK, and my best hope for it, now that its immediate political future will be as a halfway house between UK and EU, is that it sees a new influx of commerce, and this becomes more important than its sectarian divisions.
You're a great one for constructing a tottering pile of what you think my 'solution' is based on an (admittedly flippant) comment.
My utilitarian solution to that particular problem is for Police Scotland to offer subsidised policing for say five Orange Marches a year and require the LOL to pay for the entirety of the policing for the rest, cash up front.
Of course there's no marching going on at all atm aside from restless pacing up and down the Axminster. I wonder if that will produce more withering on the vine or if it'll be Marching Season II: Back With a Vengeance? The latter I suspect.
I would make them pay for all of them , any sectarian marches on both sides should be self funded.
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
V pleased to hear Bercow not happy about . his non peerage. Apparently he is a county standard tennis player and i read somewhere he duffed up Boris 6-0 6-0 6-0. ..not very charitable if true... how to win friends and influence people eh...
If the report that Framk Field is being ennobled is correct, I don't understand why Bercow was blocked, not because of any real or imagined faults of behaviour, but on the grounds that Corbyn had nominated a non-Labour candidate. Why is it then OK for the Government to nominate an ex-Labour independent, apart from mischief?
I say that as someone who quite likes Frank and I don't oppose his nomination. But either all party leaders should be able to nominate people outside their parties or none should.
Not wanting to have a sharp disagreement at this time on a Sunday, I am not aware that Field has an unresolved / incomplete investigation into his credibly alleged bullying of his own staff that he has suppressed by exploiting his own position.
Though I'll give you that Field has become quite bullying in his handling of witnesses, and more kneejerk in how he deals with evidence against his own view, in his Chairmanship of Select Committees in recent years.
Also not in argumentative mood! But we're told that Bercow wasn't blocked because of allegations about bullying, but because it was inappropriate for a Labour leader to nominate a non-Lanour person. I'm merely saying it's inconsistent with Frank being nominated.
Personally, I think it's a silly rule and all party leaders should be able to nominate anybody they like. If they choose to use a slot for someone who isn't a party hack, that's actually a good thing, not something to punish.
Its only because Labour put forward Bercow that you are underwhelmed.., had it been the other way round, I doubt you would have even thought about it.
I haven't commented on these protests up to now but I feel that some sort of riposte is needed to this article.
What really irritates me about this notion of "white privilege" is that it implies that the ancestors of black people suffered horribly while the ancestors of white people all sat around drinking cups of tea like the cast of a Jane Austen novel,
The reality is that that the profits of Empire accrued to a very small group of people, while the ancestors of most white people had hard and difficult lives as well.
I have done a lot of genealogy of my own family that backs this up. One ancestor died in the workhouse while another was blinded in a mining accident. Another was transported to Australia for stealing a sheep. One ancestral couple had 9 of their 11 children die before adulthood. Diseases like typhus and cholera were rampant, while many women died in childbirth.
If you go to a poor white city like Stoke you won't find much white privilege there and I doubt they even had any to start with.
The reality is that slavery ended nearly 200 years ago in the British Empire and 150 years ago in the US. There is nobody alive today who can remember slavery. The Empire ended for the most part over 50 years ago. How long can you go on blaming the wrongs of the past for today's problems?
You mention the Chinese and the opium wars. It is interesting that despite this Chinese Britons have the highest rates of educational success of all ethnic groups? Why do you think this is?
It is also worth pointing out that many immigrants came from the subcontinent in the 60s and 70s and also suffered racism and colonialism and yet many of them have gone on to do very well for themselves financially. Again why do you think this is?
I would argue that wallowing in the past may nurture a sense of grievance but is unlikely to allow anyone to move forward.
Yes it bothers me that the ancestors of poor people in Britain, who struggled then and struggle now, are expected to feel guilty in the same way as those whose ancestors became fabulously wealthy off the slave trade, and who still live off that wealth today.
Yet when there is mass immigration, it is the poor British who have to make massive adjustments to their disrupted way of life, compete with the newcomers for jobs and public services, while the old masters pontificate in luxury.
There is a comment in the header about walking down streets named after slave owners and indeed many prominent buildings are also named after slave owners. However as Historic England points out "Contrary to what many people now believe, streets were not named after people because they were slavers. They were honoured in this way because they were landowners, decision makers, politicians, patrons of the arts and powerful business people". In Liverpool for example the Liverpool Dispensary for the Sick, providing medicine for the poor, was founded by slave traders.
We should not conceal our historical record and seek to hide away the awkward bits by changing names to suit agendas.
Indeed. There are some excellent comments on here this morning; I'm pleased to see a healthy debate has resulted.
History is very complex, and consists of many shades of grey. All of us should be concerned about a certain Marxist conflict view of history that will end up pivoting on a crude racial divide between black and white, and end up fuelling further resentment and polarisation down the road.
That's so unhealthy that it shouldn't need me to point it out to (usually) very perceptive and intelligent posters.
I think the earliest lesson in race I got was from my dad, "don't blame white people for your problems, it might be easy or even true, but it isn't going to change anything". Basically I've lived my whole life in that manner and instead of wasting energy on bitching about how difficult white people make it to be not white I got on with my own life. It's worked very well. My sister would also agree.
I think it's a lesson all non-whites need to learn.
Good lesson and same should apply elsewhere, ie rich toffs etc , plenty of whites have excuses for their problems as well and whilst their are often reasons it is always easier to blame someone else.
In the days before 16 September 1992, the Tories were about level with Labour (some polls had them ahead, some had them behind). All of the polls that followed had Labour ahead. By November Labour were 20 points clear.
A loose comment.
If you look carefully at the polls in autumn 1992 you will in fact see that the slide in Conservative support happened nowhere near so fast as the Cummings saga.
Black Wednesday was 16th September 1992. Conservative leads in the month leading up to that date were:
-6 -3 -4 2
(A mean Labour lead of +3)
The slide did not happen immediately. The polls in the month after were:
-8 -2 -4 -5 -7 -6 0 -9
(A mean Labour lead of +4)
The first big poll shift occurred exactly a month after Black Wednesday on 19th October 1992 when Gallup had Labour on a lead of +22. Thereafter the polls mostly started to show substantial Labour leads, although not all did.
Compared to GE19 the Tories voteshare is down 1 to 3% based on last night's 3 polls but the LD voteshare is down 3 to 5%.
The main movement is still LD to Labour since the last general election and the Tories voteshare is still over 40%
Pretty sure on 'personality' John Smith wasn't beating Major by much at all. The shift came with Blair
Ideologically too Starmer is closer to John Smith than Blair
Here's the graph of the leader personality ratings 92-97.
Major Blue, Labour Red... guess when Blair took over
Blair was the most centrist Labour leader ever and the most charismatic Labour leader ever, combine the two and he won the biggest Labour landslides ever in 1997 and 2001
When some years ago I moved to Acton, west London one of things I had to do was find a barber’s. As it happened there was one very near where I lived on the high street: walk in, extremely popular. The barbers and the clientele were exclusively black - mainly young men; indeed, so popular was it that it appeared also to function as an informal community centre. As a middle-aged white man, I thought this place is not for me. I just wouldn’t feel comfortable going there - and though, if I had, I would have hoped to have had a friendly welcome, I felt too nervous to put it to the test. Fortunately, for me there were plenty of other options nearby.
But this was for me a moment of revelation. The feeling I had experienced for the first time in my life, is almost certainly experienced by black people pretty much every day of their lives.
Fantastic article, btw. One of the very best that’s ever appeared on PB.
I know exactly what you mean. I had the same experience once, and after hesitating I did go in. They were friendly and mildly amused. But the fact that I hesitated was telling, just as you say.
I think the earliest lesson in race I got was from my dad, "don't blame white people for your problems, it might be easy or even true, but it isn't going to change anything". Basically I've lived my whole life in that manner and instead of wasting energy on bitching about how difficult white people make it to be not white I got on with my own life. It's worked very well. My sister would also agree.
I think it's a lesson all non-whites need to learn.
Good lesson and same should apply elsewhere, ie rich toffs etc , plenty of whites have excuses for their problems as well and whilst their are often reasons it is always easier to blame someone else.
Rule number 1 I taught my children - life is unfair, deal with it.
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
I am not going to be stopped from criticising China for its barbarism now because of what English people (not even my ancestors) did 150 years ago.
British people.
Lucky you will never change the England = Britain mindset, it is deeply ingrained.
I always think its wrong to exclude Scotland and Wales when we talk about the Empire. It is wrong to take away both the credit and the blame for the Empire away from Scotland and Wales. For better or (and) worse, our countries built the world's largest Empire together, regardless of how people's feelings about it have now changed.
I wonder if it will now be followed by a bunch of almost exclusively male pale & stale posters seeking in their different ways - some by absurdly reductive simplification, some by convoluted whataboutery, some by outright head-in-sand denial - to downplay or deny the enduring racist legacy of our colonialism?
I'd want 1.01 on Betfair before I lumped on that possibility.
Well the best thing we stale and pale people can do is listen to their concerns without thinking they've just got a chip on their shoulder.
But these BLM protests haven't helped the cause at all, at risk of sounding like a 60s American talking about MLK. All I've seen on my Facebook is the small number of left wing friends I have uncritically singing its praise and the vast majority seemingly being pushed further to the right.
There's a PR downside to BLM activism here. I agree with that.
But my frustration is when people refuse to accept that there is an enduring racist legacy from colonialism. To me, this is an absurd denial of a palpable truth.
Which is a real shame. Because when it comes to discussing how serious racism is today in the UK, how it manifests, what (if anything) can and should be done about it, this is a conversation that necessarily involves many shades of opinion. The racism debate is really important and needs different perspectives. About the only perspective it doesn't need is the one which starts from "there is no racist legacy from colonialism so we don't need to think or talk about that at all." That kills it stone dead.
And, btw, I extend the same dim view to the other extreme of "everything that's wrong about race relations in the here and now is because of slavery and Empire." But we hear less of that on here than we do the denial. Or it seems we do anyway. Perhaps I am projecting or noticing one more than the other. This is possible.
Inclined to agree.
As I said yesterday, if your Grandad was had over financially by someone exploiting him in tough times, who then built a business on the back of the profit he made out of Gramps, when you see the Grandson in a swish apartment his Daddy bought him, you're entitled to be aggrieved, and expect some understanding of why you feel that way.
I think the earliest lesson in race I got was from my dad, "don't blame white people for your problems, it might be easy or even true, but it isn't going to change anything". Basically I've lived my whole life in that manner and instead of wasting energy on bitching about how difficult white people make it to be not white I got on with my own life. It's worked very well. My sister would also agree.
I think it's a lesson all non-whites need to learn.
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
Starmer's Westminster Scottish polling is irrelevant given the SNP are Labour's mini me at Westminster level and will put Starmer in office not Boris.
It is English and Welsh polling Starmer needs to worry about and there the Labour voteshare is up on 2019.
The Holyrood voteshare is far more relevant for all the unionist parties if they are to get a Unionist majority next year to block indyref2
Why is a unionist majority at Holyrood relevant when Boris is just going to crush any dissent with the Army anyway, apparently? What difference does it make?
As it means even if Starmer became PM in 2024 he also could ignore indyref2 given the SNP are not going to put the Tories in
Labour are unlikely to ignore indyref2 if there’s a nationalist majority with a clear mandate. Labour are not hypocrites unlike the Tories.
Yes but if there is a Unionist majority at Holyrood next year there would be no nationalist majority with a mandate.
That is the whole point
You are, yet again, confusing the SNP with the pro-independence parties. You are forgetting that there is already a pro-independence majority at Holyrood, which was there before and after your precious party manife3sto - which was rejected by the Scots massively.
And picking the fiddled voting system which favours your party in Scotland while ignoring the one in Westminster.
What are you arguing? That English voters should always, always, override Scots voters?
The Tories are in government at Westminster on a no indyref2 for a generation platform and without Westminster consent there can be no indyref2.
For indyref2 to occur within the next 5 years two things need to occur, first the SNP and Greens need to win another majority at Holyrood next year and second Labour needs to win the 2024 UK general election.
I haven't commented on these protests up to now but I feel that some sort of riposte is needed to this article.
What really irritates me about this notion of "white privilege" is that it implies that the ancestors of black people suffered horribly while the ancestors of white people all sat around drinking cups of tea like the cast of a Jane Austen novel,
The reality is that that the profits of Empire accrued to a very small group of people, while the ancestors of most white people had hard and difficult lives as well.
I have done a lot of genealogy of my own family that backs this up. One ancestor died in the workhouse while another was blinded in a mining accident. Another was transported to Australia for stealing a sheep. One ancestral couple had 9 of their 11 children die before adulthood. Diseases like typhus and cholera were rampant, while many women died in childbirth.
If you go to a poor white city like Stoke you won't find much white privilege there and I doubt they even had any to start with.
The reality is that slavery ended nearly 200 years ago in the British Empire and 150 years ago in the US. There is nobody alive today who can remember slavery. The Empire ended for the most part over 50 years ago. How long can you go on blaming the wrongs of the past for today's problems?
You mention the Chinese and the opium wars. It is interesting that despite this Chinese Britons have the highest rates of educational success of all ethnic groups? Why do you think this is?
It is also worth pointing out that many immigrants came from the subcontinent in the 60s and 70s and also suffered racism and colonialism and yet many of them have gone on to do very well for themselves financially. Again why do you think this is?
I would argue that wallowing in the past may nurture a sense of grievance but is unlikely to allow anyone to move forward.
White people in the UK will almost never experience discrimination or abuse based on the colour of their skin. That should not be a privilege, but until you can say the same for black people it is.
Won't they? What about white people in the UK who fall on the wrong side of a corporate policy on diversity, or don't say quite the wrong thing, or get punished for something their wife or family have done?
What about white people who are European or Irish (non-English) ? What about those from council estates who have a unfashionable accent, who are characterised as "white trash", and not given opportunities or mentoring to succeed? What about the treatment of girls in care in Rotherham? What about white women or men who are dating (for example) a Muslim man or woman who hold very "traditional" views and are shunned by their families?
What about white people who might walk in the wrong part of a non-white neighbourhood, and be threatened?
You can say the incidence for black people is higher, and I'm sure it is, but to say White people almost never experience discrimination in the UK is totally incorrect.
I think the earliest lesson in race I got was from my dad, "don't blame white people for your problems, it might be easy or even true, but it isn't going to change anything". Basically I've lived my whole life in that manner and instead of wasting energy on bitching about how difficult white people make it to be not white I got on with my own life. It's worked very well. My sister would also agree.
I think it's a lesson all non-whites need to learn.
I haven't commented on these protests up to now but I feel that some sort of riposte is needed to this article.
What really irritates me about this notion of "white privilege" is that it implies that the ancestors of black people suffered horribly while the ancestors of white people all sat around drinking cups of tea like the cast of a Jane Austen novel,
The reality is that that the profits of Empire accrued to a very small group of people, while the ancestors of most white people had hard and difficult lives as well.
I have done a lot of genealogy of my own family that backs this up. One ancestor died in the workhouse while another was blinded in a mining accident. Another was transported to Australia for stealing a sheep. One ancestral couple had 9 of their 11 children die before adulthood. Diseases like typhus and cholera were rampant, while many women died in childbirth.
If you go to a poor white city like Stoke you won't find much white privilege there and I doubt they even had any to start with.
The reality is that slavery ended nearly 200 years ago in the British Empire and 150 years ago in the US. There is nobody alive today who can remember slavery. The Empire ended for the most part over 50 years ago. How long can you go on blaming the wrongs of the past for today's problems?
You mention the Chinese and the opium wars. It is interesting that despite this Chinese Britons have the highest rates of educational success of all ethnic groups? Why do you think this is?
It is also worth pointing out that many immigrants came from the subcontinent in the 60s and 70s and also suffered racism and colonialism and yet many of them have gone on to do very well for themselves financially. Again why do you think this is?
I would argue that wallowing in the past may nurture a sense of grievance but is unlikely to allow anyone to move forward.
White people in the UK will almost never experience discrimination or abuse based on the colour of their skin. That should not be a privilege, but until you can say the same for black people it is.
Won't they? What about white people in the UK who fall on the wrong side of a corporate policy on diversity, or don't say quite the wrong thing, or get punished for something their wife or family have done?
What about white people who are European or Irish (non-English) ? What about those from council estates who have a unfashionable accent, who are characterised as "white trash", and not given opportunities or mentoring to succeed? What about the treatment of girls in care in Rotherham? What about white women or men who are dating (for example) a Muslim man or woman who hold very "traditional" views and are shunned by their families?
What about white people who might walk in the wrong part of a non-white neighbourhood, and be threatened?
You can say the incidence for black people is higher, and I'm sure it is, but to say White people almost never experience discrimination in the UK is totally incorrect.
V pleased to hear Bercow not happy about . his non peerage. Apparently he is a county standard tennis player and i read somewhere he duffed up Boris 6-0 6-0 6-0. ..not very charitable if true... how to win friends and influence people eh...
If the report that Framk Field is being ennobled is correct, I don't understand why Bercow was blocked, not because of any real or imagined faults of behaviour, but on the grounds that Corbyn had nominated a non-Labour candidate. Why is it then OK for the Government to nominate an ex-Labour independent, apart from mischief?
I say that as someone who quite likes Frank and I don't oppose his nomination. But either all party leaders should be able to nominate people outside their parties or none should.
Not wanting to have a sharp disagreement at this time on a Sunday, I am not aware that Field has an unresolved / incomplete investigation into his credibly alleged bullying of his own staff that he has suppressed by exploiting his own position.
Though I'll give you that Field has become quite bullying in his handling of witnesses, and more kneejerk in how he deals with evidence against his own view, in his Chairmanship of Select Committees in recent years.
Also not in argumentative mood! But we're told that Bercow wasn't blocked because of allegations about bullying, but because it was inappropriate for a Labour leader to nominate a non-Lanour person. I'm merely saying it's inconsistent with Frank being nominated.
Personally, I think it's a silly rule and all party leaders should be able to nominate anybody they like. If they choose to use a slot for someone who isn't a party hack, that's actually a good thing, not something to punish.
I thought that several Leaders had, over the years, nominated people who went straight to the cross-benches.
I am not going to be stopped from criticising China for its barbarism now because of what English people (not even my ancestors) did 150 years ago.
British people.
Lucky you will never change the England = Britain mindset, it is deeply ingrained.
I always think its wrong to exclude Scotland and Wales when we talk about the Empire. It is wrong to take away both the credit and the blame for the Empire away from Scotland and Wales. For better or (and) worse, our countries built the world's largest Empire together, regardless of how people's feelings about it have now changed.
The first empire was built as England and lost as Britain.
Since 'whitesplaining' is clearly being frowned upon, here's some blacksplaining from Dr Martin Luther King: 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' Until we see skin colour as entirely incidental, we won't have learned this lesson. Sadly efforts to do so are hampered by well-meaning attempts like the one above to sympathise and understand, and perhaps somehow mitigate the circumstances, of not being white.
As for the atrocities of the past, which we can do little to change, we might do better to concentrate on the atrocities of now. In Nigeria for example, 600 black Christians have been killed since the beginning of 2020 - victims of persecution by Jihadist groups. I might be missing them, but I don't see the mass protests demanding we do something about this. The African continent is utterly forgotten in all this, and if I were a Nigerian Christian, I would be feeling quite angry about the whole BLM movement, which in Britain at any rate, is seems to be toxically self-indulgent and obsessed with trivialities.
My grandson’s black grandmother gets called a nigger in the street. She has been spat on, solely because of the colour of her skin. These are not trivialities.
Disgusting behaviour like that is not going to be affected one jot by divisive protests during the current lockdown. Indeed I suspect they give succour to racist groups.
The cohesiveness of society is strengthened when we focus on what we have in common, not our differences.
Black people in the UK experience prejudice that only they experience. We could all unite to understand that. This could help strengthen cohesion.
I would prefer to eradicate it, to render it utterly irrelevant, a silly relic of the past. And that is going to happen when we all turn our attention from it, toward other things, and move on from it. It can not be solved not by relentless focus on it, which can do no more than make people feel temporarily appeased.
You think you defeat racism by ignoring it.
That is certainly a take.
What other problems can you defeat by ignoring them? Fascism? Boulders rolling down hills? Gravity?
Sectarianism would be a good example. Daniel Defoe 'There is no Protestant or Catholic in a good bargain' - Sectarianism was all but eradicated in swathes of Britain and lessened where it still exists, because people became more interested in commerce.
Still alive and kicking in west of Scotland unfortunately.
So I understand.
I've obviously not ignored the100+ a year Orange Walks in Glasgow enough. A couple more decades of blind eyes turned and deefies slung should sort it though.
Your solution when Catholics and Protestants had been killing each other in their hundreds within living memory would have been to focus on it more. What actually happened was that people's focus shifted, toward making the most of the new opportunities that the 18th century offered. The vestiges that still exist can be troubling (although uniforms and symbols only have the power that we ascribe to them), but again, even they will pass as focus shifts. And quite frankly, no, you haven't ignored it enough.
I hope that Northern Ireland remains within the UK, and my best hope for it, now that its immediate political future will be as a halfway house between UK and EU, is that it sees a new influx of commerce, and this becomes more important than its sectarian divisions.
You're a great one for constructing a tottering pile of what you think my 'solution' is based on an (admittedly flippant) comment.
My utilitarian solution to that particular problem is for Police Scotland to offer subsidised policing for say five Orange Marches a year and require the LOL to pay for the entirety of the policing for the rest, cash up front.
Of course there's no marching going on at all atm aside from restless pacing up and down the Axminster. I wonder if that will produce more withering on the vine or if it'll be Marching Season II: Back With a Vengeance? The latter I suspect.
To add to the tottering pile a bit more...
1. We're discussing two different things. I am discussing moving from a situation of very real sectarian violence affecting everyone at all levels of society from King/s down, throughout Britain, and how we moved past it. You're discussing its leftovers.
2. The principle remains the same. To whatever extent you find Orange marches and the like frustrating, distasteful, and even distressing, I would definitely recommend removing your attention from them and focusing on something that you do like. It feels to me like you don't really want sectarianism to end because you seem to quite enjoy raging against the 'orrible specimens of Glasgow Protestants waving Union flags that you show us here on a fairly frequent basis.
3. The opposition to the marches is probably half the motivation for even going on them. So literally, by ignoring them, they would stop - or certainly stop being anything more than a quaint sideshow.
Given the amount of words you've disgorged on the subject compared to me today, I'm not sure if you should really be preaching on the virtues of ignoring it.
There's an existing level of violence associated with Orange marches that if it were committed on eg Indy marches would have people like you prolapsing in righteous outrage.
In a normal summer I can hear through my kitchen window the plaintive notes of flute playing most weekends. Would your suggestion for ignoring it involve earplugs or a continual round of weekend breaks? You appear unsurprisingly ignorant of just how prevalent the culture is in the West of Scotland, and how much it's adherents desperately want not to be ignored.
This top Tory look is going down a treat I see, surge must be due.......... SNP at 54% in last three polls Opinium on 4th June, with don’t knows removed has this
Starmer's Westminster Scottish polling is irrelevant given the SNP are Labour's mini me at Westminster level and will put Starmer in office not Boris.
It is English and Welsh polling Starmer needs to worry about and there the Labour voteshare is up on 2019.
The Holyrood voteshare is far more relevant for all the unionist parties if they are to get a Unionist majority next year to block indyref2
Starmer’s Scottish polling is critically important to British Nationalists like you. Without Labour, the Union falls.
It would be interesting to see what levels of support Scottish independence received in Scotland if there were any form of Labour-led minority governmnet in charge at Westminster. I doubt the SNP would ever reach any kind of agreement with Labour in Westminster, but I wonder how often the SNP would vote against them.
I think the earliest lesson in race I got was from my dad, "don't blame white people for your problems, it might be easy or even true, but it isn't going to change anything". Basically I've lived my whole life in that manner and instead of wasting energy on bitching about how difficult white people make it to be not white I got on with my own life. It's worked very well. My sister would also agree.
I think it's a lesson all non-whites need to learn.
Good lesson and same should apply elsewhere, ie rich toffs etc , plenty of whites have excuses for their problems as well and whilst their are often reasons it is always easier to blame someone else.
Rule number 1 I taught my children - life is unfair, deal with it.
As perhaps a gross generalisation, I think the biggest influence on your life, whatever your circumstances, is going to be you. If you're not comfy with your life you should look to the biggest influence for the why, before you look elsewhere.
I haven't commented on these protests up to now but I feel that some sort of riposte is needed to this article.
What really irritates me about this notion of "white privilege" is that it implies that the ancestors of black people suffered horribly while the ancestors of white people all sat around drinking cups of tea like the cast of a Jane Austen novel,
The reality is that that the profits of Empire accrued to a very small group of people, while the ancestors of most white people had hard and difficult lives as well.
I have done a lot of genealogy of my own family that backs this up. One ancestor died in the workhouse while another was blinded in a mining accident. Another was transported to Australia for stealing a sheep. One ancestral couple had 9 of their 11 children die before adulthood. Diseases like typhus and cholera were rampant, while many women died in childbirth.
If you go to a poor white city like Stoke you won't find much white privilege there and I doubt they even had any to start with.
The reality is that slavery ended nearly 200 years ago in the British Empire and 150 years ago in the US. There is nobody alive today who can remember slavery. The Empire ended for the most part over 50 years ago. How long can you go on blaming the wrongs of the past for today's problems?
You mention the Chinese and the opium wars. It is interesting that despite this Chinese Britons have the highest rates of educational success of all ethnic groups? Why do you think this is?
It is also worth pointing out that many immigrants came from the subcontinent in the 60s and 70s and also suffered racism and colonialism and yet many of them have gone on to do very well for themselves financially. Again why do you think this is?
I would argue that wallowing in the past may nurture a sense of grievance but is unlikely to allow anyone to move forward.
White people in the UK will almost never experience discrimination or abuse based on the colour of their skin. That should not be a privilege, but until you can say the same for black people it is.
Won't they? What about white people in the UK who fall on the wrong side of a corporate policy on diversity, or don't say quite the wrong thing, or get punished for something their wife or family have done?
What about white people who are European or Irish (non-English) ? What about those from council estates who have a unfashionable accent, who are characterised as "white trash", and not given opportunities or mentoring to succeed? What about the treatment of girls in care in Rotherham? What about white women or men who are dating (for example) a Muslim man or woman who hold very "traditional" views and are shunned by their families?
What about white people who might walk in the wrong part of a non-white neighbourhood, and be threatened?
You can say the incidence for black people is higher, and I'm sure it is, but to say White people almost never experience discrimination in the UK is totally incorrect.
Those of us advocating for change need to be very careful in our use of language and I agree that "almost never" is wrong and misleading.
I'm picking up that many people do not like the term white privilege because most white people are not in absolute terms privileged.
How about "white advantage" as an alternative?
Term to describe the notion that however rich or poor they are a white person in England is far far less likely to suffer racial prejudice than a black one.
Gets rid of that "privilege" word which I sense is a turn-off with its misleading and inappropriate (for this issue) images of country houses and public schools and henley regattas etc etc.
Comments
You HYUFD on the other hand say it as you see it, which is why, although I mainly disagree with you, I very much respect your opinion.
That's why I think it can sometimes seems not as good a fit here, and a transposition of an American movement that doesn't quite work. It's not that there's no prejudice that needs addressing in Britain, but it's our own different version of it that isn't quite captured by the language and methods of African-American struggles.
""It seems to be clear now, when you talk to specialists in the field," he continued, "that there seems to be a considerable amount of people who don't develop antibodies, but still seem to be immune."
(Telegraph)
The main movement is still LD to Labour since the last general election and the Tories voteshare is still over 40%
It is English and Welsh polling Starmer needs to worry about and there the Labour voteshare is up on 2019.
The Holyrood voteshare is far more relevant for all the unionist parties if they are to get a Unionist majority next year to block indyref2
https://twitter.com/BlackVisionsMN/status/1269419231029927936
People who hate Boris the most are often wealthy liberals who backed Remain
I think an unthinking acceptance of BLM and their points isn't the right thing to do. They make a lot of fair and valid points about policing and there's a lot to reform wrt race within the police.
However, outside of that the UK is, IMO, fairly good a providing people with opportunities to succeed, it's up to the individual (or in the case of children, their parents) to grab those opportunities. Usually that means education. We live in a country that has pretty good free education from primary all the way to 18. I think what any study needs to focus on is the outcome differences between different backgrounds at schools and what the main driver behind that is. I'd be fairly happy to bet a large amount of money that parenting (or lack of) will be the primary differentiator between success at school or not. Success at school is the foundation of a successful life and everyone, black, brown, white or otherwise, has their own ability to do well at school.
Is Britain a racist society? On balance no. Is there a vast gap in outcomes between different racial backgrouds? Yes. Both of these statements are true and I say this as someone from a working class immigrant background.
There was a viral video doing the rounds yesterday of gang members in LA protesting together and everyone thought it was a great show of unity. Yet in a couple of weeks these two gangs will be back to killing each other over territory and recruiting young black boys to be hoppers and lookouts depriving them of any chance of getting a decent education. That's the larger issue no one wants to approach, and the same is true here with the county lines/postcode gangs.
So yes, there are huge racial issues in the UK and elsewhere in the western world. However, to pin the blame on slavery or anything else is a simplistic look that really isn't going to help solve the problems, it will just get people more entrenched.
Anyway, I've got bread to bake.
"Male, white, not in the first flush".
There. That better now? Is it no longer offensive or even worse ironic?
Black and Asian Conservative politicians have a very different, and no less valid, outlook to the campaigners of BLM, on matters of racial injustice.
Though I'll give you that Field has become quite bullying in his handling of witnesses, and more kneejerk in how he deals with evidence against his own view, in his Chairmanship of Select Committees in recent years.
But this was for me a moment of revelation. The feeling I had experienced for the first time in my life, is almost certainly experienced by black people pretty much every day of their lives.
Fantastic article, btw. One of the very best that’s ever appeared on PB.
That is the whole point
We could throw religion into the mix too, I suppose, but it's complex enough already.
Thanks and well done.
I am not going to be stopped from criticising China for its barbarism now because of what English people (not even my ancestors) did 150 years ago.
But these BLM protests haven't helped the cause at all, at risk of sounding like a 60s American talking about MLK. All I've seen on my Facebook is the small number of left wing friends I have uncritically singing its praise and the vast majority seemingly being pushed further to the right.
My utilitarian solution to that particular problem is for Police Scotland to offer subsidised policing for say five Orange Marches a year and require the LOL to pay for the entirety of the policing for the rest, cash up front.
Of course there's no marching going on at all atm aside from restless pacing up and down the Axminster. I wonder if that will produce more withering on the vine or if it'll be Marching Season II: Back With a Vengeance? The latter I suspect.
The US situation is very different and I dont know enough about it to criticise the protesters there for their methods.
I think it's a lesson all non-whites need to learn.
1) poses as anti-racist while being led by Jeremy Corbyn;
2) Fumes about tax and tax avoidance while having Ian Lavery in a senior position;
3) Criticises the Liberal Democrats for not respecting the result of a referendum while saying they would try and reverse it;
is not really demonstrating that they 'are not hypocrites.'
All political parties are of course hypocritical to some degree. This is because in a serious party when reality collides with ideology, reality wins. (This doesn't apply to the Republicans, but they forfeited the right to be considered a serious political party some time ago.)
But one of the key problems Starmer has to sort out if Labour is to stand any chance of returning to power in the medium term is that they appear to be one of the worst sets of hypocrites and chancers around.
The issue across the US with police funding is that it has continued to rise above inflation at the same time as other social spending in cities has fallen. In large parts of the US police forces tend to be seen, and tend to behave as an occupying force rather than policing with consent.
Changing the attitudes of police forces is going to be a hard task; the power of the purse is one of the stronger levers available to local governments.
What really irritates me about this notion of "white privilege" is that it implies that the ancestors of black people suffered horribly while the ancestors of white people all sat around drinking cups of tea like the cast of a Jane Austen novel,
The reality is that that the profits of Empire accrued to a very small group of people, while the ancestors of most white people had hard and difficult lives as well.
I have done a lot of genealogy of my own family that backs this up. One ancestor died in the workhouse while another was blinded in a mining accident. Another was transported to Australia for stealing a sheep. One ancestral couple had 9 of their 11 children die before adulthood. Diseases like typhus and cholera were rampant, while many women died in childbirth.
If you go to a poor white city like Stoke you won't find much white privilege there and I doubt they even had any to start with.
The reality is that slavery ended nearly 200 years ago in the British Empire and 150 years ago in the US. There is nobody alive today who can remember slavery.
The Empire ended for the most part over 50 years ago. How long can you go on blaming the wrongs of the past for today's problems?
You mention the Chinese and the opium wars. It is interesting that despite this Chinese Britons have the highest rates of educational success of all ethnic groups? Why do you think this is?
It is also worth pointing out that many immigrants came from the subcontinent in the 60s and 70s and also suffered racism and colonialism and yet many of them have gone on to do very well for themselves financially. Again why do you think this is?
I would argue that wallowing in the past may nurture a sense of grievance but is unlikely to allow anyone to move forward.
However I don’t believe that Labour would be hypocritical on the self-determination front, but I may be wrong.
Major Blue, Labour Red... guess when Blair took over
And picking the fiddled voting system which favours your party in Scotland while ignoring the one in Westminster.
What are you arguing? That English voters should always, always, override Scots voters?
1. We're discussing two different things. I am discussing moving from a situation of very real sectarian violence affecting everyone at all levels of society from King/s down, throughout Britain, and how we moved past it. You're discussing its leftovers.
2. The principle remains the same. To whatever extent you find Orange marches and the like frustrating, distasteful, and even distressing, I would definitely recommend removing your attention from them and focusing on something that you do like. It feels to me like you don't really want sectarianism to end because you seem to quite enjoy raging against the 'orrible specimens of Glasgow Protestants waving Union flags that you show us here on a fairly frequent basis.
3. The opposition to the marches is probably half the motivation for even going on them. So literally, by ignoring them, they would stop - or certainly stop being anything more than a quaint sideshow.
That does not mean all white people are racist. Neither does it mean that large numbers of white people do not experience significant hardships or institutional harms. However, like for like, at every level, a black skin subjects you to higher levels of prejudice than your white-skinned contemporaries.
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269389298664701952?s=20
We should not conceal our historical record and seek to hide away the awkward bits by changing names to suit agendas.
Also worth visiting are the Sun Yat-sen Museum and the Coastal Defence Museum, which was a fort which failed to defend Hong Kong against the Japanese.
When I first went to Hong Kong twenty years ago, the differences with the mainland were much starker. I took a train to the border at Lo Wu and tried to imagine standing there in 1968, with the barbarity and insanity of Maoist China just across the fence, and only the British flag protecting me from the most murderous dictatorship ever.
But I couldn't. It was a peaceful day.
A lot of people seem to have trouble telling the two apart. Trans people have gender issues.
But my frustration is when people refuse to accept that there is an enduring racist legacy from colonialism. To me, this is an absurd denial of a palpable truth.
Which is a real shame. Because when it comes to discussing how serious racism is today in the UK, how it manifests, what (if anything) can and should be done about it, this is a conversation that necessarily involves many shades of opinion. The racism debate is really important and needs different perspectives. About the only perspective it doesn't need is the one which starts from "there is no racist legacy from colonialism so we don't need to think or talk about that at all." That kills it stone dead.
And, btw, I extend the same dim view to the other extreme of "everything that's wrong about race relations in the here and now is because of slavery and Empire." But we hear less of that on here than we do the denial. Or it seems we do anyway. Perhaps I am projecting or noticing one more than the other. This is possible.
My Scottish ancestors were impoverished and made homeless by the clearances, so set off to the mines and farms of the Antipodes. They prospered there, and never forgot their roots. They did benefit though from having land that was cleared of aboriginals by the Empire. My Welsh ancestors moved to Manchester to work in the cotton Mills. Terrible working conditions, but working slave produced cotton, and selling it to an Indian Colony, where its own industry was penalised.
Victims or beneficiaries of Empire? A bit of both really, and I suspect the same is true of most Britons.
Labourlist boulton and co benedict brogan john redwood diary paul waugh at the standard. Red box peston tom harris .and so on and so forth. I never read any blogs anymore ....
Personally, I think it's a silly rule and all party leaders should be able to nominate anybody they like. If they choose to use a slot for someone who isn't a party hack, that's actually a good thing, not something to punish.
It seems to be clear that Mr Tegnell doesn't know his arse from his elbow.
Yet when there is mass immigration, it is the poor British who have to make massive adjustments to their disrupted way of life, compete with the newcomers for jobs and public services, while the old masters pontificate in luxury.
History is very complex, and consists of many shades of grey. All of us should be concerned about a certain Marxist conflict view of history that will end up pivoting on a crude racial divide between black and white, and end up fuelling further resentment and polarisation down the road.
That's so unhealthy that it shouldn't need me to point it out to (usually) very perceptive and intelligent posters.
Do you feel like giving me another view to work with?
Think we've done "Colonialism has not left a racist legacy."
As I said yesterday, if your Grandad was had over financially by someone exploiting him in tough times, who then built a business on the back of the profit he made out of Gramps, when you see the Grandson in a swish apartment his Daddy bought him, you're entitled to be aggrieved, and expect some understanding of why you feel that way.
For indyref2 to occur within the next 5 years two things need to occur, first the SNP and Greens need to win another majority at Holyrood next year and second Labour needs to win the 2024 UK general election.
What about white people who are European or Irish (non-English) ? What about those from council estates who have a unfashionable accent, who are characterised as "white trash", and not given opportunities or mentoring to succeed? What about the treatment of girls in care in Rotherham? What about white women or men who are dating (for example) a Muslim man or woman who hold very "traditional" views and are shunned by their families?
What about white people who might walk in the wrong part of a non-white neighbourhood, and be threatened?
You can say the incidence for black people is higher, and I'm sure it is, but to say White people almost never experience discrimination in the UK is totally incorrect.
It's too much.
There's an existing level of violence associated with Orange marches that if it were committed on eg Indy marches would have people like you prolapsing in righteous outrage.
In a normal summer I can hear through my kitchen window the plaintive notes of flute playing most weekends. Would your suggestion for ignoring it involve earplugs or a continual round of weekend breaks? You appear unsurprisingly ignorant of just how prevalent the culture is in the West of Scotland, and how much it's adherents desperately want not to be ignored.
How about "white advantage" as an alternative?
Term to describe the notion that however rich or poor they are a white person in England is far far less likely to suffer racial prejudice than a black one.
Gets rid of that "privilege" word which I sense is a turn-off with its misleading and inappropriate (for this issue) images of country houses and public schools and henley regattas etc etc.