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The events of the last three weeks aren’t ones many of us are likely to forget. It started with footage of a senseless murder taking place in real-time: a man pleading for his life and crying for his mother as the life is gradually squeezed out of him by a police officer whilst the pleas of by-standers are ignored. The fact the Minneapolis police initially put out a statement that glossed over this, whilst the union president stood-up for the officers involved, meant it cut no ice when they were all fired the day after: it struck us as a system that was rotten from the top-down. That the use of disproportionate force by the US police was a feature, not a bug, and that any officer unlucky enough to find themselves accused or in the dock would be treated with leniency, whilst those they arrested would be treated with anything but.
Comments
https://twitter.com/eddiemarsan/status/1269682750769987586?s=20
Eddie's point is important because in order to move forward we have to acknowledge and address our past. It's great that this is starting to happen.
It was also wonderful to see The Duchess of Cambridge's message this week about the need for kindness. She's fab.
Sad to wake up to news of violence in Reading overnight, condolences to those affected and let's hope this is simply one idiot rather than part of something bigger.
A rather weird morning here in the Middle East, it's just done rather dark as a partial solar eclipse passes over - there's a metaphor somewhere about darkened skies that will soon brighten again.
Good article, Mr. Royale.
I watched the James Baldwin film last night, and with regard to the US and of course the Caribbean, one point struck home. Baldwin said, to a white man, and I hope I'm remembering his words accurately 'None of my ancestors wanted to come here; yours did!"
Does look as though the wheels are coming off!
The US has two problems that the UK does not:
1. The police are a paramilitary organisation. In the UK, or France, or Canada, or Italy, there is roughly a one-to-one ratio between the number of police killed by criminals, and the number of criminals (and others) killed by the police. In the US, more than 1,000 we're shot and killed by the police last year, and another 1,600 died in police custody. In total, 89 police were killed in the line of duty. That's a 30-1 ratio.
2. Behaviour, as CR has pointed out, is accepted from white people (such as donning assault weapons and occupying the state senate), that would not be accepted from African Americans. There is a legacy of racism in the US, going all the way back to slavery, that has not been eradicated.
Both these problems need to be solved. But they are separate issues.
Cabinet sources said the move was now seen as inevitable. They believe sweeping changes will be made in an attempt to defuse mounting discontent on the Tory backbenches following a stream of U-turns and a fall in the party’s poll ratings.
Among those seen as vulnerable are education secretary Gavin Williamson, communities secretary Robert Jenrick and work and pensions secretary Thérèse Coffey... Names being tipped for returns to the top table include Jeremy Hunt and Liam Fox
Racism in all its forms is abhorant. If we are going to teach about slavery which led to millions of Africans being transported to the West Indies and Southern States are we also going to teach about the indigenous African tribes who sold their fellow countrymen to white Europeans because they fetched a higher price than selling them to Arabs! Are we going to address the fact that slavery is still endemic in some parts of the African continent.
Expecting "white Europeans"to "give the knee" is absurd. It is a form of protest adopted by black US basketball players and other sportsmen to quite properly highlight the appalling treatment they receive in THEIR own country. Listening to an overseas student at Oxford demand that Cecil Rhodes statue be removed made my blood boil. No-one asked him to come and study in the UK, he chose to!
As for the rush for reparations etc, are we going to bulldoze the centre of Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, all built on the proceeds of slavery! Are we going to pull down Hadrian's Wall and demand reparation from Italy because the Romans slaughtered millions of Britons during their almost 500 year occupation of our islands?
I live with the heritage of colonial slavery every day. Like ALL other Highland families we are steeped in it. Look at the names of the plantations in Jamaica or St Vincent. You will find they are named after almost every village or town round the Moray Firth in the Scottish Highlands. For the last 2-3 years I have made contact with or been contacted by mixed race cousins who are themselves the descendants of a white plantation owner/manager and a black freed or slave woman. With absolutely no sense of grievance they are keen to share with me, their cousin, their particular family story and learn about our shared family history back to the Norman Conquest. My cousins are my cousins, whether they be products of the union of a white master and black slave woman in St Vincent or a young white officer in the Honourable East India Company and the daughter of a Maharaja.
We need to stop looking at history through the moral views of the 21st century and address the issues of today - health, housing and education and why black British people tend to do badly in access to or sharing off these resources. That will of course also require our black community to face up to why when we hear of a teenager being needlessly shot or killed in London, all too often she or he is a black teenager and the perpetrator is also a black teenager. As I said at the start, racism of all kinds is abhorrent but racism comes in many guises and colours!!
As for Trump, he is simply beyond the pale but from his recent comments I have to say Biden is little better.
I can't believe some people on here got excited about the Trump Campaign lies about how many people were going to turn up.
Incidentally it would be surprising to see Hunt and even Fox return unless they are guaranteed independence from Cummings’ meddling.
Many congratulations CR
And above all else we all need to ditch the abuse and intolerance of other views and recognise nobody is superior to anyone else on the expression of their view, we are all entitled to our views and to argue for them with respect
The ideas behind these protests are not that different to any previous communist revolution, or any theocratic uprising. They are a direct challenge to liberal democracy.
The choice is either that this is crushed and the woke are manouvred out of the universities, media and large capitalist enterprises or they win and get to impose their own vision of society on us. Both visions involve the end of the liberal democratic state as we knew it.
It is clear to me that many people here, at least in public, are quite willing to make their accommodations with the woke. Right now that seems like the right call. There is no effective opposition to what they are doing.
Under the old order I would have been regarded 'liberal left' but even I can see that this is turning in to a choice between living in Putins Russia or the Khymer Rouge.
The option of living in a state where you can keep your head down and avoid trouble but stay secure, retain some sense of personal, private freedom is, when all things are considered, preferable over living in an intrusive revolutionary state which seeks to remake human nature.
Both are awful choices. By contrast, the liberal Britain that we knew and has existed for most of our lifetimes was a utopia. But right now it feels like it is lost forever. It wont be saved by bowing to the mob.
Sorry to depress you all on Sunday morning. Enjoy your freedom while you still have it.
I do agree with @whunter's proposition is that the old order is being swept away and will not return. Unlike them, I give it full throated welcome.
1) It's fair, given he's in charge and some of the screwups (care homes, the app) were not merely predictable but widely predicted.
2) He's incompetent, so removing him is beneficial to both the country and the Conservatives themselves.
3) Sunak might get it, which would be a 250/1 winner.
The union was two equal powers joining to form a new Union of which the two powers would be joined. Scotland retains its own separate legal system. The idea that one partner- England - can stop the other partner from dissolving the Union is to suggest that the EU should have been able to stop the UK from leaving. Whilst I support the Union it is not up to me in England to tell Scotland what to do.
That various PB Conservative and Unionists don't understand the Union is telling.
From the Daily Mail (yes, indeed): As one Minister complains: ‘What lay at the heart of all that was that no one trusts No 10 to hold the line on anything any more. No one’s going to go out and fight for a policy – even if it’s the right policy – because they think when the heat is on, they’ll fold. Cummings is the only thing they’ve actually dug in over. Everyone and everything else is expendable.’
What’s also worrying Tory MPs is a suspicion that the mayhem of the past week may not be an aberration, but a return to normality. Boris’s stunning Election triumph has obscured the fact that retreats and confused and messy compromises were features of the early days of his administration.
That was six years ago.
'I’m worried some of their actions might move us away from building a society that is colour blind to one that is colour obsessed, and frustrate understanding rather than building it.'
It's difficult but not impossible and it has to be done. Laws can help, but they will only take you so far. BLM can be a pain in the arse sometimes, especially when it allows itself to be hijacked by groups who wouldn't be given the time of day if they appeared under their own banner. But we can't shrug and give up just because of them.
BLM has been a force for good because it's made so many of us realise that some sort of formal equality is not sufficient, it needs a society wide change of attitude to eliminate the kind of casual everyday racism that we barely notice, unless we're on the receiving end. When we get rid of that, we'll be neither color blind nor color obsessed.
I won't be alive when it happens, but I'll be doing what I can in the meantime.
But what about this. CR says: "In a liberal society speech is what we use...". I agree. But loads don't. For extremists of every sort - left, right, religious, woke, no-platformers, climate campaigners, single issue fanatics and so on - the liberal society is not the solution, it is the problem. The place people give to liberal values is more or less the simple way if identifying an extremist, whether it is Trump, the BNP, SWP, XR, Hamas or whatever.
How will CR defend his (and my) liberal values against those who say it has failed to deliver anything like justice (or whatever) and isn't going to? There are a lot of anti-liberals around.
What upside is there for them?
I am looking after my daughter this morning (it is father's day!) but if I get a chance to log in later and engage below the line I will do so.
Brexit did not cause, but did reveal, the existence of two tribes in the UK with very different views about our history and identity. Reactions to BLM protests reveal pretty much the same fault line.
How long is a "generation" anyway?
The IRA was avowedly Leninist-Marxist. Yet practically none of their supporters signed up to that, They signed up for Northern Ireland leaving the UK and joining Eire.
The same is true of most of the supporters of BLM. They care about - however carelessly defined - "racial injustice". Most of them love their Nike trainers and wouldn't dream of overthrowing capitalism.
The manifestos of these groups are defined by a small number of people who are happy to argue the toss until 2am. But there is no chance of the manifesto being implemented, and those - by and large - that march under the BLM banner don't give two figs for some kind of global communist rebellion.
The real issue with BLM is not the loony and the nutters. It is the criminals who see marches and riots as an opportunity to pillage and to steal, or an opportunity to give it to the "enemy" via a swift punch to the head. And those people need to be identified and imprisoned.
Just need to work out the exact factors then everything can open up as long as we don't create 'perfect storm' situations.
It's not going to happen, we know, but that doesn't stop it from being bleeding obvious.
I think that is what makes it a good piece.
On the thread header, Casino Royale has written a good, classically liberal let's all be kind and colour blind piece. Hard to disagree with the thrust of this, but I'm less sure about the solutions. He acknowledges that there may be residual racial prejudice amongst 15%-25% of the population - really, a very high number if he's right, and I suspect he is. What precisely is to be done about this - I don't think appealing to such people to be colour blind will really cut it.
I guess my main quibble is that in quite a long thread header the word power does not feature once. Any solution to our current woes surely needs to contain some analysis of power - who has it, in whose interest is it used, and how can it be more evenly distributed to challenge both real and perceived (racial) injustice.
Came as shock to me a few days ago when a poll showed that 59% of people in the UK support BLM. I can only assume that they have no idea what it is that they are supporting. Black Lives Matter is a clever moniker because one may be reluctant to say that you don`t support it because it sounds like you are saying that black lives don`t matter.
https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police/asset-forfeiture-abuse
I think it's reasonable to assume that a "black militia" would not have been allowed to occupy the State Senate. And a white man suspected of carrying a firearm would probably not have been shot on the street.
But these are US problem, not UK ones. The UK has issues, but they are far less serious than US ones. We would do well to remember that.
I still don't know, and the £1 million fund-raiser is still completely anonymous afaics.
For all I know that money has gone to a Trotter Trading character from Penge who is about to vanish abroad.
And I suspect that you would have found that 59% of Irishmen would have supported the goals of the IRA, without realising that included the ending of the concept of private property.
The laws obviously vary by state, but in general if you are going to shoot someone and limit liability, do it in your own home, and make sure they are dead was the advice.
Switzerland has many fewer guns per head than the US: only one gun for every four people in private hands, whereas America has more than one gun per person. Swiss background checks are much tougher, and the authorities have lists of psychologically dangerous people they check up on regularly. And Switzerland still has the highest rate of gun deaths in Europe.
As a liberal I`d say that anyway, of course, but I worry that conservatives and collectivists take for granted the benefits of living in a liberal democracy and would themselves miss it when its gone.
The referendum pledge was known about at the time of the independence vote.
Had Scotland voted to leave would we now be discussing having another referendum? Of course not. But fanatics believe referendum results only count if they go the 'right' way.
Being "colour blind" is not an adequate response, though a better one than being overtly racist, as ignoring injustices does not help in their elimination. It does not require us to be "colour obsessed" but does require awareness.
It's where identity politics gets you.
Is it possible to have a multi-racial society without identity politics? I would like to believe it is, but I'm not sure. None spring to mind.
It's a very difficult place to police, when in almost every situation it has to be assumed that everyone is armed. How this gets de-escalated is the $64,000 question, but arming the police like they're the army definitely isn't the way to start.
https://twitter.com/Gabriel_Pogrund/status/1274614865798279168
Maybe @Sean_F's two tribes have more in common than most of us admit.
In part it feels like a denial of the significance of events. The people pulling down the statues are not the mad fringe or the criminals. It is also evidence of making intellectual accommodations with the incoming regime (the line of thought goes - they aren't that bad, their aims are good, we can work with them....)
The slight historical novelty here is that, at least at this point, the revolution against the old order is being driven to some extent by capitalist elites themselves.
As for the IRA, we might not have seen the last of them.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/the-spy-who-came-home
This is just one of the reasons why we should hope for and embrace the end of the Union. It would bring clarity, and resolve a lot of problems.
However, the heavy handed response in large parts of the US has not been notably successful. And given our much lower police numbers, policing with consent is the only viable response in any case.
It’s going to be a very difficult line to tread, and we don’t have the most adroit of governments to lead the way.
It's equally problematic imo when identitarian campaigners rely on the same race-based categories as alleged oppressors.
But that then takes us into the 'self-identity' morass, whether Dolzeal, Warren, Jackie Walker or any of the others.
No I don't have an answer.
It does indeed confer the right of citizens to bear arms but it does not restrict the State's right to stipulate what sort of arms and how and when they may be used. This is why you will be pulled up short should you try to park an Abrams tank on your front lawn or build a small thermonuclear device in your garden shed.
The State could restrict gun ownership much further than it does already without even coming close to offending either the letter or the spirit of the 2nd Amendment. It could for example ban assault weapons. That it does not do so is down to various reasons, some of which you mention, but largely because the NRA has the politicians by the short and curlies.
“Playing into his hands”