First day of Furlough, its raining so lets watch Veep from the beginning. Don't have Sky so lets do a Now TV trial. Find that Now TV is incompatible with Firestick, Chromebook, HDMI, casting etc. Just like Apple TV it seems focused on making you buy their hardware.
Disney aren't out trying to hustle hardware. They have content. They want as many people to buy their content as humanly possible. Which means making it work on *everything*. So my household watches Disney on Firestick, on Xbox, on Android. Now tv? Need Sky, or their stick to watch it on a TV screen. Err no.
I don't know why it isn't on Fire. Might be to do with a dispute with Amazon since they're a rival broadcaster rather than trying to keep it on their devices alone. YouTube was off the fire stick for a long time for the same reason.
You can get Now TV from other sticks like eg a Roku stick.
1. Taking down statues and putting them into storage is very different from bulldozing the Colosseum. In one case, the artefact is preserved, in the other, it is not.
2. Within the bounds of the relevant laws (which it would appear have not been followed), it is clearly elected politicians who should choose which statues are on display. The mob doesn't get to overrule Bristol Council. Likewise, if (following proper procedures) the Mayor of London or Tower Hamlets (or whoever is responsible for the statue in Docklands) chooses to remove a statue of Mrs Thatcher or Mao or whoever, then that is there perogative. It's not like (see 1) that the statue is being destroyed. The elected politicians of the past got to choose which statues were on display, it seems odd that we should strip that right from the elected politicians of today.
3. Statues don't exist forever in a vacuum. Imagine if there was a statue of Jimmy Saville outside a children's hospital. Now, it may well have been that Jimmy was instrumental in getting the hospital built. Would any of us object to removing his statue? I was pretty shocked to discover there were Leopold II statues in existence, and I'm pretty sure that Leopold II was worse than Jimmy Saville.
I am not sure how to quantify relative evil.
On the face of it genocide might seem worse than the rape of a multiple underage quadriplegic girls in the dead of night at Stoke Mandeville Hospital but don't they both warrant full marks on a 1 to 10 scale?
Statues are motionless visitors from another time unable to perceive or adapt to the world as it unfolds around them. Ultimately they stand out as anachronistic reminders that serve no purpose, beyond asking the question why are they there.
Much like Boris and his government.
Should the Coliseum in Rome be bulldozed?
The Coliseum isn't a statue.
And pulling statues off plinths so they're no longer celebrated today isn't the same as bulldozing. What we put on our plinths today should be up to the people of today.
How many people died in an horrendously cruel way in the Coliseum?
This whatabouterism is just silly.
Its not at all, how many statues exist in the world of incredibly violent nasty people. Lets close the Briitish museum, lets hide all aspects of our past. Once you start with this past removal then everything must be removed.
You are arguing against an enemy that doesn't exist. Congratulations, with your wit and style and intelligence and bravado, you successfully beat a non-existent person in an argument.
Would you like a prize?
Yes, I would like all the statues that have been removed
Completely ignoring the fact that NZ is thousands of miles from nowhere with a population density of 1/15th of the UK.
I agree that the Government have got just about every single thing wrong in this crisis. But using NZ as an example is just dumb.
Only dumb to people who don't want to learn. But, OK, let's take Australia instead. One of the most urbanised societies on earth and 102 fatalities.
Edit. And incidentally NZ is also highly urbanised, with a slightly higher % of people living in urban areas than the UK.
Yep. Read my post. It said the Government got everything wrong.If you want examples of countries getting things right look closer to home at Germany, or even Ireland. They are far better examples with which to beat our Government.
But as I said - and as you seem to accept - using NZ as an example is really dumb.
Completely ignoring the fact that NZ is thousands of miles from nowhere with a population density of 1/15th of the UK.
I agree that the Government have got just about every single thing wrong in this crisis. But using NZ as an example is just dumb.
Only dumb to people who don't want to learn. But, OK, let's take Australia instead. One of the most urbanised societies on earth and 102 fatalities.
Edit. And incidentally NZ is also highly urbanised, with a slightly higher % of people living in urban areas than the UK.
Yep. Read my post. It said the Government got everything wrong.If you want examples of countries getting things right look closer to home at Germany, or even Ireland. They are far better examples with which to beat our Government.
But as I said - and as you seem to accept - using NZ as an example is really dumb.
I don't accept that at all for the very good reasons I have already given.
First day of Furlough, its raining so lets watch Veep from the beginning. Don't have Sky so lets do a Now TV trial. Find that Now TV is incompatible with Firestick, Chromebook, HDMI, casting etc. Just like Apple TV it seems focused on making you buy their hardware.
Disney aren't out trying to hustle hardware. They have content. They want as many people to buy their content as humanly possible. Which means making it work on *everything*. So my household watches Disney on Firestick, on Xbox, on Android. Now tv? Need Sky, or their stick to watch it on a TV screen. Err no.
I don't know why it isn't on Fire. Might be to do with a dispute with Amazon since they're a rival broadcaster rather than trying to keep it on their devices alone. YouTube was off the fire stick for a long time for the same reason.
You can get Now TV from other sticks like eg a Roku stick.
Apparently you can download it to a Samsung TV. Except that I have an LG TV - which is blocked. And its from 2008 so isn't smart... I still don't get it. You have a whole pile of content, surely the idea is sell as many subs as possible and that means making it work on platforms. Hey ho, happy not to pay them any money.
I was trained as an historian and was taught that to come to any kind of opinion on the past you have to study as many sources as possible and make your judgment accordingly. A source may exist unchanging for a very long time but how people view it and react to it will change down the ages, which is only right and proper. Whether you react to it with approval or horror it's important that the source continue to exist for future generations to interpret. Remove the source and you remove the ability to view the past as people saw it at the time. That's all I'm saying
Good thing the sources aren't being removed then. Statues aren't sources, if you want to look at source materials to learn more about these slave traders there's plenty of materials available to look at.
Statues can be sources. Anything can be an historical source, depending on what you use it for.
For example, the statue of Colston could be used a source to show how the corporation of late nineteenth century Bristol didn’t care about its slaving past.
And that’s even before I go into art history.
It can be, so it can be fished out of the river and put in a museum where that can be explained in detail if anyone wants to do that.
No need for it to be on a plinth to do that.
Sighs.
The fact it was on that plinth, in that location, is part of the context. As most people in Bristol understood.
That’s why I’ve been saying the solution is to leave it there and put a bigger statue of Paul Stephenson and his fellow boycott organisers opposite, with a series of information boards in between.
But there’s no explaining it to some people.
yeah, I cannot see beyond building up more statues, memorials and public works of art.
Why did someone in government spend two days briefing that pubs would be able to reopen on 22nd June, only for the Business Sec then to say they would not open until 4th July at earliest?
Because the Conservative government is profoundly incompetent. They seem to be taking the Westminster and Whitehall culture of incompetence to new heights. Or depths.
Completely ignoring the fact that NZ is thousands of miles from nowhere with a population density of 1/15th of the UK.
I agree that the Government have got just about every single thing wrong in this crisis. But using NZ as an example is just dumb.
Only dumb to people who don't want to learn. But, OK, let's take Australia instead. One of the most urbanised societies on earth and 102 fatalities.
Edit. And incidentally NZ is also highly urbanised, with a slightly higher % of people living in urban areas than the UK.
Yep. Read my post. It said the Government got everything wrong.If you want examples of countries getting things right look closer to home at Germany, or even Ireland. They are far better examples with which to beat our Government.
But as I said - and as you seem to accept - using NZ as an example is really dumb.
I don't accept that at all for the very good reasons I have already given.
You gave no (valid) reasons. You just changed your example.
(Technically the tweet is wrong, it wasn't the Belgian Congo until 1910, until then being a personal possession of Leopold II)
Belgium is a very good example of the perverse nature of this current debate. I was talking yesterday to a Belgian friend of mine who left school something like 8 or 10 years ago. He said that even then, well into the 21st century, his school taught almost nothing about Leopold and the Congo genocide. If it was mentioned at all it was in the context of how colonialism is bad generally rather than anything specific about what Belgium did.
So whilst I fully understand the move to get rid of statues of Leopold and am surprised they even exist, I do get the impression that it is something akin to displacement activity designed to avoid a proper programme of confronting what happened in Belgium's name in the past.
At least in Britain we do teach our secondary school kids quite extensively on Empire and look at both the good and bad aspects of it as well as the drivers behind it.
Wasn't it rather Leopold personally (who of course derived his ability to do so from his position) rather than Belgium officially? As I recall when the Belgian state got involved to take away his private possession it was in attempt to curb the worst of his abuses.
Agreed. If we come away from this episode with a better understanding of our past and a renewed desire to end discrimination and improve the life chances of everyone then it will have been worth upsetting the Daily Mail. Actually, upsetting the Daily Mail is a worthy goal in itself, so it's a win-win.
How do you have a better understanding of the past ? You've just erased it.
Its not been erased, the past is still the past. We're talking more about the past so the past is still there, still able to be learnt about.
Removing statues from display doesn't erase the past.
English middle class bollocks. You re-arrange the artwork and claim tg have stopped discrimination.
I don't think Ive chuckled as much in ages as when I saw the Oxford protests.
A sea of white privileged faces protesting about white privilege, you couldn't make it up.
All pretending they care about the life chances of black people.
Patronising, nauseous, ghastly
How do you know they don't "care about the life chances of black people".
That's a pretty nasty slur.
But accurate.
You wouldn't like it if I made baseless slurs against you.
I get them on here often enough from the Remainer tossers (as do you). Why should I not throw some back. Besides with my daughter having to put up with these wankers at university at the moment I am seeing first hand exactly what their priorities are (or rather second hand as it is all through remote learning of course). Very few of them care about - or at least talk about - making life better for minorities. It is all about smashing the system, anti capitalism and how awful Thatcher/Boris/Trump or any other leader to the right of Stalin are.
That will be the case for some people, not others.
Just as some Brexiteers voted for Brexit because they wanted to get rid of all immigration, but that wasn't what Brexit is about.
Don't judge a campaign by a few extremists on its fringe.
Good to see a touch of class on PB this morning with the reproduction of one of Shelley's finest short poems. Here's another one on a similar theme, the fall of grreat men from power. No statue involved but nevertheless a reminder of our changing views of the once great and noble.
It's by Ezra Pound. Enjoy.
THE RETURN
See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering!
See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened; As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back; These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe," inviolable.
Gods of the wingèd shoe! With them the silver hounds, sniffing the trace of air!
Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood.
1. Taking down statues and putting them into storage is very different from bulldozing the Colosseum. In one case, the artefact is preserved, in the other, it is not.
2. Within the bounds of the relevant laws (which it would appear have not been followed), it is clearly elected politicians who should choose which statues are on display. The mob doesn't get to overrule Bristol Council. Likewise, if (following proper procedures) the Mayor of London or Tower Hamlets (or whoever is responsible for the statue in Docklands) chooses to remove a statue of Mrs Thatcher or Mao or whoever, then that is there perogative. It's not like (see 1) that the statue is being destroyed. The elected politicians of the past got to choose which statues were on display, it seems odd that we should strip that right from the elected politicians of today.
3. Statues don't exist forever in a vacuum. Imagine if there was a statue of Jimmy Saville outside a children's hospital. Now, it may well have been that Jimmy was instrumental in getting the hospital built. Would any of us object to removing his statue? I was pretty shocked to discover there were Leopold II statues in existence, and I'm pretty sure that Leopold II was worse than Jimmy Saville.
Good points.
(except that statues probably would last for ever in a vacuum).
BBC is axing series from i player for blacking up.. i guess thsts thecend for Love thy Neighbour then.
There was a discussion about this topic on Radio 5 this morning. There was a freelance journalist who disliked Little Britain's depiction of black, gay, and disabled characters. She came out with this statement that "comedy should not be allowed to be offensive".
There aren't going to be many laughs in this brave new world.
Agreed. If we come away from this episode with a better understanding of our past and a renewed desire to end discrimination and improve the life chances of everyone then it will have been worth upsetting the Daily Mail. Actually, upsetting the Daily Mail is a worthy goal in itself, so it's a win-win.
How do you have a better understanding of the past ? You've just erased it.
Its not been erased, the past is still the past. We're talking more about the past so the past is still there, still able to be learnt about.
Removing statues from display doesn't erase the past.
English middle class bollocks. You re-arrange the artwork and claim tg have stopped discrimination.
I don't think Ive chuckled as much in ages as when I saw the Oxford protests.
A sea of white privileged faces protesting about white privilege, you couldn't make it up.
All pretending they care about the life chances of black people.
Patronising, nauseous, ghastly
How do you know they don't "care about the life chances of black people".
That's a pretty nasty slur.
But accurate.
You wouldn't like it if I made baseless slurs against you.
I get them on here often enough from the Remainer tossers (as do you). Why should I not throw some back. Besides with my daughter having to put up with these wankers at university at the moment I am seeing first hand exactly what their priorities are (or rather second hand as it is all through remote learning of course). Very few of them care about - or at least talk about - making life better for minorities. It is all about smashing the system, anti capitalism and how awful Thatcher/Boris/Trump or any other leader to the right of Stalin are.
That will be the case for some people, not others.
Just as some Brexiteers voted for Brexit because they wanted to get rid of all immigration, but that wasn't what Brexit is about.
Don't judge a campaign by a few extremists on its fringe.
That's exactly what we're being asked to do.
We're being asked to accept that they are representative of all black people.
First they came for the statues. Then they came for the old films.
yeah, but then they'll stop.
They pinky promised.
Yes, it's a slippery slope, and it's one we are all standing on. You can decide, like Nigel Farage, to be outraged at the removal of statues of slave traders and genocidal dictators. Or you can draw your line somewhere else.
I've made a suggestion in the thread header where else you might draw the line. I'm sure there are other points too. Perhaps you might suggest one.
BBC is axing series from i player for blacking up.. i guess thsts thecend for Love thy Neighbour then.
There was a discussion about this topic on Radio 5 this morning. There was a freelance journalist who disliked Little Britain's depiction of black, gay, and disabled characters. She came out with this statement that "comedy should not be allowed to be offensive".
There aren't going to be many laughs in this brave new world.
I look forward to the BBC cleansing their archives of the mountains of anti-Irish, anti-Scottish and anti-Welsh material.
There were some questions on the last thread about whether the Robert Milligan statue was part of the Grade I listing of the adjacent buildingS.
The answer is yes. Pure and simple. It’s part of a site that is listed, and making changes to such a site without listed buildings consent is an offence. Listing is here.
1) As there seems a non-trivial risk that if it hadn’t been removed it would have been illegally torn down, there might be a plea of necessity for removing it and placing it into storage;
2) Historic England have been clearly been intimidated by the violence of these mobs (see this statement on Colston’s statue) and are in any case in my experience highly ineffective. So I do not believe they will be taken steps to order it be put back up.
Therefore, conclusions:
1) Proper channels have not been followed in this case (we can be sure of that as there won’t have been time) and a council with a JCB have technically acted as illegally as a mob of violent anarchists;
Agreed. If we come away from this episode with a better understanding of our past and a renewed desire to end discrimination and improve the life chances of everyone then it will have been worth upsetting the Daily Mail. Actually, upsetting the Daily Mail is a worthy goal in itself, so it's a win-win.
How do you have a better understanding of the past ? You've just erased it.
Its not been erased, the past is still the past. We're talking more about the past so the past is still there, still able to be learnt about.
Removing statues from display doesn't erase the past.
English middle class bollocks. You re-arrange the artwork and claim tg have stopped discrimination.
I don't think Ive chuckled as much in ages as when I saw the Oxford protests.
A sea of white privileged faces protesting about white privilege, you couldn't make it up.
All pretending they care about the life chances of black people.
Patronising, nauseous, ghastly
How do you know they don't "care about the life chances of black people".
That's a pretty nasty slur.
But accurate.
You wouldn't like it if I made baseless slurs against you.
I get them on here often enough from the Remainer tossers (as do you). Why should I not throw some back. Besides with my daughter having to put up with these wankers at university at the moment I am seeing first hand exactly what their priorities are (or rather second hand as it is all through remote learning of course). Very few of them care about - or at least talk about - making life better for minorities. It is all about smashing the system, anti capitalism and how awful Thatcher/Boris/Trump or any other leader to the right of Stalin are.
That will be the case for some people, not others.
Just as some Brexiteers voted for Brexit because they wanted to get rid of all immigration, but that wasn't what Brexit is about.
Don't judge a campaign by a few extremists on its fringe.
That's exactly what we're being asked to do.
We're being asked to accept that they are representative of all black people.
I'd like to see the evidence of that.
Its racist to suggest anything is representative of all black people.
Nor is that what I think you're being asked to accept.
Why did someone in government spend two days briefing that pubs would be able to reopen on 22nd June, only for the Business Sec then to say they would not open until 4th July at earliest?
Because the Conservative government is profoundly incompetent. They seem to be taking the Westminster and Whitehall culture of incompetence to new heights. Or depths.
Three weeks ago you were posting tweets of how stupid it was to consider sending kids back to school
Scott is not a government minister.
Government ministers are expected to be considered, consistent and competent. They are not. That matters.
Scott is just a guy on a blog. We don’t really have much expectation.
The point is no matter what the Governemnt did Scott would post a tweet criticising them. If they had decided yesterday that the kids can all go back to school how many tweets would Scott have posted criticising that decision.
Agreed. If we come away from this episode with a better understanding of our past and a renewed desire to end discrimination and improve the life chances of everyone then it will have been worth upsetting the Daily Mail. Actually, upsetting the Daily Mail is a worthy goal in itself, so it's a win-win.
How do you have a better understanding of the past ? You've just erased it.
Its not been erased, the past is still the past. We're talking more about the past so the past is still there, still able to be learnt about.
Removing statues from display doesn't erase the past.
English middle class bollocks. You re-arrange the artwork and claim tg have stopped discrimination.
I don't think Ive chuckled as much in ages as when I saw the Oxford protests.
A sea of white privileged faces protesting about white privilege, you couldn't make it up.
All pretending they care about the life chances of black people.
Patronising, nauseous, ghastly
How do you know they don't "care about the life chances of black people".
That's a pretty nasty slur.
But accurate.
You wouldn't like it if I made baseless slurs against you.
I get them on here often enough from the Remainer tossers (as do you). Why should I not throw some back. Besides with my daughter having to put up with these wankers at university at the moment I am seeing first hand exactly what their priorities are (or rather second hand as it is all through remote learning of course). Very few of them care about - or at least talk about - making life better for minorities. It is all about smashing the system, anti capitalism and how awful Thatcher/Boris/Trump or any other leader to the right of Stalin are.
You seem quite angry, Richard. Lockdown not treating you too well. Perhaps find time to take a break and chill out. Perhaps give yourself a timeout as you did last time. Not everyone's an enemy, you know and enjoyable rhetoric and debating style as it is, I can see that it's affecting you.
(Technically the tweet is wrong, it wasn't the Belgian Congo until 1910, until then being a personal possession of Leopold II)
Belgium is a very good example of the perverse nature of this current debate. I was talking yesterday to a Belgian friend of mine who left school something like 8 or 10 years ago. He said that even then, well into the 21st century, his school taught almost nothing about Leopold and the Congo genocide. If it was mentioned at all it was in the context of how colonialism is bad generally rather than anything specific about what Belgium did.
So whilst I fully understand the move to get rid of statues of Leopold and am surprised they even exist, I do get the impression that it is something akin to displacement activity designed to avoid a proper programme of confronting what happened in Belgium's name in the past.
At least in Britain we do teach our secondary school kids quite extensively on Empire and look at both the good and bad aspects of it as well as the drivers behind it.
Wasn't it rather Leopold personally (who of course derived his ability to do so from his position) rather than Belgium officially? As I recall when the Belgian state got involved to take away his private possession it was in attempt to curb the worst of his abuses.
I can't really support that as a defence. It would be like trying to separate the actions of the Queen from those of the British state. The King was supported in his actions by the Force Publique which was a military/police force set up by the Belgian Government which included serving Belgian troops. Much of the money he made was spent on public building works in Belgium.
It would be like claiming the British were not responsible for anything that happened in India prior to 1858 because legally it was run by the East India Company. In neither case does it really wash.
At the same time, those unions and leftwingers who were bleating about the need for guaranteed safety for teachers and pupils have got what they wanted. You can't have a guarantee because it's an airborne infectious disease we don't really understand. Now they're complaining about what's happened.
The Government should've bit the bullet. But this does remind me of gambling shop job losses. Everyone approved of the FOBT stakes being slashed by about 98%, everyone forecast job losses, yet when they happened the BBC et al whined about 'unforeseen consequences' and attacked the Government on that basis.
Those in power are incompetent and those in opposition are getting on their knees before a mob of vandals.
I was trained as an historian and was taught that to come to any kind of opinion on the past you have to study as many sources as possible and make your judgment accordingly. A source may exist unchanging for a very long time but how people view it and react to it will change down the ages, which is only right and proper. Whether you react to it with approval or horror it's important that the source continue to exist for future generations to interpret. Remove the source and you remove the ability to view the past as people saw it at the time. That's all I'm saying
Good thing the sources aren't being removed then. Statues aren't sources, if you want to look at source materials to learn more about these slave traders there's plenty of materials available to look at.
Statues can be sources. Anything can be an historical source, depending on what you use it for.
For example, the statue of Colston could be used a source to show how the corporation of late nineteenth century Bristol didn’t care about its slaving past.
And that’s even before I go into art history.
It can be, so it can be fished out of the river and put in a museum where that can be explained in detail if anyone wants to do that.
No need for it to be on a plinth to do that.
Sighs.
The fact it was on that plinth, in that location, is part of the context. As most people in Bristol understood.
That’s why I’ve been saying the solution is to leave it there and put a bigger statue of Paul Stephenson and his fellow boycott organisers opposite, with a series of information boards in between.
But there’s no explaining it to some people.
It's remarkable how some people think they understand the people of Bristol better than the people of Bristol.
Three weeks ago you were posting tweets of how stupid it was to consider sending kids back to school
Scott is not a government minister.
Government ministers are expected to be considered, consistent and competent. They are not. That matters.
Scott is just a guy on a blog. We don’t really have much expectation.
The point is no matter what the Governemnt did Scott would post a tweet criticising them. If they had decided yesterday that the kids can all go back to school how mat tweets would Scott have posted criticising that decision.
Oh, and you Tories are impeccably scrupulous in your polite, constructive, nuanced, reasoned criticism of Sturgeon, Drakeford, Starmer etc. You would never dream of just criticising them for the sake of it.
Completely ignoring the fact that NZ is thousands of miles from nowhere with a population density of 1/15th of the UK.
I agree that the Government have got just about every single thing wrong in this crisis. But using NZ as an example is just dumb.
Only dumb to people who don't want to learn. But, OK, let's take Australia instead. One of the most urbanised societies on earth and 102 fatalities.
Edit. And incidentally NZ is also highly urbanised, with a slightly higher % of people living in urban areas than the UK.
Yep. Read my post. It said the Government got everything wrong.If you want examples of countries getting things right look closer to home at Germany, or even Ireland. They are far better examples with which to beat our Government.
But as I said - and as you seem to accept - using NZ as an example is really dumb.
I don't accept that at all for the very good reasons I have already given.
You gave no (valid) reasons. You just changed your example.
And you write no (truthful) statements. I didn't change my example. I added one.
As this is boring, I will make one substantive point here. For the purposes of the epidemic, it doesn't matter if countries have vast areas of emptiness. There's no-one there to catch the disease. What matters is where people do actually live. Urbanisation is the key measure, not population density.
I was trained as an historian and was taught that to come to any kind of opinion on the past you have to study as many sources as possible and make your judgment accordingly. A source may exist unchanging for a very long time but how people view it and react to it will change down the ages, which is only right and proper. Whether you react to it with approval or horror it's important that the source continue to exist for future generations to interpret. Remove the source and you remove the ability to view the past as people saw it at the time. That's all I'm saying
Good thing the sources aren't being removed then. Statues aren't sources, if you want to look at source materials to learn more about these slave traders there's plenty of materials available to look at.
Statues can be sources. Anything can be an historical source, depending on what you use it for.
For example, the statue of Colston could be used a source to show how the corporation of late nineteenth century Bristol didn’t care about its slaving past.
And that’s even before I go into art history.
It can be, so it can be fished out of the river and put in a museum where that can be explained in detail if anyone wants to do that.
No need for it to be on a plinth to do that.
Sighs.
The fact it was on that plinth, in that location, is part of the context. As most people in Bristol understood.
That’s why I’ve been saying the solution is to leave it there and put a bigger statue of Paul Stephenson and his fellow boycott organisers opposite, with a series of information boards in between.
But there’s no explaining it to some people.
It's remarkable how some people think they understand the people of Bristol better than the people of Bristol.
The people of Bristol can decide what happens next. Their choice.
If this is the moment in time when the UK says "we don't want statues of slave traders in our public spaces, or them celebrated via monuments" I can live with it. Howsoever it comes around.
Of course I realise that this is a particularly difficult path to navigate because we have the example of Gerry Adams/Nelson Mandela and times change and one man's freedom fighter, etc. But I think history is on the side of the statue bringer downers.
After all even the Vorticist manifesto in BLAST entreated the suffragettes to draw the line at destroying art in galleries.
The fact that it seems to be mainly or many crusties doing it? I won't let that interfere with my view.
Agreed. If we come away from this episode with a better understanding of our past and a renewed desire to end discrimination and improve the life chances of everyone then it will have been worth upsetting the Daily Mail. Actually, upsetting the Daily Mail is a worthy goal in itself, so it's a win-win.
How do you have a better understanding of the past ? You've just erased it.
Its not been erased, the past is still the past. We're talking more about the past so the past is still there, still able to be learnt about.
Removing statues from display doesn't erase the past.
English middle class bollocks. You re-arrange the artwork and claim tg have stopped discrimination.
I don't think Ive chuckled as much in ages as when I saw the Oxford protests.
A sea of white privileged faces protesting about white privilege, you couldn't make it up.
All pretending they care about the life chances of black people.
Patronising, nauseous, ghastly
How do you know they don't "care about the life chances of black people".
That's a pretty nasty slur.
But accurate.
You wouldn't like it if I made baseless slurs against you.
I get them on here often enough from the Remainer tossers (as do you). Why should I not throw some back. Besides with my daughter having to put up with these wankers at university at the moment I am seeing first hand exactly what their priorities are (or rather second hand as it is all through remote learning of course). Very few of them care about - or at least talk about - making life better for minorities. It is all about smashing the system, anti capitalism and how awful Thatcher/Boris/Trump or any other leader to the right of Stalin are.
You seem quite angry, Richard. Lockdown not treating you too well. Perhaps find time to take a break and chill out. Perhaps give yourself a timeout as you did last time. Not everyone's an enemy, you know and enjoyable rhetoric and debating style as it is, I can see that it's affecting you.
I am not angry at all. In fact I am absolutely loving lockdown. I get to work from home with my family around me and have several acres of flower meadow and woodland of my own to wander through. To be honest from a purely personal point of view I would like lockdown to go on permanently. I am genuinely enjoying pricking the pompous idiocy of those who think any of these UK demonstrations are really about making things better for ethnic minorities.
There were some questions on the last thread about whether the Robert Milligan statue was part of the Grade I listing of the adjacent buildingS.
The answer is yes. Pure and simple. It’s part of a site that is listed, and making changes to such a site without listed buildings consent is an offence. Listing is here.
1) As there seems a non-trivial risk that if it hadn’t been removed it would have been illegally torn down, there might be a plea of necessity for removing it and placing it into storage;
2) Historic England have been clearly been intimidated by the violence of these mobs (see this statement on Colston’s statue) and are in any case in my experience highly ineffective. So I do not believe they will be taken steps to order it be put back up.
Therefore, conclusions:
1) Proper channels have not been followed in this case (we can be sure of that as there won’t have been time) and a council with a JCB have technically acted as illegally as a mob of violent anarchists;
2) Nothing will be done about it.
I think that's right.
The statue isn't mentioned within the listing so it's actually irrelevant whether it stays or goes as at the date of the listing the statue wasn't there. Being honest, most conservation officers would be happy for recent additions to be removed.
Beyond that yes process should have been followed but hey the Mayor of London needed so news about himself as all the other news he's currently featuring in isn't good news about him.
Agreed. If we come away from this episode with a better understanding of our past and a renewed desire to end discrimination and improve the life chances of everyone then it will have been worth upsetting the Daily Mail. Actually, upsetting the Daily Mail is a worthy goal in itself, so it's a win-win.
How do you have a better understanding of the past ? You've just erased it.
Its not been erased, the past is still the past. We're talking more about the past so the past is still there, still able to be learnt about.
Removing statues from display doesn't erase the past.
English middle class bollocks. You re-arrange the artwork and claim tg have stopped discrimination.
I don't think Ive chuckled as much in ages as when I saw the Oxford protests.
A sea of white privileged faces protesting about white privilege, you couldn't make it up.
All pretending they care about the life chances of black people.
Patronising, nauseous, ghastly
How do you know they don't "care about the life chances of black people".
That's a pretty nasty slur.
But accurate.
You wouldn't like it if I made baseless slurs against you.
I get them on here often enough from the Remainer tossers (as do you). Why should I not throw some back. Besides with my daughter having to put up with these wankers at university at the moment I am seeing first hand exactly what their priorities are (or rather second hand as it is all through remote learning of course). Very few of them care about - or at least talk about - making life better for minorities. It is all about smashing the system, anti capitalism and how awful Thatcher/Boris/Trump or any other leader to the right of Stalin are.
You seem quite angry, Richard. Lockdown not treating you too well. Perhaps find time to take a break and chill out. Perhaps give yourself a timeout as you did last time. Not everyone's an enemy, you know and enjoyable rhetoric and debating style as it is, I can see that it's affecting you.
I am not angry at all. In fact I am absolutely loving lockdown. I get to work from home with my family around me and have several acres of flower meadow and woodland of my own to wander through. To be honest from a purely personal point of view I would like lockdown to go on permanently. I am genuinely enjoying pricking the pompous idiocy of those who think any of these UK demonstrations are really about making things better for ethnic minorities.
You would have to be sub-human for you not to be affected by the bile you throw out regularly. As I say, for me on an internet chatroom all is well and you can go for it - tossers and morons and all the rest. But sitting there, surrounded by your flower meadows and woodland, and with your family close by, to be so insulting and potty-mouthed to people you don't know on the internet?
A lot of developing countries are still in their first one too.
I suspect that we will just have a single one, but with a long fat, bumpy tail. I dont think that it will spread again here like Feb and early March. People are taking at least some social distancing measures seriously.
That's arguable. If you look at the figures for some of those states, case numbers had trended downwards thanks to control measures, and have started to spike back up again.
Although pretty much in agreement with Alastair that's a lot of words to state the obvious. There is no place for a statue idolising a slave trader in modern Britain.
Toppling the tyrant has done more to wake up people to our mostly disgraceful colonial past than any history lessons of the last 100 years.
I suggest everyone watches Michael Portillo's Empire Journeys currently showing on Channel 5. It's deeply shocking, perhaps all the more so because delivered in such a gentle way.
Britain was built on slavery, oppression, abuse, violence and rape of people and land. There were a few lone souls who campaigned against the perpetrators but we shouldn't latch onto them too quickly in order to salve our consciences.
Abandoning the return to school was yesterday's change of direction. Trying to quietly drop the 'two metre rule' looks like being today's.
Nobody minds decisive changes in policy based on new evidence. But that isn't what we are getting.
I don’t think in fairness that the government is changing policy.
To call the muddle, ad hoc decisions, spin and misinformation up to now a ‘policy’ would be to dignify it.
And if you don’t have a policy, you can’t change it.
Whatever, there's a lack of clear leadership, a lack of clear direction, and what appears to be either recommended or mandatory on one day can easily change the day after.
Belgium is a very good example of the perverse nature of this current debate. I was talking yesterday to a Belgian friend of mine who left school something like 8 or 10 years ago. He said that even then, well into the 21st century, his school taught almost nothing about Leopold and the Congo genocide. If it was mentioned at all it was in the context of how colonialism is bad generally rather than anything specific about what Belgium did.
I went to school in Belgium for six years for the whole of enseignement primaire. Unlike Johnson I didn't go the British School of Brussels but to the local réseau de la Communauté française. It was an absolutely outstanding level of education but I don't remember learning anything specific about the Belgian Congo.
yeah, I mean, I know this recent madness not going to stop and I know more and more aspects of our life will come under the poisonous attention of the mob, but I genuinely didn't expect someone to admit to it as brazenly and callously as that.
Statues of those who derived most of their wealth and status from the slave trade should indeed be moved to a museum.
Others like Nelson, Churchill and Drake who were notable mainly for other achievements should be kept
Statues of those who derived most of their wealth and status from the slave trade should indeed be moved to a museum.
can you actually build a roof over the whole of Spain ?
Oh come on. It's not that slippery a slope. Sure we are going to have arguments about Gladstone, Churchill and Cromwell - but self-declared slave traders is another kettle of fish.
There were some questions on the last thread about whether the Robert Milligan statue was part of the Grade I listing of the adjacent buildingS.
The answer is yes. Pure and simple. It’s part of a site that is listed, and making changes to such a site without listed buildings consent is an offence. Listing is here.
1) As there seems a non-trivial risk that if it hadn’t been removed it would have been illegally torn down, there might be a plea of necessity for removing it and placing it into storage;
2) Historic England have been clearly been intimidated by the violence of these mobs (see this statement on Colston’s statue) and are in any case in my experience highly ineffective. So I do not believe they will be taken steps to order it be put back up.
Therefore, conclusions:
1) Proper channels have not been followed in this case (we can be sure of that as there won’t have been time) and a council with a JCB have technically acted as illegally as a mob of violent anarchists;
2) Nothing will be done about it.
I think that's right.
The statue isn't mentioned within the listing so it's actually irrelevant whether it stays or goes as at the date of the listing the statue wasn't there.
From the listing:
A stone dedication plaque, originally placed on No. 5 Warehouse, has been re-sited on the western flank wall of the Dock Office building. The plaque describes the building of the West India Docks as part of 'an undertaking which under the favour of God, shall contribute Stablity, Increase, and Ornament to British Commerce.' A bronze statue of Robert Milligan (c1746-1809, statue 1812), original promoter of the Docks, stands on the North Quay outside the entrance to No. 1 Warehouse, the Museum in Docklands.
Agreed. If we come away from this episode with a better understanding of our past and a renewed desire to end discrimination and improve the life chances of everyone then it will have been worth upsetting the Daily Mail. Actually, upsetting the Daily Mail is a worthy goal in itself, so it's a win-win.
How do you have a better understanding of the past ? You've just erased it.
Its not been erased, the past is still the past. We're talking more about the past so the past is still there, still able to be learnt about.
Removing statues from display doesn't erase the past.
English middle class bollocks. You re-arrange the artwork and claim tg have stopped discrimination.
I don't think Ive chuckled as much in ages as when I saw the Oxford protests.
A sea of white privileged faces protesting about white privilege, you couldn't make it up.
All pretending they care about the life chances of black people.
Patronising, nauseous, ghastly
How do you know they don't "care about the life chances of black people".
That's a pretty nasty slur.
But accurate.
Are you geniunely claiming that every middle class white person that went to the demonstration doesn't "care about the life chances of black people"?
I mean, if you want to argue there are better ways of achieving that goal than toppling statues or going down on one knee, I'd be right beside you. But my experience is - just like Oxbridge communists of the 1930s - that those young, overly sincere, people do feel that the world is unfair on certain minorities.
And I think it's genuinely appalling to doubt people's motives without any evidence at all. It would be like if I accused you of not really believing in wanting to leave the EU for principled reasons, and it was all because it was the trendy thing to do in your part of the country.
I wouldn't doubt your convictions, and I think it's unbelievably superior and rude and offensive, for you to doubt theirs.
Although pretty much in agreement with Alastair that's a lot of words to state the obvious. There is no place for a statue idolising a slave trader in modern Britain.
Toppling the tyrant has done more to wake up people to our mostly disgraceful colonial past than any history lessons of the last 100 years.
I suggest everyone watches Michael Portillo's Empire Journeys currently showing on Channel 5. It's deeply shocking, perhaps all the more so because delivered in such a gentle way.
Britain was built on slavery, oppression, abuse, violence and rape of people and land. There were a few lone souls who campaigned against the perpetrators but we shouldn't latch onto them too quickly in order to salve our consciences.
“ Britain was built on slavery, oppression, abuse, violence and rape of people and land.”
We’ve found the new BetterTogether2 slogan. IndyRef2 is a slam dunk for the Brit Nats.
Completely ignoring the fact that NZ is thousands of miles from nowhere with a population density of 1/15th of the UK.
I agree that the Government have got just about every single thing wrong in this crisis. But using NZ as an example is just dumb.
Only dumb to people who don't want to learn. But, OK, let's take Australia instead. One of the most urbanised societies on earth and 102 fatalities.
Edit. And incidentally NZ is also highly urbanised, with a slightly higher % of people living in urban areas than the UK.
Yep. Read my post. It said the Government got everything wrong.If you want examples of countries getting things right look closer to home at Germany, or even Ireland. They are far better examples with which to beat our Government.
But as I said - and as you seem to accept - using NZ as an example is really dumb.
I don't accept that at all for the very good reasons I have already given.
You gave no (valid) reasons. You just changed your example.
And you write no (truthful) statements. I didn't change my example. I added one.
As this is boring, I will make one substantive point here. For the purposes of the epidemic, it doesn't matter if countries have vast areas of emptiness. There's no-one there to catch the disease. What matters is where people do actually live. Urbanisation is the key measure, not population density.
Tell you what, you go visit Christchurch or Wellington and tell me how it compares in terms of 'urbanisation' with London, or Manchester or Birmingham. Or any other of dozens of cities in the UK or anywhere else in Europe.
Wellington has a population density equivalent to Eastbourne - lower than 80 other urban districts in England. There is simply no comparison.
This is turning into another national scandal now. We can reopen non-essential shops, but we can't open the schools and protect vulnerable children. It's a disgrace.
Statues are motionless visitors from another time unable to perceive or adapt to the world as it unfolds around them. Ultimately they stand out as anachronistic reminders that serve no purpose, beyond asking the question why are they there.
Much like Boris and his government.
Should the Coliseum in Rome be bulldozed?
The Coliseum isn't a statue.
And pulling statues off plinths so they're no longer celebrated today isn't the same as bulldozing. What we put on our plinths today should be up to the people of today.
How many people died in an horrendously cruel way in the Coliseum?
This whatabouterism is just silly.
Its not at all, how many statues exist in the world of incredibly violent nasty people. Lets close the Briitish museum, lets hide all aspects of our past. Once you start with this past removal then everything must be removed.
You are arguing against an enemy that doesn't exist. Congratulations, with your wit and style and intelligence and bravado, you successfully beat a non-existent person in an argument.
Would you like a prize?
Yes, I would like all the statues that have been removed
They're not yours. They're owned, by and large, by councils and municipalities.
Agreed. If we come away from this episode with a better understanding of our past and a renewed desire to end discrimination and improve the life chances of everyone then it will have been worth upsetting the Daily Mail. Actually, upsetting the Daily Mail is a worthy goal in itself, so it's a win-win.
How do you have a better understanding of the past ? You've just erased it.
Its not been erased, the past is still the past. We're talking more about the past so the past is still there, still able to be learnt about.
Removing statues from display doesn't erase the past.
English middle class bollocks. You re-arrange the artwork and claim tg have stopped discrimination.
I don't think Ive chuckled as much in ages as when I saw the Oxford protests.
A sea of white privileged faces protesting about white privilege, you couldn't make it up.
All pretending they care about the life chances of black people.
Patronising, nauseous, ghastly
How do you know they don't "care about the life chances of black people".
That's a pretty nasty slur.
But accurate.
Are you geniunely claiming that every middle class white person that went to the demonstration doesn't "care about the life chances of black people"?
I mean, if you want to argue there are better ways of achieving that goal than toppling statues or going down on one knee, I'd be right beside you. But my experience is - just like Oxbridge communists of the 1930s - that those young, overly sincere, people do feel that the world is unfair on certain minorities.
And I think it's genuinely appalling to doubt people's motives without any evidence at all. It would be like if I accused you of not really believing in wanting to leave the EU for principled reasons, and it was all because it was the trendy thing to do in your part of the country.
I wouldn't doubt your convictions, and I think it's unbelievably superior and rude and offensive, for you to doubt theirs.
It is exactly the reverse. I am quite happy with the statues going. But yes I genuinely doubt the motives of the vast majority of those at these demonstrations in the UK. All you have to do is listen to them for a few minutes.
I see that the US is today overtaking Spain in confirmed population-adjusted virus infection totals, whilst Peru yesterday overtook the US. Of countries of any size, the top three are now Chile - Peru - USA
In terms of deaths per head Belgium is still top, then the UK and Spain.
In terms of overall deaths the US is top, then the UK then Brazil
Abandoning the return to school was yesterday's change of direction. Trying to quietly drop the 'two metre rule' looks like being today's.
Nobody minds decisive changes in policy based on new evidence. But that isn't what we are getting.
I don’t think in fairness that the government is changing policy.
To call the muddle, ad hoc decisions, spin and misinformation up to now a ‘policy’ would be to dignify it.
And if you don’t have a policy, you can’t change it.
Whatever, there's a lack of clear leadership, a lack of clear direction, and what appears to be either recommended or mandatory on one day can easily change the day after.
Its become a total shambles. R number. Schools. Pubs. 2m social distancing. Quarantine. Face masks.
It is a total mess. Has anyone any idea where we are going?
(Technically the tweet is wrong, it wasn't the Belgian Congo until 1910, until then being a personal possession of Leopold II)
Belgium is a very good example of the perverse nature of this current debate. I was talking yesterday to a Belgian friend of mine who left school something like 8 or 10 years ago. He said that even then, well into the 21st century, his school taught almost nothing about Leopold and the Congo genocide. If it was mentioned at all it was in the context of how colonialism is bad generally rather than anything specific about what Belgium did.
So whilst I fully understand the move to get rid of statues of Leopold and am surprised they even exist, I do get the impression that it is something akin to displacement activity designed to avoid a proper programme of confronting what happened in Belgium's name in the past.
At least in Britain we do teach our secondary school kids quite extensively on Empire and look at both the good and bad aspects of it as well as the drivers behind it.
Wasn't it rather Leopold personally (who of course derived his ability to do so from his position) rather than Belgium officially? As I recall when the Belgian state got involved to take away his private possession it was in attempt to curb the worst of his abuses.
I can't really support that as a defence. It would be like trying to separate the actions of the Queen from those of the British state. The King was supported in his actions by the Force Publique which was a military/police force set up by the Belgian Government which included serving Belgian troops. Much of the money he made was spent on public building works in Belgium.
It would be like claiming the British were not responsible for anything that happened in India prior to 1858 because legally it was run by the East India Company. In neither case does it really wash.
It is a *little* different, because (based on reading King Leopold's Ghost about 20 years ago) the Belgian body politic had some say in domestic affairs. There were representative bodies relating to Belgium.
Congo, by contrast, was completely Leoplold's bag. There was no body in Belgium that any any jurisdiction over it whatsoever.
Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but it seems a little different from the UK experience with the East India Company, where there were endless debates in Parliament.
Completely ignoring the fact that NZ is thousands of miles from nowhere with a population density of 1/15th of the UK.
I agree that the Government have got just about every single thing wrong in this crisis. But using NZ as an example is just dumb.
Only dumb to people who don't want to learn. But, OK, let's take Australia instead. One of the most urbanised societies on earth and 102 fatalities.
Edit. And incidentally NZ is also highly urbanised, with a slightly higher % of people living in urban areas than the UK.
Yep. Read my post. It said the Government got everything wrong.If you want examples of countries getting things right look closer to home at Germany, or even Ireland. They are far better examples with which to beat our Government.
But as I said - and as you seem to accept - using NZ as an example is really dumb.
I don't accept that at all for the very good reasons I have already given.
You gave no (valid) reasons. You just changed your example.
And you write no (truthful) statements. I didn't change my example. I added one.
As this is boring, I will make one substantive point here. For the purposes of the epidemic, it doesn't matter if countries have vast areas of emptiness. There's no-one there to catch the disease. What matters is where people do actually live. Urbanisation is the key measure, not population density.
Tell you what, you go visit Christchurch or Wellington and tell me how it compares in terms of 'urbanisation' with London, or Manchester or Birmingham. Or any other of dozens of cities in the UK or anywhere else in Europe.
Wellington has a population density equivalent to Eastbourne - lower than 80 other urban districts in England. There is simply no comparison.
Concentrations of density (and connections to the rest of the world) seem to matter more than raw density numbers. A big example of this would be New York State, which is less dense (significantly) than England, but has suffered far more than England has.
Belgium is a very good example of the perverse nature of this current debate. I was talking yesterday to a Belgian friend of mine who left school something like 8 or 10 years ago. He said that even then, well into the 21st century, his school taught almost nothing about Leopold and the Congo genocide. If it was mentioned at all it was in the context of how colonialism is bad generally rather than anything specific about what Belgium did.
I went to school in Belgium for six years for the whole of enseignement primaire. Unlike Johnson I didn't go the British School of Brussels but to the local réseau de la Communauté française. It was an absolutely outstanding level of education but I don't remember learning anything specific about the Belgian Congo.
That is the impression I got from my colleague as well.
By contrast I am currently helping my 12 year old son with his history and right now they are 'doing' Empire and have been for the last 5 or 6 weeks. Extensive detailed stuff from the school on India, The Scramble for Africa and slavery. Really well done using all sorts of different sources including the Paxman Empire series mentioned earlier by another poster. It is balanced and informative and doesn't shy away from highlighting the issues of British imperialism and a real credit to whoever put the curriculum together and the teachers trying to get it over in these circumstances.
This is turning into another national scandal now. We can reopen non-essential shops, but we can't open the schools and protect vulnerable children. It's a disgrace.
Have a look at twitter to see the number of people saying that it was ridiculous to send children back to school over the past couple of months, including all teaching unions, The Labour Party, headmasters, teachers, parents etc, etc. Now the Government has decided to take that course its a disgrace?
There were some questions on the last thread about whether the Robert Milligan statue was part of the Grade I listing of the adjacent buildingS.
The answer is yes. Pure and simple. It’s part of a site that is listed, and making changes to such a site without listed buildings consent is an offence. Listing is here.
1) As there seems a non-trivial risk that if it hadn’t been removed it would have been illegally torn down, there might be a plea of necessity for removing it and placing it into storage;
2) Historic England have been clearly been intimidated by the violence of these mobs (see this statement on Colston’s statue) and are in any case in my experience highly ineffective. So I do not believe they will be taken steps to order it be put back up.
Therefore, conclusions:
1) Proper channels have not been followed in this case (we can be sure of that as there won’t have been time) and a council with a JCB have technically acted as illegally as a mob of violent anarchists;
2) Nothing will be done about it.
I think that's right.
The statue isn't mentioned within the listing so it's actually irrelevant whether it stays or goes as at the date of the listing the statue wasn't there.
From the listing:
A stone dedication plaque, originally placed on No. 5 Warehouse, has been re-sited on the western flank wall of the Dock Office building. The plaque describes the building of the West India Docks as part of 'an undertaking which under the favour of God, shall contribute Stablity, Increase, and Ornament to British Commerce.' A bronze statue of Robert Milligan (c1746-1809, statue 1812), original promoter of the Docks, stands on the North Quay outside the entrance to No. 1 Warehouse, the Museum in Docklands.
Nope that's from the article describing the area as is - the actual reason for listing can be seen at the bottom in the REASONS FOR DESIGNATION area and that is the bit that is most important as it determines which bits you really care about.
Mind while the reasons for designation doesn't mention the statue the fact it says "Strong connection with the British slave trade adds to historical interest of buildings, the warehouses having been built for the express purpose of receiving goods produced by slaves on West Indian plantations. " justifies the statue remaining in situ...
Agreed. If we come away from this episode with a better understanding of our past and a renewed desire to end discrimination and improve the life chances of everyone then it will have been worth upsetting the Daily Mail. Actually, upsetting the Daily Mail is a worthy goal in itself, so it's a win-win.
How do you have a better understanding of the past ? You've just erased it.
Its not been erased, the past is still the past. We're talking more about the past so the past is still there, still able to be learnt about.
Removing statues from display doesn't erase the past.
English middle class bollocks. You re-arrange the artwork and claim tg have stopped discrimination.
I don't think Ive chuckled as much in ages as when I saw the Oxford protests.
A sea of white privileged faces protesting about white privilege, you couldn't make it up.
All pretending they care about the life chances of black people.
Patronising, nauseous, ghastly
How do you know they don't "care about the life chances of black people".
That's a pretty nasty slur.
But accurate.
You wouldn't like it if I made baseless slurs against you.
I get them on here often enough from the Remainer tossers (as do you). Why should I not throw some back. Besides with my daughter having to put up with these wankers at university at the moment I am seeing first hand exactly what their priorities are (or rather second hand as it is all through remote learning of course). Very few of them care about - or at least talk about - making life better for minorities. It is all about smashing the system, anti capitalism and how awful Thatcher/Boris/Trump or any other leader to the right of Stalin are.
You seem quite angry, Richard. Lockdown not treating you too well. Perhaps find time to take a break and chill out. Perhaps give yourself a timeout as you did last time. Not everyone's an enemy, you know and enjoyable rhetoric and debating style as it is, I can see that it's affecting you.
I am not angry at all. In fact I am absolutely loving lockdown. I get to work from home with my family around me and have several acres of flower meadow and woodland of my own to wander through. To be honest from a purely personal point of view I would like lockdown to go on permanently. I am genuinely enjoying pricking the pompous idiocy of those who think any of these UK demonstrations are really about making things better for ethnic minorities.
You would have to be sub-human for you not to be affected by the bile you throw out regularly. As I say, for me on an internet chatroom all is well and you can go for it - tossers and morons and all the rest. But sitting there, surrounded by your flower meadows and woodland, and with your family close by, to be so insulting and potty-mouthed to people you don't know on the internet?
Bespeaks of a deeper malaise, frankly.
Nothing you don't deserve considering your history on here.
Agreed. If we come away from this episode with a better understanding of our past and a renewed desire to end discrimination and improve the life chances of everyone then it will have been worth upsetting the Daily Mail. Actually, upsetting the Daily Mail is a worthy goal in itself, so it's a win-win.
How do you have a better understanding of the past ? You've just erased it.
Its not been erased, the past is still the past. We're talking more about the past so the past is still there, still able to be learnt about.
Removing statues from display doesn't erase the past.
English middle class bollocks. You re-arrange the artwork and claim tg have stopped discrimination.
I don't think Ive chuckled as much in ages as when I saw the Oxford protests.
A sea of white privileged faces protesting about white privilege, you couldn't make it up.
All pretending they care about the life chances of black people.
Patronising, nauseous, ghastly
How do you know they don't "care about the life chances of black people".
That's a pretty nasty slur.
But accurate.
Are you geniunely claiming that every middle class white person that went to the demonstration doesn't "care about the life chances of black people"?
I mean, if you want to argue there are better ways of achieving that goal than toppling statues or going down on one knee, I'd be right beside you. But my experience is - just like Oxbridge communists of the 1930s - that those young, overly sincere, people do feel that the world is unfair on certain minorities.
And I think it's genuinely appalling to doubt people's motives without any evidence at all. It would be like if I accused you of not really believing in wanting to leave the EU for principled reasons, and it was all because it was the trendy thing to do in your part of the country.
I wouldn't doubt your convictions, and I think it's unbelievably superior and rude and offensive, for you to doubt theirs.
It is exactly the reverse. I am quite happy with the statues going. But yes I genuinely doubt the motives of the vast majority of those at these demonstrations in the UK. All you have to do is listen to them for a few minutes.
Abandoning the return to school was yesterday's change of direction. Trying to quietly drop the 'two metre rule' looks like being today's.
Nobody minds decisive changes in policy based on new evidence. But that isn't what we are getting.
I don’t think in fairness that the government is changing policy.
To call the muddle, ad hoc decisions, spin and misinformation up to now a ‘policy’ would be to dignify it.
And if you don’t have a policy, you can’t change it.
Whatever, there's a lack of clear leadership, a lack of clear direction, and what appears to be either recommended or mandatory on one day can easily change the day after.
Its become a total shambles. R number. Schools. Pubs. 2m social distancing. Quarantine. Face masks.
It is a total mess. Has anyone any idea where we are going?
Look at today's mess, and just imagine it as something larger, with more obvious contradictions. Then double the mess again and I suspect you will be close to reality.
First they came for the statues. Then they came for the old films.
yeah, but then they'll stop.
They pinky promised.
I hope they won't stop.
We should never stop trying to improve the world.
wow, that's both quite brilliant and quite chilling at the same time.
We didn't start the fire It was always burning Since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No we didn't light it But we tried to fight it
I was on holiday in Sag Harbor (Long Island) with my kids and my mother-in-law about five years ago. On the High Street, there was a bald, podgy man with a couple of dogs. My kids and my mother-in-law ignored the man and gave the dogs much love and attention while my wife and I laughed about it.
As we walked away, saying thanks to the man, my wife said "you know who that was?"
"No," I said.
"Billy Joel".
Two minutes later, I'd Googled him, and it was indeed Billy Joel, and I hadn't said a word to him other than "thanks".
(Technically the tweet is wrong, it wasn't the Belgian Congo until 1910, until then being a personal possession of Leopold II)
Belgium is a very good example of the perverse nature of this current debate. I was talking yesterday to a Belgian friend of mine who left school something like 8 or 10 years ago. He said that even then, well into the 21st century, his school taught almost nothing about Leopold and the Congo genocide. If it was mentioned at all it was in the context of how colonialism is bad generally rather than anything specific about what Belgium did.
So whilst I fully understand the move to get rid of statues of Leopold and am surprised they even exist, I do get the impression that it is something akin to displacement activity designed to avoid a proper programme of confronting what happened in Belgium's name in the past.
At least in Britain we do teach our secondary school kids quite extensively on Empire and look at both the good and bad aspects of it as well as the drivers behind it.
Wasn't it rather Leopold personally (who of course derived his ability to do so from his position) rather than Belgium officially? As I recall when the Belgian state got involved to take away his private possession it was in attempt to curb the worst of his abuses.
I can't really support that as a defence. It would be like trying to separate the actions of the Queen from those of the British state. The King was supported in his actions by the Force Publique which was a military/police force set up by the Belgian Government which included serving Belgian troops. Much of the money he made was spent on public building works in Belgium.
It would be like claiming the British were not responsible for anything that happened in India prior to 1858 because legally it was run by the East India Company. In neither case does it really wash.
It is a *little* different, because (based on reading King Leopold's Ghost about 20 years ago) the Belgian body politic had some say in domestic affairs. There were representative bodies relating to Belgium.
Congo, by contrast, was completely Leoplold's bag. There was no body in Belgium that any any jurisdiction over it whatsoever.
Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but it seems a little different from the UK experience with the East India Company, where there were endless debates in Parliament.
I think that speaks more to the differences in the relationship overall between the King and Parliament in Belgium. But as I say, his own personal army down there was still set up by the Belgian Government and officered primarily by regular serving Belgian troops. He simply could not have done what he did without the support of the Belgian state.
Abandoning the return to school was yesterday's change of direction. Trying to quietly drop the 'two metre rule' looks like being today's.
Nobody minds decisive changes in policy based on new evidence. But that isn't what we are getting.
I don’t think in fairness that the government is changing policy.
To call the muddle, ad hoc decisions, spin and misinformation up to now a ‘policy’ would be to dignify it.
And if you don’t have a policy, you can’t change it.
Whatever, there's a lack of clear leadership, a lack of clear direction, and what appears to be either recommended or mandatory on one day can easily change the day after.
Its become a total shambles. R number. Schools. Pubs. 2m social distancing. Quarantine. Face masks.
It is a total mess. Has anyone any idea where we are going?
I do think increasingly that we have handled this whole thing worse than any other major country. Perhaps even worse than the US, in the sense that the US has followed a clear path of prioritising the economy over public health and that policy has seen some success on its own terms at least. We seem to have acted like a rabbit in the headlights, unable to either bring the virus properly under control or to protect the economy. Kids are out of school. Mass unemployment looms in the summer. No track or trace systems in place. No clarity on social distancing policy (thanks Dom). Government debt racking up. Quarantine for foreign arrivals introduced at precisely the time it's not needed. They can't even come up with a clear policy on pubs, an area where you would think the British would enjoy a competitive advantage. Utter shambles.
The sudden destruction or removal of statues and monuments generally happens when a nation has suffered defeat in war or been overturned by a revolution.
For this to happen in a few days either directly due to the actions of a mob or out of fear of them is disquieting because it betokens that kind of top-to-bottom upheaval.
In an democracy, the memorials of history don't just get destroyed or removed without the slightest hint of due process or democratic consent. I own a listed building, and I can't change the roof tiles without due process - but Khan gets to rip a Grade I-listed statue off its foundations by fiat? Rioters get to destroy a Grade-II listed statue because their feelings were hurt? No, that's not how it works in a civilized country.
Interesting. But I think @AlastairMeeks underplays the extent to which destruction of monuments can presage some rather more totalitarian and vile movements than simply people expressing outrage over honouring a historical figure.
The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, of Mosul, of parts of Palmyra, of Christian churches was not done because of a bit of outrage over the Romans holding slaves but because the attackers wanted to obliterate a country’s past and culture and also the people who held onto these things. It was an attempt to wipe out memory.
It was not an attempt to right wrongs but to wipe out. It was genocidal in intent. Ditto the Chinese destruction of Uighur buildings.
The same could be said of the English attack on churches and monasteries during the Reformation. It was an attempt - quite a successful one - to destroy Catholic England and the memory of that England and it led to the persecution of those who held onto that. Much of the wealth of the aristocracy was made from the looting that took place - both here and in Ireland.
Not wanting to have a statue glorifying a slave trader does not make one ISIS of course. But there is concern that what some of those demanding statues be pulled down want is not a better appreciation of our history but to pretend it didn’t happen. Do they really want understanding? Or obliteration? Do they understand the injunction about the sins of the father not being visited on the sons - ignorance of which justified Christian anti-semitism - when they demand that Gladstone be attacked because of what his father did?
Slavery happened. We need to understand our part in it and how it was understood, then and later. So putting things in museums is fine. Adding in plaques which explain rather than glorify is also ok. Remove if the local community want this. Also OK. But allow a mob to throw away - no.
If Bristol Council did not resolve the issue around the Colston statue it was because they allowed one small group to stymie the rewriting of the plaque. They should not have done so. They should not now allow a small group to stymie the decision of the local people to keep it - if that is what it is. Power has not changed in a democracy where people have voted for a local council and if people are frustrated with the slowness of democracy then they need to make it work better not ignore it.
India proved a noble prospect for Scots on the make. So much so, in fact, that as early as 1750 almost 40 per cent of the writers — or clerks — working for the company in Bengal were Scots. Thirty years later the proportion of Scots had risen to nearly half; this at a time when Scotland’s population was barely a sixth of England’s. Half of the East India Company’s regiments were raised in Scotland. There was no English Empire; it was a British enterprise and often a brutal and sinful one.
Agreed. If we come away from this episode with a better understanding of our past and a renewed desire to end discrimination and improve the life chances of everyone then it will have been worth upsetting the Daily Mail. Actually, upsetting the Daily Mail is a worthy goal in itself, so it's a win-win.
How do you have a better understanding of the past ? You've just erased it.
Its not been erased, the past is still the past. We're talking more about the past so the past is still there, still able to be learnt about.
Removing statues from display doesn't erase the past.
English middle class bollocks. You re-arrange the artwork and claim tg have stopped discrimination.
I don't think Ive chuckled as much in ages as when I saw the Oxford protests.
A sea of white privileged faces protesting about white privilege, you couldn't make it up.
All pretending they care about the life chances of black people.
Patronising, nauseous, ghastly
How do you know they don't "care about the life chances of black people".
That's a pretty nasty slur.
But accurate.
You wouldn't like it if I made baseless slurs against you.
I get them on here often enough from the Remainer tossers (as do you). Why should I not throw some back. Besides with my daughter having to put up with these wankers at university at the moment I am seeing first hand exactly what their priorities are (or rather second hand as it is all through remote learning of course). Very few of them care about - or at least talk about - making life better for minorities. It is all about smashing the system, anti capitalism and how awful Thatcher/Boris/Trump or any other leader to the right of Stalin are.
You seem quite angry, Richard. Lockdown not treating you too well. Perhaps find time to take a break and chill out. Perhaps give yourself a timeout as you did last time. Not everyone's an enemy, you know and enjoyable rhetoric and debating style as it is, I can see that it's affecting you.
I am not angry at all. In fact I am absolutely loving lockdown. I get to work from home with my family around me and have several acres of flower meadow and woodland of my own to wander through. To be honest from a purely personal point of view I would like lockdown to go on permanently. I am genuinely enjoying pricking the pompous idiocy of those who think any of these UK demonstrations are really about making things better for ethnic minorities.
You would have to be sub-human for you not to be affected by the bile you throw out regularly. As I say, for me on an internet chatroom all is well and you can go for it - tossers and morons and all the rest. But sitting there, surrounded by your flower meadows and woodland, and with your family close by, to be so insulting and potty-mouthed to people you don't know on the internet?
Bespeaks of a deeper malaise, frankly.
Nothing you don't deserve considering your history on here.
Any insult you fling at me is, simply, you confirming subconsciously that I have been right all along.
And, to be clear, if I were living in Bristol my view is that either there should be a proper explanation of who Colston actually was or, better still, the statue should be put in a museum about Bristol’s history where the whole story can be properly explained.
Statues are motionless visitors from another time unable to perceive or adapt to the world as it unfolds around them. Ultimately they stand out as anachronistic reminders that serve no purpose, beyond asking the question why are they there.
Much like Boris and his government.
Should the Coliseum in Rome be bulldozed?
The Coliseum didn't do anything, it's just a building.
Can you genuinely not see a difference between a building where something evil happened and a statue glorifying someone who actually did those evil things?
It is exactly the reverse. I am quite happy with the statues going. But yes I genuinely doubt the motives of the vast majority of those at these demonstrations in the UK. All you have to do is listen to them for a few minutes.
Do you feel the same way about generally well-respected protests of the past, like civil rights protests or suffragettes? Because I'm sure people were saying exactly the same thing of those at the time.
Comments
You can get Now TV from other sticks like eg a Roku stick.
On the face of it genocide might seem worse than the rape of a multiple underage quadriplegic girls in the dead of night at Stoke Mandeville Hospital but don't they both warrant full marks on a 1 to 10 scale?
Welcome to England’s green and pleasant land.
But as I said - and as you seem to accept - using NZ as an example is really dumb.
Nobody minds decisive changes in policy based on new evidence. But that isn't what we are getting.
To call the muddle, ad hoc decisions, spin and misinformation up to now a ‘policy’ would be to dignify it.
And if you don’t have a policy, you can’t change it.
Mind you I am amused at how much the value of political influence has fallen - £12,000!!?
"It profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Wales!”
Then they came for the old films.
God knows what will come out on the child protection front when this is over. Really bleak thought.
They pinky promised.
Just as some Brexiteers voted for Brexit because they wanted to get rid of all immigration, but that wasn't what Brexit is about.
Don't judge a campaign by a few extremists on its fringe.
It's by Ezra Pound. Enjoy.
THE RETURN
See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!
See, they return, one, and by one,
With fear, as half-awakened;
As if the snow should hesitate
And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;
These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe,"
inviolable.
Gods of the wingèd shoe!
With them the silver hounds,
sniffing the trace of air!
Haie! Haie!
These were the swift to harry;
These the keen-scented;
These were the souls of blood.
Slow on the leash,
pallid the leash-men!
(except that statues probably would last for ever in a vacuum).
There aren't going to be many laughs in this brave new world.
Government ministers are expected to be considered, consistent and competent. They are not. That matters.
Scott is just a guy on a blog. We don’t really have much expectation.
We're being asked to accept that they are representative of all black people.
I'd like to see the evidence of that.
I've made a suggestion in the thread header where else you might draw the line. I'm sure there are other points too. Perhaps you might suggest one.
And of course...'Forever Changes'.
We should never stop trying to improve the world.
Nor is that what I think you're being asked to accept.
It would be like claiming the British were not responsible for anything that happened in India prior to 1858 because legally it was run by the East India Company. In neither case does it really wash.
At the same time, those unions and leftwingers who were bleating about the need for guaranteed safety for teachers and pupils have got what they wanted. You can't have a guarantee because it's an airborne infectious disease we don't really understand. Now they're complaining about what's happened.
The Government should've bit the bullet. But this does remind me of gambling shop job losses. Everyone approved of the FOBT stakes being slashed by about 98%, everyone forecast job losses, yet when they happened the BBC et al whined about 'unforeseen consequences' and attacked the Government on that basis.
Those in power are incompetent and those in opposition are getting on their knees before a mob of vandals.
O tempora, o mores!
As this is boring, I will make one substantive point here. For the purposes of the epidemic, it doesn't matter if countries have vast areas of emptiness. There's no-one there to catch the disease. What matters is where people do actually live. Urbanisation is the key measure, not population density.
If this is the moment in time when the UK says "we don't want statues of slave traders in our public spaces, or them celebrated via monuments" I can live with it. Howsoever it comes around.
Of course I realise that this is a particularly difficult path to navigate because we have the example of Gerry Adams/Nelson Mandela and times change and one man's freedom fighter, etc. But I think history is on the side of the statue bringer downers.
After all even the Vorticist manifesto in BLAST entreated the suffragettes to draw the line at destroying art in galleries.
The fact that it seems to be mainly or many crusties doing it? I won't let that interfere with my view.
Beyond that yes process should have been followed but hey the Mayor of London needed so news about himself as all the other news he's currently featuring in isn't good news about him.
Others like Nelson, Churchill and Drake who were notable mainly for other achievements should be kept
Bespeaks of a deeper malaise, frankly.
can you actually build a roof over the whole of Spain ?
If you look at the figures for some of those states, case numbers had trended downwards thanks to control measures, and have started to spike back up again.
Toppling the tyrant has done more to wake up people to our mostly disgraceful colonial past than any history lessons of the last 100 years.
I suggest everyone watches Michael Portillo's Empire Journeys currently showing on Channel 5. It's deeply shocking, perhaps all the more so because delivered in such a gentle way.
Britain was built on slavery, oppression, abuse, violence and rape of people and land. There were a few lone souls who campaigned against the perpetrators but we shouldn't latch onto them too quickly in order to salve our consciences.
A stone dedication plaque, originally placed on No. 5 Warehouse, has been re-sited on the western flank wall of the Dock Office building. The plaque describes the building of the West India Docks as part of 'an undertaking which under the favour of God, shall contribute Stablity, Increase, and Ornament to British Commerce.' A bronze statue of Robert Milligan (c1746-1809, statue 1812), original promoter of the Docks, stands on the North Quay outside the entrance to No. 1 Warehouse, the Museum in Docklands.
I mean, if you want to argue there are better ways of achieving that goal than toppling statues or going down on one knee, I'd be right beside you. But my experience is - just like Oxbridge communists of the 1930s - that those young, overly sincere, people do feel that the world is unfair on certain minorities.
And I think it's genuinely appalling to doubt people's motives without any evidence at all. It would be like if I accused you of not really believing in wanting to leave the EU for principled reasons, and it was all because it was the trendy thing to do in your part of the country.
I wouldn't doubt your convictions, and I think it's unbelievably superior and rude and offensive, for you to doubt theirs.
We’ve found the new BetterTogether2 slogan. IndyRef2 is a slam dunk for the Brit Nats.
Wellington has a population density equivalent to Eastbourne - lower than 80 other urban districts in England. There is simply no comparison.
https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1270628335551381505
You are free to bid for them.
In terms of overall deaths the US is top, then the UK then Brazil
It is a total mess. Has anyone any idea where we are going?
Congo, by contrast, was completely Leoplold's bag. There was no body in Belgium that any any jurisdiction over it whatsoever.
Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but it seems a little different from the UK experience with the East India Company, where there were endless debates in Parliament.
https://twitter.com/maxclementsECHO/status/1270391104022745088
By contrast I am currently helping my 12 year old son with his history and right now they are 'doing' Empire and have been for the last 5 or 6 weeks. Extensive detailed stuff from the school on India, The Scramble for Africa and slavery. Really well done using all sorts of different sources including the Paxman Empire series mentioned earlier by another poster. It is balanced and informative and doesn't shy away from highlighting the issues of British imperialism and a real credit to whoever put the curriculum together and the teachers trying to get it over in these circumstances.
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Mind while the reasons for designation doesn't mention the statue the fact it says "Strong connection with the British slave trade adds to historical interest of buildings, the warehouses having been built for the express purpose of receiving goods produced by slaves on West Indian plantations. " justifies the statue remaining in situ...
As we walked away, saying thanks to the man, my wife said "you know who that was?"
"No," I said.
"Billy Joel".
Two minutes later, I'd Googled him, and it was indeed Billy Joel, and I hadn't said a word to him other than "thanks".
For this to happen in a few days either directly due to the actions of a mob or out of fear of them is disquieting because it betokens that kind of top-to-bottom upheaval.
In an democracy, the memorials of history don't just get destroyed or removed without the slightest hint of due process or democratic consent. I own a listed building, and I can't change the roof tiles without due process - but Khan gets to rip a Grade I-listed statue off its foundations by fiat? Rioters get to destroy a Grade-II listed statue because their feelings were hurt? No, that's not how it works in a civilized country.
The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, of Mosul, of parts of Palmyra, of Christian churches was not done because of a bit of outrage over the Romans holding slaves but because the attackers wanted to obliterate a country’s past and culture and also the people who held onto these things. It was an attempt to wipe out memory.
It was not an attempt to right wrongs but to wipe out. It was genocidal in intent. Ditto the Chinese destruction of Uighur buildings.
The same could be said of the English attack on churches and monasteries during the Reformation. It was an attempt - quite a successful one - to destroy Catholic England and the memory of that England and it led to the persecution of those who held onto that. Much of the wealth of the aristocracy was made from the looting that took place - both here and in Ireland.
Not wanting to have a statue glorifying a slave trader does not make one ISIS of course. But there is concern that what some of those demanding statues be pulled down want is not a better appreciation of our history but to pretend it didn’t happen. Do they really want understanding? Or obliteration? Do they understand the injunction about the sins of the father not being visited on the sons - ignorance of which justified Christian anti-semitism - when they demand that Gladstone be attacked because of what his father did?
Slavery happened. We need to understand our part in it and how it was understood, then and later. So putting things in museums is fine. Adding in plaques which explain rather than glorify is also ok. Remove if the local community want this. Also OK. But allow a mob to throw away - no.
If Bristol Council did not resolve the issue around the Colston statue it was because they allowed one small group to stymie the rewriting of the plaque. They should not have done so. They should not now allow a small group to stymie the decision of the local people to keep it - if that is what it is. Power has not changed in a democracy where people have voted for a local council and if people are frustrated with the slowness of democracy then they need to make it work better not ignore it.
India proved a noble prospect for Scots on the make. So much so, in fact, that as early as 1750 almost 40 per cent of the writers — or clerks — working for the company in Bengal were Scots. Thirty years later the proportion of Scots had risen to nearly half; this at a time when Scotland’s population was barely a sixth of England’s. Half of the East India Company’s regiments were raised in Scotland. There was no English Empire; it was a British enterprise and often a brutal and sinful one.
Can you genuinely not see a difference between a building where something evil happened and a statue glorifying someone who actually did those evil things?
https://twitter.com/nickhassey/status/1270635015605555200
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1270517294192525312?s=20