This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
...but you are one of the endless pessimists peddling the notion of perpetual decline created by the liberal elites. You have your socially Conservative Government (on paper at least, granted- probably the most fiscally left-wing ever) and still you bang on about liberal wokeism, whatever that may be.
You sound like Jeremy Corbyn, you would be at your happiest, like him, in perpetual opposition, moaning on about how unfair the world is to you.
Nonsense. My critique is both factual and mainstream. In fact, the Charities Commission is on the cusp of investigating the National Trust for overreach. And the cabinet has it on its radar as well. It's important the NT keeps our nation's heritage in all our interests without getting involved in politics. That's not their job.
However much you'd like to bat me away there's a lot of substance in what I'm saying and well you know it.
Can I offer you the flip side. Before the Covid pandemic I was in Antigua. We spoke to a guide who was showing us around English Harbour, we asked why there was no mention of the slave trade in her presentation. She explained that most of her clients were American tourists, and a number considered the history of the slave trade to be overblown, and some even believed there were no "slaves" just indentured servants. As she lived by tips, why upset the punters? It works both ways.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The "crime" the National Trust named him for was opposing Indian Independence and being Colonial Secretary in the early 20th Century.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
"...dangerously Woke" Where's the actual danger?
Just do what (in normal times) millions of other, mainly middle-aged, mainly middle-class, almost certainly predominantly Conservative-voting people do and let it go...
Enjoy the beauty and the tranqulity of the the National Trust properties and landscapes and ignore the stuff you don't like.
If you can't, only you will be missing out
Yes, it's a lose-lose but it's only by withdrawing my funds and support that they'll learn the lesson and reform.
I will not support - still less fund - an organisation whose activities I vehmently disagree with and believe to be damaging to social cohesion.
The Conservative Party has done more damage to social cohesion in the UK over the past decade than any other organisation I can think of.
Austerity and Brexit have created more social division than any policies since at least the 1930s.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
...but you are one of the endless pessimists peddling the notion of perpetual decline created by the liberal elites. You have your socially Conservative Government (on paper at least, granted- probably the most fiscally left-wing ever) and still you bang on about liberal wokeism, whatever that may be.
You sound like Jeremy Corbyn, you would be at your happiest, like him, in perpetual opposition, moaning on about how unfair the world is to you.
If it's not the Commons that's full of dangerous lefties, it's the media, or schools. Or universities. Or the heritage industry. Or the John Lewis ad agency. Or the Premier League with its knee-taking virtue-signalling. Or the Church of England, the UN, environmentalists,
In fact, the entire country is a bunch of lefties, and I'm the only one left in the majority.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The "crime" the National Trust named him for was opposing Indian Independence and being Colonial Secretary in the early 20th Century.
We all knew that.
Perhaps not everyone is as aware of Churchill attitude to colonials, whether Indians or even Australians as you are.
My own jaundiced view of the man comes from my Australian grandmother.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
...but you are one of the endless pessimists peddling the notion of perpetual decline created by the liberal elites. You have your socially Conservative Government (on paper at least, granted- probably the most fiscally left-wing ever) and still you bang on about liberal wokeism, whatever that may be.
You sound like Jeremy Corbyn, you would be at your happiest, like him, in perpetual opposition, moaning on about how unfair the world is to you.
Nonsense. My critique is both factual and mainstream. In fact, the Charities Commission is on the cusp of investigating the National Trust for overreach. And the cabinet has it on its radar as well. It's important the NT keeps our nation's heritage in all our interests without getting involved in politics. That's not their job.
However much you'd like to bat me away there's a lot of substance in what I'm saying and well you know it.
Can I offer you the flip side. Before the Covid pandemic I was in Antigua. We spoke to a guide who was showing us around English Harbour, we asked why there was no mention of the slave trade in her presentation. She explained that most of her clients were American tourists, and a number considered the history of the slave trade to be overblown, and some even believed there were no "slaves" just indentured servants. As she lived by tips, why upset the punters? It works both ways.
Actually, as it happens, islands like Jamaica started off with Irish indentured labour, which was obviously white.
That's why simple racial caricatures of the past (very fashionable today) can be so divisive.
The NT report even hat-tips the fact the Romans had slavery "but it wasn't racially bound", as if that somehow makes it not as bad.
In reality, they enslaved anyone and everyone they could, including sometimes their own children and families.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
"...dangerously Woke" Where's the actual danger?
Just do what (in normal times) millions of other, mainly middle-aged, mainly middle-class, almost certainly predominantly Conservative-voting people do and let it go...
Enjoy the beauty and the tranqulity of the the National Trust properties and landscapes and ignore the stuff you don't like.
If you can't, only you will be missing out
Yes, it's a lose-lose but it's only by withdrawing my funds and support that they'll learn the lesson and reform.
I will not support - still less fund - an organisation whose activities I vehmently disagree with and believe to be damaging to social cohesion.
Fair enough and I respect your obviously strongly-held views, even if I believe you are misguided. Of course the National Trust have, and will, make mistakes, but generally I think most people see the NT as one of the great British institutions of which we can be proud, up there with the NHS, BBC, the UK Armed Forces, RNLI, etc...
I do not think that withdrawing your funds will have any effect whatsoever on the National Trust though. If 25% of their members did then maybe, but I honestly think very few see it as you do.
Why has England only vaccinated 40% of its care home residents Vs 80%+ in Scotland despite the JCVI advising all 4 nations that this was the top priority group?
Because England doesn’t suffer from a partisan unionist media that uses care home deaths as a stick to beat the government with?
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The "crime" the National Trust named him for was opposing Indian Independence and being Colonial Secretary in the early 20th Century.
We all knew that.
Perhaps not everyone is as aware of Churchill attitude to colonials, whether Indians or even Australians as you are.
My own jaundiced view of the man comes from my Australian grandmother.
I think they are, by and large. The point is that people are always of their time (just as we are) and we need to remember why we remember them and their historical significance in the round.
How confident are you that we'll all stand up to scrutiny in 100 years by the standards and values of the 22nd Century?
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
...but you are one of the endless pessimists peddling the notion of perpetual decline created by the liberal elites. You have your socially Conservative Government (on paper at least, granted- probably the most fiscally left-wing ever) and still you bang on about liberal wokeism, whatever that may be.
You sound like Jeremy Corbyn, you would be at your happiest, like him, in perpetual opposition, moaning on about how unfair the world is to you.
If it's not the Commons that's full of dangerous lefties, it's the media, or schools. Or universities. Or the heritage industry. Or the John Lewis ad agency. Or the Premier League with its knee-taking virtue-signalling. Or the Church of England, the UN, environmentalists,
In fact, the entire country is a bunch of lefties, and I'm the only one left in the majority.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
Yes, but Churchill was considered a bit of a dinosaur, even by contemporaries. It was his opposition to Indian independence that put him in the wilderness, even before the Nazis were on the scene.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
"...dangerously Woke" Where's the actual danger?
Just do what (in normal times) millions of other, mainly middle-aged, mainly middle-class, almost certainly predominantly Conservative-voting people do and let it go...
Enjoy the beauty and the tranqulity of the the National Trust properties and landscapes and ignore the stuff you don't like.
If you can't, only you will be missing out
Yes, it's a lose-lose but it's only by withdrawing my funds and support that they'll learn the lesson and reform.
I will not support - still less fund - an organisation whose activities I vehmently disagree with and believe to be damaging to social cohesion.
Fair enough and I respect your obviously strongly-held views, even if I believe you are misguided. Of course the National Trust have, and will, make mistakes, but generally I think most people see the NT as one of the great British institutions of which we can be proud, up there with the NHS, BBC, the UK Armed Forces, RNLI, etc...
I do not think that withdrawing your funds will have any effect whatsoever on the National Trust though. If 25% of their members did then maybe, but I honestly think very few see it as you do.
Thanks. We'll see.
I don't think I'm in as small a minority as you think.
In any event, I need to do what I believe to be right in accordance with my own sense of integrity.
The Duke and Duchess of York's closest advisers sought help from an online troll in an attempt to discredit the Duke's sex accuser, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
The issue is the reverse though: the National Trust chooses one aspect of a house and emphasises it as a dominant theme. Slavery therefore becomes the only part of the story.
At our house, for example, we lived there over 200 years. It evolved and changed, but the Trust decided they wanted to eliminate all the “modernisations” we had done because they “weren’t in keeping”with the 18th century country house story they wanted to present. We had to fight hard (and ultimately pay) to stop them airbrushing many generations of our life. Good Henry and Henry the Magnificent were impressive people, but there is so much more to my family than them.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
Yes, but Churchill was considered a bit of a dinosaur, even by contemporaries. It was his opposition to Indian independence that put him in the wilderness, even before the Nazis were on the scene.
Tbh I wasn’t referring to Churchill, more the general desire to hold historic figures to modern standards.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
The standards of this age with respect to slavery are identical to those of any other point in history: most slaves find it objectionable.
So yes, I do judge the slave traders by the standards of the age.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
Yes, but Churchill was considered a bit of a dinosaur, even by contemporaries. It was his opposition to Indian independence that put him in the wilderness, even before the Nazis were on the scene.
Not quite right. It was his failure as Chancellor that put him on the backbenches and his opposition to Indian dominion status that kept him there.
Indian independence came after WWII, by which time he'd come round to dominion status, but by then of course it was too late.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
The standards of this age with respect to slavery are identical to those of any other point in history: most slaves find it objectionable.
So yes, I do judge the slave traders by the standards of the age.
Good. I take it you reserve particular ire for modern slave traffickers and how the CCP is treating the Uighurs then?
Wonderful indeed. This is what a Conservative Government should be doing.
As for the 'fragility' nonsense - that's just a silly psychological tactic to shame people who disagree with you into compliance. 'Oh, if don't let us smash your windows that means you're suffering from Window Fragility and you wouldn't want that, would you?'
No, I just like my windows the way they are. Is that too much to ask?
Why has England only vaccinated 40% of its care home residents Vs 80%+ in Scotland despite the JCVI advising all 4 nations that this was the top priority group?
Last I spoke to 2 care home group CEOs (and had reported back to me on 2 others) that they were virtually fully vaccinated.
However a huge percentage of residents live in independent homes (it’s more consolidated in Scotland) so that might be an explanation?
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
The standards of this age with respect to slavery are identical to those of any other point in history: most slaves find it objectionable.
So yes, I do judge the slave traders by the standards of the age.
But what do you gain by being shrieky about it? The slave traders in question were abominable, but they are long dead. If their horrible earnings were translated into objects and landscapes of great beauty let's just celebrate that fact and preserve the buildings and landscapes.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
The issue is the reverse though: the National Trust chooses one aspect of a house and emphasises it as a dominant theme. Slavery therefore becomes the only part of the story.
At our house, for example, we lived there over 200 years. It evolved and changed, but the Trust decided they wanted to eliminate all the “modernisations” we had done because they “weren’t in keeping”with the 18th century country house story they wanted to present. We had to fight hard (and ultimately pay) to stop them airbrushing many generations of our life. Good Henry and Henry the Magnificent were impressive people, but there is so much more to my family than them.
Just to say that I've seen your post but I'm staying well clear of saying anything about people's feelings about their own relatives. I tried above to put a little distance there, but I'll make it clearer here.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
...but you are one of the endless pessimists peddling the notion of perpetual decline created by the liberal elites. You have your socially Conservative Government (on paper at least, granted- probably the most fiscally left-wing ever) and still you bang on about liberal wokeism, whatever that may be.
You sound like Jeremy Corbyn, you would be at your happiest, like him, in perpetual opposition, moaning on about how unfair the world is to you.
Nonsense. My critique is both factual and mainstream. In fact, the Charities Commission is on the cusp of investigating the National Trust for overreach. And the cabinet has it on its radar as well. It's important the NT keeps our nation's heritage in all our interests without getting involved in politics. That's not their job.
However much you'd like to bat me away there's a lot of substance in what I'm saying and well you know it.
Can I offer you the flip side. Before the Covid pandemic I was in Antigua. We spoke to a guide who was showing us around English Harbour, we asked why there was no mention of the slave trade in her presentation. She explained that most of her clients were American tourists, and a number considered the history of the slave trade to be overblown, and some even believed there were no "slaves" just indentured servants. As she lived by tips, why upset the punters? It works both ways.
Actually, as it happens, islands like Jamaica started off with Irish indentured labour, which was obviously white.
That's why simple racial caricatures of the past (very fashionable today) can be so divisive.
The NT report even hat-tips the fact the Romans had slavery "but it wasn't racially bound", as if that somehow makes it not as bad.
In reality, they enslaved anyone and everyone they could, including sometimes their own children and families.
There was a programme I heard the other day arguing that colour-based racism had its origins in the West Indies when plantation owners tried to drive a wedge between white indentured servants and black slaves. By creating a sense of racial superiority they prevented the indentured servants joining forces with the slaves
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
The theory, sure, but this is the killer bit for me: "The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses."
And, on top of that, you have the CCP refusing to allow WHO staff access to China to investigate this further.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
The standards of this age with respect to slavery are identical to those of any other point in history: most slaves find it objectionable.
So yes, I do judge the slave traders by the standards of the age.
But what do you gain by being shrieky about it? The slave traders in question were abominable, but they are long dead. If their horrible earnings were translated into objects and landscapes of great beauty let's just celebrate that fact and preserve the buildings and landscapes.
I don't think the only two states here are "shrieky" or "celebration". And a more careful reading of what I wrote above (i.e. actually reading it) will show that I'm saying we should tell the truth about history. That is itself an act of preservation. Fetishising the past destroys it.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
The issue is the reverse though: the National Trust chooses one aspect of a house and emphasises it as a dominant theme. Slavery therefore becomes the only part of the story.
At our house, for example, we lived there over 200 years. It evolved and changed, but the Trust decided they wanted to eliminate all the “modernisations” we had done because they “weren’t in keeping”with the 18th century country house story they wanted to present. We had to fight hard (and ultimately pay) to stop them airbrushing many generations of our life. Good Henry and Henry the Magnificent were impressive people, but there is so much more to my family than them.
Just to say that I've seen your post but I'm staying well clear of saying anything about people's feelings about their own relatives. I tried above to put a little distance there, but I'll make it clearer here.
I’m not bothered about it - it was just to make it a less abstract debate. Most prominent historical figures did some pretty shitty things by modern standards. But we don’t judge Caesar, for example, solely on the fact that he had Vercingetorix (?) strangled.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Friedrich Merz is a real piece of work. Having lost the leadership, he is asking Laschet to make him Finance Minister in the current government led by Angela Merkel.
Oddly enough, this morning's CDU leadership election might have been the most significant election of 2021.
Laschet is "continuity Merkel" in many respects but the key player looks to be Jens Spahn who I think will have a senior role in any future Laschet Govenrment and is the heir apparent.
Laschet worked well enough with the FDP in his own State but he's much more likely to be able to work with the Greens than Merz but the problem then becomes resistance from the CSU wing to any future Black-Green coalition.
I also think the election of Laschet closes the door on any CDU/CSU-AfD coalition.
It is not yet certain Laschet will be CDU/CSU chancellor candidate however.
If Markus Soder, Bavarian Minister President and CSU leader, runs for it he could get it. The CDU delegates only gave Laschet a narrow win in the second round over Merz.
The CSU have not had one of their own as chancellor candidate since Stoiber in 2002 and may feel it is their turn again.
Or to put it another way the CDU/CSU candidate directly before Merkel came from the CSU, so it is hardly "their turn". Söder or Soeder (but not Soder) might well become kanzlerkandidat for the Union, but that would be a mistake. The CSU is much more to the right than the CDU and are not at all liked above the "white sausage equator". I also do not think that a CSU will win back many AfD votes because AfD voters are populists, and the CSU is no more "populist" than the CDU.
Anyway the German federal election in September will be more important than today's internal CDU result.
I really really could not give a shit about any statue, road name or anything.
But anyone celebrating the fact that locally elected politicians in a country cannot even make such irrelevant decisions about their local areas tells you everything you need to know about this massively overly centralised, London centric nation we live in.
We need huge, massive devolution of decision making, the idea that locally democratically elected politicians cannot make such decisions tells you all you need to know about the authoritarian government that we have that tells us how we should manage our local areas from hundreds of miles away.
Shocking how little democracy we have at anything like a local level in this country, it's so undemocratic.
And no, I really don't care one way of the other about the statues, I care about the people having a say on their lives and their locality.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
The standards of this age with respect to slavery are identical to those of any other point in history: most slaves find it objectionable.
So yes, I do judge the slave traders by the standards of the age.
Good. I take it you reserve particular ire for modern slave traffickers and how the CCP is treating the Uighurs then?
Well of course. I don't really know why you'd think you'd get anything other than total agreement from me for that. It's completely and inexcusably abhorrent.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
The standards of this age with respect to slavery are identical to those of any other point in history: most slaves find it objectionable.
So yes, I do judge the slave traders by the standards of the age.
But what do you gain by being shrieky about it? The slave traders in question were abominable, but they are long dead. If their horrible earnings were translated into objects and landscapes of great beauty let's just celebrate that fact and preserve the buildings and landscapes.
I don't think the only two states here are "shrieky" or "celebration". And a more careful reading of what I wrote above (i.e. actually reading it) will show that I'm saying we should tell the truth about history. That is itself an act of preservation. Fetishising the past destroys it.
Yes, but you are overcooking it. For instance: I am no fan of Churchill's at all - I think he was principally a great showman - but you do yourself no favours at all by referring to his "crimes." He didn't commit any. I know what you mean, but talking about him in that way is shriekiness.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
...but you are one of the endless pessimists peddling the notion of perpetual decline created by the liberal elites. You have your socially Conservative Government (on paper at least, granted- probably the most fiscally left-wing ever) and still you bang on about liberal wokeism, whatever that may be.
You sound like Jeremy Corbyn, you would be at your happiest, like him, in perpetual opposition, moaning on about how unfair the world is to you.
Nonsense. My critique is both factual and mainstream. In fact, the Charities Commission is on the cusp of investigating the National Trust for overreach. And the cabinet has it on its radar as well. It's important the NT keeps our nation's heritage in all our interests without getting involved in politics. That's not their job.
However much you'd like to bat me away there's a lot of substance in what I'm saying and well you know it.
Can I offer you the flip side. Before the Covid pandemic I was in Antigua. We spoke to a guide who was showing us around English Harbour, we asked why there was no mention of the slave trade in her presentation. She explained that most of her clients were American tourists, and a number considered the history of the slave trade to be overblown, and some even believed there were no "slaves" just indentured servants. As she lived by tips, why upset the punters? It works both ways.
Actually, as it happens, islands like Jamaica started off with Irish indentured labour, which was obviously white.
That's why simple racial caricatures of the past (very fashionable today) can be so divisive.
The NT report even hat-tips the fact the Romans had slavery "but it wasn't racially bound", as if that somehow makes it not as bad.
In reality, they enslaved anyone and everyone they could, including sometimes their own children and families.
There was a programme I heard the other day arguing that colour-based racism had its origins in the West Indies when plantation owners tried to drive a wedge between white indentured servants and black slaves. By creating a sense of racial superiority they prevented the indentured servants joining forces with the slaves
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I really really could not give a shit about any statue, road name or anything.
But anyone celebrating the fact that locally elected politicians in a country cannot even make such irrelevant decisions about their local areas tells you everything you need to know about this massively overly centralised, London centric nation we live in.
We need huge, massive devolution of decision making, the idea that locally democratically elected politicians cannot make such decisions tells you all you need to know about the authoritarian government that we have that tells us how we should manage our local areas from hundreds of miles away.
Shocking how little democracy we have at anything like a local level in this country, it's so undemocratic.
And no, I really don't care one way of the other about the statues, I care about the people having a say on their lives and their locality.
Part of a wider centralising tendency in this government. They need to be careful, at some point the Conservatives will not be in power and someone else will have all these shiny buttons to play with.
Probably a bit OTT, but I find it hard to think it unreasonable that you'd need planning permission in many of these cases, given some of the incredibly minor things that do require planning permission. The vast majority of planning permissions are not even decided by elected members, though depending on the area statue removal and the like are probably more likely to get called in than many other types of decision.
Making it harder to create or change road names just seems like it will cause a headache at some point, it's a function which usually gets no notice or care whatsoever, and sounds like this might make it more complicated than it needs to be.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
...but you are one of the endless pessimists peddling the notion of perpetual decline created by the liberal elites. You have your socially Conservative Government (on paper at least, granted- probably the most fiscally left-wing ever) and still you bang on about liberal wokeism, whatever that may be.
You sound like Jeremy Corbyn, you would be at your happiest, like him, in perpetual opposition, moaning on about how unfair the world is to you.
Nonsense. My critique is both factual and mainstream. In fact, the Charities Commission is on the cusp of investigating the National Trust for overreach. And the cabinet has it on its radar as well. It's important the NT keeps our nation's heritage in all our interests without getting involved in politics. That's not their job.
However much you'd like to bat me away there's a lot of substance in what I'm saying and well you know it.
Can I offer you the flip side. Before the Covid pandemic I was in Antigua. We spoke to a guide who was showing us around English Harbour, we asked why there was no mention of the slave trade in her presentation. She explained that most of her clients were American tourists, and a number considered the history of the slave trade to be overblown, and some even believed there were no "slaves" just indentured servants. As she lived by tips, why upset the punters? It works both ways.
Actually, as it happens, islands like Jamaica started off with Irish indentured labour, which was obviously white.
That's why simple racial caricatures of the past (very fashionable today) can be so divisive.
The NT report even hat-tips the fact the Romans had slavery "but it wasn't racially bound", as if that somehow makes it not as bad.
In reality, they enslaved anyone and everyone they could, including sometimes their own children and families.
There was a programme I heard the other day arguing that colour-based racism had its origins in the West Indies when plantation owners tried to drive a wedge between white indentured servants and black slaves. By creating a sense of racial superiority they prevented the indentured servants joining forces with the slaves
‘Twas ever thus. Keeping dirt poor whites in the Southern US states angry about their even poorer black neighbours was never accidental.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
The issue is the reverse though: the National Trust chooses one aspect of a house and emphasises it as a dominant theme. Slavery therefore becomes the only part of the story.
At our house, for example, we lived there over 200 years. It evolved and changed, but the Trust decided they wanted to eliminate all the “modernisations” we had done because they “weren’t in keeping”with the 18th century country house story they wanted to present. We had to fight hard (and ultimately pay) to stop them airbrushing many generations of our life. Good Henry and Henry the Magnificent were impressive people, but there is so much more to my family than them.
Just to say that I've seen your post but I'm staying well clear of saying anything about people's feelings about their own relatives. I tried above to put a little distance there, but I'll make it clearer here.
I’m not bothered about it - it was just to make it a less abstract debate. Most prominent historical figures did some pretty shitty things by modern standards. But we don’t judge Caesar, for example, solely on the fact that he had Vercingetorix (?) strangled.
No, and we shouldn't. There are many fine aspirational and cautionary tales we can from studying history. Caesar's story was a truly incredible one, but my all time favourite is Claudius'. What a wild ride that kid had.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I can fully believe that, but Chinese citizens are subjected to tremendous levels of propaganda and actively misinformed by their own government when it suits them.
Its worth repeating that Bristol had conducted a lengthy consultation on what to do about Coulson statue, including talking to those who were direct descendants of slaves. The recommendation was a plaque to explain who he was. The merchant society were then obstructive of this solution.
Probably a bit OTT, but I find it hard to think it unreasonable that you'd need planning permission in many of these cases, given some of the incredibly minor things that do require planning permission. The vast majority of planning permissions are not even decided by elected members, though depending on the area statue removal and the like are probably more likely to get called in than many other types of decision.
Making it harder to create or change road names just seems like it will cause a headache at some point, it's a function which usually gets no notice or care whatsoever, and sounds like this might make it more complicated than it needs to be.
Very smart politics. Will be popular. People don't necessarily mind the pulling down of statues, but do it legally, peacefully and democratically. We have seen where mobs can lead...
Its worth repeating that Bristol had conducted a lengthy consultation on what to do about Coulson statue. The recommendation was a plague to explain. The merchant society were then obstructive of this solution.
In fairness a plague would seem extreme.
Some council recently did an exercise then removed a statue. Whether one disagrees or agrees with the removal I'd find it hard to argue against that - it wasn't simply torn down, they looked into it, and local representatives made the call. That's local democracy. There's higher protections for very old and significant stuff in any case.
We need to get this properly under control until any relaxations. Nothing before April. Regional tiers don't work. Reduction in restrictions must be at national level, ideally the regional authorities in line with Westminster.
SW suffering from Fleeing Fulham Fucker's Flu.
Dartmouth currently has more Covid than in the previous 9 months combined.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I can fully believe that, but Chinese citizens are subjected to tremendous levels of propaganda and actively misinformed by their own government when it suits them.
There is no such thing as a free press there.
He organises a 5-a-side football league for Europeans living over there.
Last summer they were unable to book any 5-a-side pitches in his part of Beijing as no one wanted to deal with Europeans.
It's so alien to how we live or even think that they live and think its very hard to talk about the Chinese way in any sort of informed view as what matters to the public and government are not remotely what we'd imagine.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
...but you are one of the endless pessimists peddling the notion of perpetual decline created by the liberal elites. You have your socially Conservative Government (on paper at least, granted- probably the most fiscally left-wing ever) and still you bang on about liberal wokeism, whatever that may be.
You sound like Jeremy Corbyn, you would be at your happiest, like him, in perpetual opposition, moaning on about how unfair the world is to you.
Nonsense. My critique is both factual and mainstream. In fact, the Charities Commission is on the cusp of investigating the National Trust for overreach. And the cabinet has it on its radar as well. It's important the NT keeps our nation's heritage in all our interests without getting involved in politics. That's not their job.
However much you'd like to bat me away there's a lot of substance in what I'm saying and well you know it.
Can I offer you the flip side. Before the Covid pandemic I was in Antigua. We spoke to a guide who was showing us around English Harbour, we asked why there was no mention of the slave trade in her presentation. She explained that most of her clients were American tourists, and a number considered the history of the slave trade to be overblown, and some even believed there were no "slaves" just indentured servants. As she lived by tips, why upset the punters? It works both ways.
Actually, as it happens, islands like Jamaica started off with Irish indentured labour, which was obviously white.
That's why simple racial caricatures of the past (very fashionable today) can be so divisive.
The NT report even hat-tips the fact the Romans had slavery "but it wasn't racially bound", as if that somehow makes it not as bad.
In reality, they enslaved anyone and everyone they could, including sometimes their own children and families.
There was a programme I heard the other day arguing that colour-based racism had its origins in the West Indies when plantation owners tried to drive a wedge between white indentured servants and black slaves. By creating a sense of racial superiority they prevented the indentured servants joining forces with the slaves
Something of the sort occurred in early to mid 17th-century Virginia.
Awhile back saw episode of Prof. John Lewis Gates's genealogy show on PBS that featured actor-comedian-writer Wanda Sykes.
Turned out one of her ancestors was a White woman indentured servant who had a child by a Black slave. At a time when Virginia colony law said, if the mother was free, the child was free.
However, it was NOT long before the law was changed, so that ANY child whose mother OR father was a Black slave, the child was enslaved. AND Black by law.
Thus in short order, it became a social, economic, legal principle, that no White person could be a slave; indentured, imprisoned, transported, but NOT enslaved, at least not in Virginia.
Along with the corollary principle, that no Black person was presumed to be free, without absolute positive proof, but instead was presumed to be a slave, in fact born TO be a slave.
This from Wanda Sykes's wiki page
" Sykes' family history was researched for an episode of the 2012 PBS genealogy program Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr. Her ancestry was traced back to a 1683 court case involving her paternal ninth great-grandmother Elizabeth Banks, a free white woman and indentured servant, who gave birth to a biracial child, Mary Banks, fathered by a slave, who inherited her mother's free status. According to historian Ira Berlin, a specialist in the history of American slavery, the Sykes family history is "the only such case that I know of in which it is possible to trace a black family rooted in freedom from the late 17th century to the present."
Probably a bit OTT, but I find it hard to think it unreasonable that you'd need planning permission in many of these cases, given some of the incredibly minor things that do require planning permission. The vast majority of planning permissions are not even decided by elected members, though depending on the area statue removal and the like are probably more likely to get called in than many other types of decision.
Making it harder to create or change road names just seems like it will cause a headache at some point, it's a function which usually gets no notice or care whatsoever, and sounds like this might make it more complicated than it needs to be.
Well the Tories love red tape as we know, so a bit more tied around a few mouldy old statues will go nicely with the Brexit red tape already strangling exporters.
Its worth repeating that Bristol had conducted a lengthy consultation on what to do about Coulson statue. The recommendation was a plague to explain. The merchant society were then obstructive of this solution.
In fairness a plague would seem extreme.
Some council recently did an exercise then removed a statue. Whether one disagrees or agrees with the removal I'd find it hard to argue against that - it wasn't simply torn down, they looked into it, and local representatives made the call. That's local democracy. There's higher protections for very old and significant stuff in any case.
If Covid-19 is the plague to explain then maybe we should all be blaming Bristol council?
French drugs firm 'days away' from production on 60million doses of Britain's FOURTH coronavirus vaccine... before it's even struck a deal with the EU
Chief executive Thomas Lingelbach said Valneva’s vaccine, which has been produced with financial aid from the UK Government, is about to go into mass production at its plant in Livingston, Scotland.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I can fully believe that, but Chinese citizens are subjected to tremendous levels of propaganda and actively misinformed by their own government when it suits them.
There is no such thing as a free press there.
He organises a 5-a-side football league for Europeans living over there.
Last summer they were unable to book any 5-a-side pitches in his part of Beijing as no one wanted to deal with Europeans.
It's so alien to how we live or even think that they live and think its very hard to talk about the Chinese way in any sort of informed view as what matters to the public and government are not remotely what we'd imagine.
China is one of the most authoritarian and undemocratic nations on earth now, even Hong Kong is getting more restricted.
Its people get told what to believe and despite economically being more advanced than North Korea, politically it is still not much different. The Communist Party controls all.
French drugs firm 'days away' from production on 60million doses of Britain's FOURTH coronavirus vaccine... before it's even struck a deal with the EU
Chief executive Thomas Lingelbach said Valneva’s vaccine, which has been produced with financial aid from the UK Government, is about to go into mass production at its plant in Livingston, Scotland.
French drugs firm 'days away' from production on 60million doses of Britain's FOURTH coronavirus vaccine... before it's even struck a deal with the EU
Chief executive Thomas Lingelbach said Valneva’s vaccine, which has been produced with financial aid from the UK Government, is about to go into mass production at its plant in Livingston, Scotland.
Friedrich Merz is a real piece of work. Having lost the leadership, he is asking Laschet to make him Finance Minister in the current government led by Angela Merkel.
Oddly enough, this morning's CDU leadership election might have been the most significant election of 2021.
Laschet is "continuity Merkel" in many respects but the key player looks to be Jens Spahn who I think will have a senior role in any future Laschet Govenrment and is the heir apparent.
Laschet worked well enough with the FDP in his own State but he's much more likely to be able to work with the Greens than Merz but the problem then becomes resistance from the CSU wing to any future Black-Green coalition.
I also think the election of Laschet closes the door on any CDU/CSU-AfD coalition.
It is not yet certain Laschet will be CDU/CSU chancellor candidate however.
If Markus Soder, Bavarian Minister President and CSU leader, runs for it he could get it. The CDU delegates only gave Laschet a narrow win in the second round over Merz.
The CSU have not had one of their own as chancellor candidate since Stoiber in 2002 and may feel it is their turn again.
Or to put it another way the CDU/CSU candidate directly before Merkel came from the CSU, so it is hardly "their turn". Söder or Soeder (but not Soder) might well become kanzlerkandidat for the Union, but that would be a mistake. The CSU is much more to the right than the CDU and are not at all liked above the "white sausage equator". I also do not think that a CSU will win back many AfD votes because AfD voters are populists, and the CSU is no more "populist" than the CDU.
Anyway the German federal election in September will be more important than today's internal CDU result.
Merkel as CDU leader was the CDU/CSU candidate after the CSU Stoiber and before him the candidate was the CDU Kohl and the CDU/CSU candidate before him was the CSU Frank Josef Strauss.
So on that basis of alternate candidates this year it is the CSU's turn and Soder should be the CDU/CSU candidate.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I can fully believe that, but Chinese citizens are subjected to tremendous levels of propaganda and actively misinformed by their own government when it suits them.
There is no such thing as a free press there.
He organises a 5-a-side football league for Europeans living over there.
Last summer they were unable to book any 5-a-side pitches in his part of Beijing as no one wanted to deal with Europeans.
It's so alien to how we live or even think that they live and think its very hard to talk about the Chinese way in any sort of informed view as what matters to the public and government are not remotely what we'd imagine.
There is vast, unthinking anti-foreigner prejudice. Not nasty, brutal, overt racism. But a deep, ingrained distrust. It is much, much wider than it is here, but not as deep.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I can fully believe that, but Chinese citizens are subjected to tremendous levels of propaganda and actively misinformed by their own government when it suits them.
There is no such thing as a free press there.
He organises a 5-a-side football league for Europeans living over there.
Last summer they were unable to book any 5-a-side pitches in his part of Beijing as no one wanted to deal with Europeans.
It's so alien to how we live or even think that they live and think its very hard to talk about the Chinese way in any sort of informed view as what matters to the public and government are not remotely what we'd imagine.
China is one of the most authoritarian and undemocratic nations on earth now, even Hong Kong is getting more restricted.
Its people get told what to believe and despite economically being more advanced than North Korea, politically it is still not much different. The Communist Party controls all.
Don't remotely disagree.
But I hear that the Beijing population, certainly the ones my friend interacts with in Beijing, are totally content with this approach.
The impression I get are the middle class of Beijing have no interest in our way of operating, their system suits them quite well thank you very much.
To ignore that misses the point entirely.
Further to above.
My friend was in Thailand when Beijing went into lockdown.
On returning to Beijing he had to self isolate in his flat.
He had state police knocking on his front door a few times each day to ensure he was at home, the state left his groceries outside his door each day.
The population expect that level of control and seem to be content with it.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
...but you are one of the endless pessimists peddling the notion of perpetual decline created by the liberal elites. You have your socially Conservative Government (on paper at least, granted- probably the most fiscally left-wing ever) and still you bang on about liberal wokeism, whatever that may be.
You sound like Jeremy Corbyn, you would be at your happiest, like him, in perpetual opposition, moaning on about how unfair the world is to you.
Nonsense. My critique is both factual and mainstream. In fact, the Charities Commission is on the cusp of investigating the National Trust for overreach. And the cabinet has it on its radar as well. It's important the NT keeps our nation's heritage in all our interests without getting involved in politics. That's not their job.
However much you'd like to bat me away there's a lot of substance in what I'm saying and well you know it.
Can I offer you the flip side. Before the Covid pandemic I was in Antigua. We spoke to a guide who was showing us around English Harbour, we asked why there was no mention of the slave trade in her presentation. She explained that most of her clients were American tourists, and a number considered the history of the slave trade to be overblown, and some even believed there were no "slaves" just indentured servants. As she lived by tips, why upset the punters? It works both ways.
Actually, as it happens, islands like Jamaica started off with Irish indentured labour, which was obviously white.
That's why simple racial caricatures of the past (very fashionable today) can be so divisive.
The NT report even hat-tips the fact the Romans had slavery "but it wasn't racially bound", as if that somehow makes it not as bad.
In reality, they enslaved anyone and everyone they could, including sometimes their own children and families.
There was a programme I heard the other day arguing that colour-based racism had its origins in the West Indies when plantation owners tried to drive a wedge between white indentured servants and black slaves. By creating a sense of racial superiority they prevented the indentured servants joining forces with the slaves
‘Twas ever thus. Keeping dirt poor whites in the Southern US states angry about their even poorer black neighbours was never accidental.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
Yes, but Churchill was considered a bit of a dinosaur, even by contemporaries. It was his opposition to Indian independence that put him in the wilderness, even before the Nazis were on the scene.
Not quite right. It was his failure as Chancellor that put him on the backbenches and his opposition to Indian dominion status that kept him there.
Indian independence came after WWII, by which time he'd come round to dominion status, but by then of course it was too late.
Churchill resigned from Baldwin's Opposition Front Bench because he was unable to support the party line re-India.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
...but you are one of the endless pessimists peddling the notion of perpetual decline created by the liberal elites. You have your socially Conservative Government (on paper at least, granted- probably the most fiscally left-wing ever) and still you bang on about liberal wokeism, whatever that may be.
You sound like Jeremy Corbyn, you would be at your happiest, like him, in perpetual opposition, moaning on about how unfair the world is to you.
Nonsense. My critique is both factual and mainstream. In fact, the Charities Commission is on the cusp of investigating the National Trust for overreach. And the cabinet has it on its radar as well. It's important the NT keeps our nation's heritage in all our interests without getting involved in politics. That's not their job.
However much you'd like to bat me away there's a lot of substance in what I'm saying and well you know it.
Can I offer you the flip side. Before the Covid pandemic I was in Antigua. We spoke to a guide who was showing us around English Harbour, we asked why there was no mention of the slave trade in her presentation. She explained that most of her clients were American tourists, and a number considered the history of the slave trade to be overblown, and some even believed there were no "slaves" just indentured servants. As she lived by tips, why upset the punters? It works both ways.
Actually, as it happens, islands like Jamaica started off with Irish indentured labour, which was obviously white.
That's why simple racial caricatures of the past (very fashionable today) can be so divisive.
The NT report even hat-tips the fact the Romans had slavery "but it wasn't racially bound", as if that somehow makes it not as bad.
In reality, they enslaved anyone and everyone they could, including sometimes their own children and families.
You have completely ignored my point. Why have you introduced colour into the argument?
It seems my guide in English Harbour is wise to continue her 'slavery-free' presentation, in the event you wind up on her tour.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
The standards of this age with respect to slavery are identical to those of any other point in history: most slaves find it objectionable.
So yes, I do judge the slave traders by the standards of the age.
But what do you gain by being shrieky about it? The slave traders in question were abominable, but they are long dead. If their horrible earnings were translated into objects and landscapes of great beauty let's just celebrate that fact and preserve the buildings and landscapes.
I don't think the only two states here are "shrieky" or "celebration". And a more careful reading of what I wrote above (i.e. actually reading it) will show that I'm saying we should tell the truth about history. That is itself an act of preservation. Fetishising the past destroys it.
Yes, but you are overcooking it. For instance: I am no fan of Churchill's at all - I think he was principally a great showman - but you do yourself no favours at all by referring to his "crimes." He didn't commit any. I know what you mean, but talking about him in that way is shriekiness.
Sorry, but no, I'm not accepting that. The magnitude of the horrors that Churchill inflicted upon some people deserve even stronger words than crimes, and, in point of fact, probably were literally crimes in some cases. In the aftermath of the second world war, the Nuremburg Principles make it clear that everyone all the way up to head of government are is liable. Surviving Nazis were rightly tried. Clearly the excesses of the Nazi crimes far exceeded those committed by the democratic Allied powers, but Britain did things during the war that matched some of the actions that were judged German war crimes.
And that doesn't even touch his pre-war crimes.
One can have ones "Churchill was magnificent" narrative if you want; there's truth enough in that. But you can't say he wasn't a shit of the highest order. Because there's truth in that too. I see no reason to minimise the magnitude of those acts. Real human lives were destroyed because of his carelessness and malice, and it dishonours those innocents to quibble, wrongly, that we should mind our use of the word "crime".
We need to get this properly under control until any relaxations. Nothing before April. Regional tiers don't work. Reduction in restrictions must be at national level, ideally the regional authorities in line with Westminster.
SW suffering from Fleeing Fulham Fucker's Flu.
Dartmouth currently has more Covid than in the previous 9 months combined.
Absolutely astonishing Isle of Wight went from about 2 cases per 100,000 to over 1,000 in a few weeks. This is why regional tiering doesn't work. Let's go national. And only when we are ready to release restrictions.
Re: the scheduled G7 Summit in Cornwall, two questions:
1. Is this the opening wedge for the creation of the dangerously hegemonic (or visa versa) Greater East Cornwall Co-Prosperity Sphere? Which has been the dream of extreme Cornish nationalists (or visa versa) since the First Cornish Rebellion of 1497 and their (previous) high-water mark at the Battle of Deptford Bridge.
2. In the interests of world peace and European friendship (or visa versa) should the UK offer up Rockall as permanent site for G7 Summitry? Would give needed stability to post-COVID global economic inter-dependency AND great amusement to the resident skua & etc. Should also discourage inflated entourages, out-door photo ops and other distractions to high-level decision-making.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I can fully believe that, but Chinese citizens are subjected to tremendous levels of propaganda and actively misinformed by their own government when it suits them.
There is no such thing as a free press there.
He organises a 5-a-side football league for Europeans living over there.
Last summer they were unable to book any 5-a-side pitches in his part of Beijing as no one wanted to deal with Europeans.
It's so alien to how we live or even think that they live and think its very hard to talk about the Chinese way in any sort of informed view as what matters to the public and government are not remotely what we'd imagine.
China is one of the most authoritarian and undemocratic nations on earth now, even Hong Kong is getting more restricted.
Its people get told what to believe and despite economically being more advanced than North Korea, politically it is still not much different. The Communist Party controls all.
Don't remotely disagree.
But I hear that the Beijing population, certainly the ones my friend interacts with in Beijing, are totally content with this approach.
The impression I get are the middle class of Beijing have no interest in our way of operating, their system suits them quite well thank you very much.
To ignore that misses the point entirely.
Further to above.
My friend was in Thailand when Beijing went into lockdown.
On returning to Beijing he had to self isolate in his flat.
He had state police knocking on his front door a few times each day to ensure he was at home, the state left his groceries outside his door each day.
The population expect that level of control and seem to be content with it.
China is currently only 153rd out of 167 nations in the Democracy Index.
Last is North Korea. Looks like not much prospect of any improvement there then.
Hong Kong was 75th and a beacon of freedom as well as prosperity in the region. That now looks under threat.
I wish him every success, a stronger Scottish Labour would be better for all Unionists I'd think, taking in the big picture.
I’d only observe that he wasn’t good enough to beat Richard Leonard last time out..
Boris wasn't good enough to even attempt standing to beat Theresa May, but next time out he won and it all worked out just fine for everyone, so it's good.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I can fully believe that, but Chinese citizens are subjected to tremendous levels of propaganda and actively misinformed by their own government when it suits them.
There is no such thing as a free press there.
He organises a 5-a-side football league for Europeans living over there.
Last summer they were unable to book any 5-a-side pitches in his part of Beijing as no one wanted to deal with Europeans.
It's so alien to how we live or even think that they live and think its very hard to talk about the Chinese way in any sort of informed view as what matters to the public and government are not remotely what we'd imagine.
China is one of the most authoritarian and undemocratic nations on earth now, even Hong Kong is getting more restricted.
Its people get told what to believe and despite economically being more advanced than North Korea, politically it is still not much different. The Communist Party controls all.
Don't remotely disagree.
But I hear that the Beijing population, certainly the ones my friend interacts with in Beijing, are totally content with this approach.
The impression I get are the middle class of Beijing have no interest in our way of operating, their system suits them quite well thank you very much.
To ignore that misses the point entirely.
Further to above.
My friend was in Thailand when Beijing went into lockdown.
On returning to Beijing he had to self isolate in his flat.
He had state police knocking on his front door a few times each day to ensure he was at home, the state left his groceries outside his door each day.
The population expect that level of control and seem to be content with it.
China is currently only 153rd out of 167 nations in the Democracy Index.
Last is North Korea. Looks like not much prospect of any improvement there then.
You come with a view that democracy, as you measure it, is far more important than the Chinese people I hear about through my friend.
You seem to have great trouble in recognising that your version of democracy really is not remotely on the radar of importance the huge swathes of the largest nation on the planet.
It's really not a failure or even a negative in their minds, our way of doing things is the failure as they would see it.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
The standards of this age with respect to slavery are identical to those of any other point in history: most slaves find it objectionable.
So yes, I do judge the slave traders by the standards of the age.
But what do you gain by being shrieky about it? The slave traders in question were abominable, but they are long dead. If their horrible earnings were translated into objects and landscapes of great beauty let's just celebrate that fact and preserve the buildings and landscapes.
I don't think the only two states here are "shrieky" or "celebration". And a more careful reading of what I wrote above (i.e. actually reading it) will show that I'm saying we should tell the truth about history. That is itself an act of preservation. Fetishising the past destroys it.
Yes, but you are overcooking it. For instance: I am no fan of Churchill's at all - I think he was principally a great showman - but you do yourself no favours at all by referring to his "crimes." He didn't commit any. I know what you mean, but talking about him in that way is shriekiness.
Sorry, but no, I'm not accepting that. The magnitude of the horrors that Churchill inflicted upon some people deserve even stronger words than crimes, and, in point of fact, probably were literally crimes in some cases. In the aftermath of the second world war, the Nuremburg Principles make it clear that everyone all the way up to head of government are is liable. Surviving Nazis were rightly tried. Clearly the excesses of the Nazi crimes far exceeded those committed by the democratic Allied powers, but Britain did things during the war that matched some of the actions that were judged German war crimes.
And that doesn't even touch his pre-war crimes.
One can have ones "Churchill was magnificent" narrative if you want; there's truth enough in that. But you can't say he wasn't a shit of the highest order. Because there's truth in that too. I see no reason to minimise the magnitude of those acts. Real human lives were destroyed because of his carelessness and malice, and it dishonours those innocents to quibble, wrongly, that we should mind our use of the word "crime".
Churchill, despite his brief flirtation with the Liberal Party was basically an old school traditional Tory.
I can understand why the left have little time for him other than his role in WW2 (and the NT entry does not even mention that). However for Tories such as myself Churchill remains an icon along with Thatcher.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
...but you are one of the endless pessimists peddling the notion of perpetual decline created by the liberal elites. You have your socially Conservative Government (on paper at least, granted- probably the most fiscally left-wing ever) and still you bang on about liberal wokeism, whatever that may be.
You sound like Jeremy Corbyn, you would be at your happiest, like him, in perpetual opposition, moaning on about how unfair the world is to you.
Nonsense. My critique is both factual and mainstream. In fact, the Charities Commission is on the cusp of investigating the National Trust for overreach. And the cabinet has it on its radar as well. It's important the NT keeps our nation's heritage in all our interests without getting involved in politics. That's not their job.
However much you'd like to bat me away there's a lot of substance in what I'm saying and well you know it.
Can I offer you the flip side. Before the Covid pandemic I was in Antigua. We spoke to a guide who was showing us around English Harbour, we asked why there was no mention of the slave trade in her presentation. She explained that most of her clients were American tourists, and a number considered the history of the slave trade to be overblown, and some even believed there were no "slaves" just indentured servants. As she lived by tips, why upset the punters? It works both ways.
Actually, as it happens, islands like Jamaica started off with Irish indentured labour, which was obviously white.
That's why simple racial caricatures of the past (very fashionable today) can be so divisive.
The NT report even hat-tips the fact the Romans had slavery "but it wasn't racially bound", as if that somehow makes it not as bad.
In reality, they enslaved anyone and everyone they could, including sometimes their own children and families.
You have completely ignored my point. Why have you introduced colour into the argument?
It seems my guide in English Harbour is wise to continue her 'slavery-free' presentation, in the event you wind up on her tour.
I would take some persuading about Romans enslaving their own children.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I can fully believe that, but Chinese citizens are subjected to tremendous levels of propaganda and actively misinformed by their own government when it suits them.
There is no such thing as a free press there.
He organises a 5-a-side football league for Europeans living over there.
Last summer they were unable to book any 5-a-side pitches in his part of Beijing as no one wanted to deal with Europeans.
It's so alien to how we live or even think that they live and think its very hard to talk about the Chinese way in any sort of informed view as what matters to the public and government are not remotely what we'd imagine.
China is one of the most authoritarian and undemocratic nations on earth now, even Hong Kong is getting more restricted.
Its people get told what to believe and despite economically being more advanced than North Korea, politically it is still not much different. The Communist Party controls all.
Don't remotely disagree.
But I hear that the Beijing population, certainly the ones my friend interacts with in Beijing, are totally content with this approach.
The impression I get are the middle class of Beijing have no interest in our way of operating, their system suits them quite well thank you very much.
To ignore that misses the point entirely.
Further to above.
My friend was in Thailand when Beijing went into lockdown.
On returning to Beijing he had to self isolate in his flat.
He had state police knocking on his front door a few times each day to ensure he was at home, the state left his groceries outside his door each day.
The population expect that level of control and seem to be content with it.
China is currently only 153rd out of 167 nations in the Democracy Index.
Last is North Korea. Looks like not much prospect of any improvement there then.
Hong Kong was 75th and a beacon of freedom as well as prosperity in the region. That now looks under threat.
I don't agree with the airbrushing of History, however I would be happy for the appropriate Ayrshire council to demand the removal of the name "Trump" from Turnberry Hotel. Any council, that with the will of the voters, wants Adolf Hitler Crescent or Joseph Stalin Avenue replaced with something less controversial is fine by me too.
To be honest I have more pressing issues to consider, one would think so would Robert Jenrick. What a hateful little weasel of a politician he is!
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I can fully believe that, but Chinese citizens are subjected to tremendous levels of propaganda and actively misinformed by their own government when it suits them.
There is no such thing as a free press there.
He organises a 5-a-side football league for Europeans living over there.
Last summer they were unable to book any 5-a-side pitches in his part of Beijing as no one wanted to deal with Europeans.
It's so alien to how we live or even think that they live and think its very hard to talk about the Chinese way in any sort of informed view as what matters to the public and government are not remotely what we'd imagine.
China is one of the most authoritarian and undemocratic nations on earth now, even Hong Kong is getting more restricted.
Its people get told what to believe and despite economically being more advanced than North Korea, politically it is still not much different. The Communist Party controls all.
Don't remotely disagree.
But I hear that the Beijing population, certainly the ones my friend interacts with in Beijing, are totally content with this approach.
The impression I get are the middle class of Beijing have no interest in our way of operating, their system suits them quite well thank you very much.
To ignore that misses the point entirely.
Further to above.
My friend was in Thailand when Beijing went into lockdown.
On returning to Beijing he had to self isolate in his flat.
He had state police knocking on his front door a few times each day to ensure he was at home, the state left his groceries outside his door each day.
The population expect that level of control and seem to be content with it.
China is currently only 153rd out of 167 nations in the Democracy Index.
Last is North Korea. Looks like not much prospect of any improvement there then.
You come with a view that democracy, as you measure it, is far more important than the Chinese people I hear about through my friend.
You seem to have great trouble in recognising that your version of democracy really is not remotely on the radar of importance the huge swathes of the largest nation on the planet.
It's really not a failure or even a negative in their minds, our way of doing things is the failure as they would see it.
They have never had a chance to try it even if they wanted to.
The Chinese Communist Party runs the Government and no opposition parties are allowed.
It is not merely absence of a version of democracy, there is basically no democracy in China at all.
Power comes through rising up the career ladder of the Communist Party.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I can fully believe that, but Chinese citizens are subjected to tremendous levels of propaganda and actively misinformed by their own government when it suits them.
There is no such thing as a free press there.
He organises a 5-a-side football league for Europeans living over there.
Last summer they were unable to book any 5-a-side pitches in his part of Beijing as no one wanted to deal with Europeans.
It's so alien to how we live or even think that they live and think its very hard to talk about the Chinese way in any sort of informed view as what matters to the public and government are not remotely what we'd imagine.
China is one of the most authoritarian and undemocratic nations on earth now, even Hong Kong is getting more restricted.
Its people get told what to believe and despite economically being more advanced than North Korea, politically it is still not much different. The Communist Party controls all.
Don't remotely disagree.
But I hear that the Beijing population, certainly the ones my friend interacts with in Beijing, are totally content with this approach.
The impression I get are the middle class of Beijing have no interest in our way of operating, their system suits them quite well thank you very much.
To ignore that misses the point entirely.
Further to above.
My friend was in Thailand when Beijing went into lockdown.
On returning to Beijing he had to self isolate in his flat.
He had state police knocking on his front door a few times each day to ensure he was at home, the state left his groceries outside his door each day.
The population expect that level of control and seem to be content with it.
China is currently only 153rd out of 167 nations in the Democracy Index.
Last is North Korea. Looks like not much prospect of any improvement there then.
You come with a view that democracy, as you measure it, is far more important than the Chinese people I hear about through my friend.
You seem to have great trouble in recognising that your version of democracy really is not remotely on the radar of importance the huge swathes of the largest nation on the planet.
It's really not a failure or even a negative in their minds, our way of doing things is the failure as they would see it.
I don't think people are really disputing that the chinese population are not particularly interested in democratising their system, so I don't think people are having trouble recognising that. That's different to viewing it as a major problem, and noting that in such a brutal, authoritarian regime, what we think people think is harder to pin down anyway - plenty of dictators live in places where it is speculated they might well win in a free election, but we'll never know as they don't give the opportunity. Who knows what the Chinese might be interested in if they were permitted to be interested in it.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I can fully believe that, but Chinese citizens are subjected to tremendous levels of propaganda and actively misinformed by their own government when it suits them.
There is no such thing as a free press there.
He organises a 5-a-side football league for Europeans living over there.
Last summer they were unable to book any 5-a-side pitches in his part of Beijing as no one wanted to deal with Europeans.
It's so alien to how we live or even think that they live and think its very hard to talk about the Chinese way in any sort of informed view as what matters to the public and government are not remotely what we'd imagine.
China is one of the most authoritarian and undemocratic nations on earth now, even Hong Kong is getting more restricted.
Its people get told what to believe and despite economically being more advanced than North Korea, politically it is still not much different. The Communist Party controls all.
Don't remotely disagree.
But I hear that the Beijing population, certainly the ones my friend interacts with in Beijing, are totally content with this approach.
The impression I get are the middle class of Beijing have no interest in our way of operating, their system suits them quite well thank you very much.
To ignore that misses the point entirely.
Further to above.
My friend was in Thailand when Beijing went into lockdown.
On returning to Beijing he had to self isolate in his flat.
He had state police knocking on his front door a few times each day to ensure he was at home, the state left his groceries outside his door each day.
The population expect that level of control and seem to be content with it.
China is currently only 153rd out of 167 nations in the Democracy Index.
Last is North Korea. Looks like not much prospect of any improvement there then.
Hong Kong was 75th and a beacon of freedom as well as prosperity in the region. That now looks under threat.
When did the USA slip into 'flawed democracy' I wonder.
UK not doing great on functioning of government and political culture.
Only 22 'full democracies' is a depressing number.
Civil liberties was a high score in HK. That'll be a precipitous drop.
At least we remain a full democracy though. Ironically, despite the turbulence of the last few years, our score improved because we had so many elections and referendums with higher turnout which allowed for greater democratic participation.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
...but you are one of the endless pessimists peddling the notion of perpetual decline created by the liberal elites. You have your socially Conservative Government (on paper at least, granted- probably the most fiscally left-wing ever) and still you bang on about liberal wokeism, whatever that may be.
You sound like Jeremy Corbyn, you would be at your happiest, like him, in perpetual opposition, moaning on about how unfair the world is to you.
Nonsense. My critique is both factual and mainstream. In fact, the Charities Commission is on the cusp of investigating the National Trust for overreach. And the cabinet has it on its radar as well. It's important the NT keeps our nation's heritage in all our interests without getting involved in politics. That's not their job.
However much you'd like to bat me away there's a lot of substance in what I'm saying and well you know it.
Can I offer you the flip side. Before the Covid pandemic I was in Antigua. We spoke to a guide who was showing us around English Harbour, we asked why there was no mention of the slave trade in her presentation. She explained that most of her clients were American tourists, and a number considered the history of the slave trade to be overblown, and some even believed there were no "slaves" just indentured servants. As she lived by tips, why upset the punters? It works both ways.
Actually, as it happens, islands like Jamaica started off with Irish indentured labour, which was obviously white.
That's why simple racial caricatures of the past (very fashionable today) can be so divisive.
The NT report even hat-tips the fact the Romans had slavery "but it wasn't racially bound", as if that somehow makes it not as bad.
In reality, they enslaved anyone and everyone they could, including sometimes their own children and families.
You have completely ignored my point. Why have you introduced colour into the argument?
It seems my guide in English Harbour is wise to continue her 'slavery-free' presentation, in the event you wind up on her tour.
I would take some persuading about Romans enslaving their own children.
IIRC at some periods, some poor families sold their children into slavery. Still happening in some parts of the world today.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I can fully believe that, but Chinese citizens are subjected to tremendous levels of propaganda and actively misinformed by their own government when it suits them.
There is no such thing as a free press there.
He organises a 5-a-side football league for Europeans living over there.
Last summer they were unable to book any 5-a-side pitches in his part of Beijing as no one wanted to deal with Europeans.
It's so alien to how we live or even think that they live and think its very hard to talk about the Chinese way in any sort of informed view as what matters to the public and government are not remotely what we'd imagine.
China is one of the most authoritarian and undemocratic nations on earth now, even Hong Kong is getting more restricted.
Its people get told what to believe and despite economically being more advanced than North Korea, politically it is still not much different. The Communist Party controls all.
Don't remotely disagree.
But I hear that the Beijing population, certainly the ones my friend interacts with in Beijing, are totally content with this approach.
The impression I get are the middle class of Beijing have no interest in our way of operating, their system suits them quite well thank you very much.
To ignore that misses the point entirely.
Further to above.
My friend was in Thailand when Beijing went into lockdown.
On returning to Beijing he had to self isolate in his flat.
He had state police knocking on his front door a few times each day to ensure he was at home, the state left his groceries outside his door each day.
The population expect that level of control and seem to be content with it.
China is currently only 153rd out of 167 nations in the Democracy Index.
Last is North Korea. Looks like not much prospect of any improvement there then.
Hong Kong was 75th and a beacon of freedom as well as prosperity in the region. That now looks under threat.
When did the USA slip into 'flawed democracy' I wonder.
UK not doing great on functioning of government and political culture.
Only 22 'full democracies' is a depressing number.
Civil liberties was a high score in HK. That'll be a precipitous drop.
75 democracies overall and only a minority authoritarian states is still better than it has been for almost all of world history and certainly compared to what it was 50 years ago.
I don't agree with the airbrushing of History, however I would be happy for the appropriate Ayrshire council to demand the removal of the name "Trump" from Turnberry Hotel. Any council, that with the will of the voters, wants Adolf Hitler Crescent or Joseph Stalin Avenue replaced with something less controversial is fine by me too.
To be honest I have more pressing issues to consider, one would think so would Robert Jenrick. What a hateful little weasel of a politician he is!
I've never really fully been on board with the criticism that someone cannot do relatively small thing X as they have more important thing Y to be doing. Many things happen at the same time even in the most difficult of emergency situations, and won't necessarily take up very much time at all at least on the side of the decision maker. I doubt it has taken up much of his pressing time.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
The standards of this age with respect to slavery are identical to those of any other point in history: most slaves find it objectionable.
So yes, I do judge the slave traders by the standards of the age.
But what do you gain by being shrieky about it? The slave traders in question were abominable, but they are long dead. If their horrible earnings were translated into objects and landscapes of great beauty let's just celebrate that fact and preserve the buildings and landscapes.
I don't think the only two states here are "shrieky" or "celebration". And a more careful reading of what I wrote above (i.e. actually reading it) will show that I'm saying we should tell the truth about history. That is itself an act of preservation. Fetishising the past destroys it.
Yes, but you are overcooking it. For instance: I am no fan of Churchill's at all - I think he was principally a great showman - but you do yourself no favours at all by referring to his "crimes." He didn't commit any. I know what you mean, but talking about him in that way is shriekiness.
Sorry, but no, I'm not accepting that. The magnitude of the horrors that Churchill inflicted upon some people deserve even stronger words than crimes, and, in point of fact, probably were literally crimes in some cases. In the aftermath of the second world war, the Nuremburg Principles make it clear that everyone all the way up to head of government are is liable. Surviving Nazis were rightly tried. Clearly the excesses of the Nazi crimes far exceeded those committed by the democratic Allied powers, but Britain did things during the war that matched some of the actions that were judged German war crimes.
And that doesn't even touch his pre-war crimes.
One can have ones "Churchill was magnificent" narrative if you want; there's truth enough in that. But you can't say he wasn't a shit of the highest order. Because there's truth in that too. I see no reason to minimise the magnitude of those acts. Real human lives were destroyed because of his carelessness and malice, and it dishonours those innocents to quibble, wrongly, that we should mind our use of the word "crime".
Churchill, despite his brief flirtation with the Liberal Party was basically an old school traditional Tory.
I can understand why the left have little time for him other than his role in WW2 (and the NT entry does not even mention that). However for Tories such as myself Churchill remains an icon along with Thatcher.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
The standards of this age with respect to slavery are identical to those of any other point in history: most slaves find it objectionable.
So yes, I do judge the slave traders by the standards of the age.
But what do you gain by being shrieky about it? The slave traders in question were abominable, but they are long dead. If their horrible earnings were translated into objects and landscapes of great beauty let's just celebrate that fact and preserve the buildings and landscapes.
I don't think the only two states here are "shrieky" or "celebration". And a more careful reading of what I wrote above (i.e. actually reading it) will show that I'm saying we should tell the truth about history. That is itself an act of preservation. Fetishising the past destroys it.
Yes, but you are overcooking it. For instance: I am no fan of Churchill's at all - I think he was principally a great showman - but you do yourself no favours at all by referring to his "crimes." He didn't commit any. I know what you mean, but talking about him in that way is shriekiness.
Sorry, but no, I'm not accepting that. The magnitude of the horrors that Churchill inflicted upon some people deserve even stronger words than crimes, and, in point of fact, probably were literally crimes in some cases. In the aftermath of the second world war, the Nuremburg Principles make it clear that everyone all the way up to head of government are is liable. Surviving Nazis were rightly tried. Clearly the excesses of the Nazi crimes far exceeded those committed by the democratic Allied powers, but Britain did things during the war that matched some of the actions that were judged German war crimes.
And that doesn't even touch his pre-war crimes.
One can have ones "Churchill was magnificent" narrative if you want; there's truth enough in that. But you can't say he wasn't a shit of the highest order. Because there's truth in that too. I see no reason to minimise the magnitude of those acts. Real human lives were destroyed because of his carelessness and malice, and it dishonours those innocents to quibble, wrongly, that we should mind our use of the word "crime".
Churchill, despite his brief flirtation with the Liberal Party was basically an old school traditional Tory.
I can understand why the left have little time for him other than his role in WW2 (and the NT entry does not even mention that). However for Tories such as myself Churchill remains an icon along with Thatcher.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I can fully believe that, but Chinese citizens are subjected to tremendous levels of propaganda and actively misinformed by their own government when it suits them.
There is no such thing as a free press there.
He organises a 5-a-side football league for Europeans living over there.
Last summer they were unable to book any 5-a-side pitches in his part of Beijing as no one wanted to deal with Europeans.
It's so alien to how we live or even think that they live and think its very hard to talk about the Chinese way in any sort of informed view as what matters to the public and government are not remotely what we'd imagine.
China is one of the most authoritarian and undemocratic nations on earth now, even Hong Kong is getting more restricted.
Its people get told what to believe and despite economically being more advanced than North Korea, politically it is still not much different. The Communist Party controls all.
Don't remotely disagree.
But I hear that the Beijing population, certainly the ones my friend interacts with in Beijing, are totally content with this approach.
The impression I get are the middle class of Beijing have no interest in our way of operating, their system suits them quite well thank you very much.
To ignore that misses the point entirely.
Further to above.
My friend was in Thailand when Beijing went into lockdown.
On returning to Beijing he had to self isolate in his flat.
He had state police knocking on his front door a few times each day to ensure he was at home, the state left his groceries outside his door each day.
The population expect that level of control and seem to be content with it.
China is currently only 153rd out of 167 nations in the Democracy Index.
Last is North Korea. Looks like not much prospect of any improvement there then.
Hong Kong was 75th and a beacon of freedom as well as prosperity in the region. That now looks under threat.
When did the USA slip into 'flawed democracy' I wonder.
UK not doing great on functioning of government and political culture.
Only 22 'full democracies' is a depressing number.
Civil liberties was a high score in HK. That'll be a precipitous drop.
75 democracies overall and only a minority authoritarian states is still better than it has been for almost all of world history and certainly compared to what it was 50 years ago.
Well yeah, and I'm all for looking at things in a historical context, but sometimes going 'Look, at least there isn't a Mongol horde on the horizon and the Head of State cannot kill you on a whim' fails to uplift me.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I can fully believe that, but Chinese citizens are subjected to tremendous levels of propaganda and actively misinformed by their own government when it suits them.
There is no such thing as a free press there.
He organises a 5-a-side football league for Europeans living over there.
Last summer they were unable to book any 5-a-side pitches in his part of Beijing as no one wanted to deal with Europeans.
It's so alien to how we live or even think that they live and think its very hard to talk about the Chinese way in any sort of informed view as what matters to the public and government are not remotely what we'd imagine.
China is one of the most authoritarian and undemocratic nations on earth now, even Hong Kong is getting more restricted.
Its people get told what to believe and despite economically being more advanced than North Korea, politically it is still not much different. The Communist Party controls all.
Don't remotely disagree.
But I hear that the Beijing population, certainly the ones my friend interacts with in Beijing, are totally content with this approach.
The impression I get are the middle class of Beijing have no interest in our way of operating, their system suits them quite well thank you very much.
To ignore that misses the point entirely.
Further to above.
My friend was in Thailand when Beijing went into lockdown.
On returning to Beijing he had to self isolate in his flat.
He had state police knocking on his front door a few times each day to ensure he was at home, the state left his groceries outside his door each day.
The population expect that level of control and seem to be content with it.
China is currently only 153rd out of 167 nations in the Democracy Index.
Last is North Korea. Looks like not much prospect of any improvement there then.
You come with a view that democracy, as you measure it, is far more important than the Chinese people I hear about through my friend.
You seem to have great trouble in recognising that your version of democracy really is not remotely on the radar of importance the huge swathes of the largest nation on the planet.
It's really not a failure or even a negative in their minds, our way of doing things is the failure as they would see it.
There is an attitude that China and the Soviet Union are the same because they are both nominally Communist. National unity. Order. Lack of starvation. These have been recurrent themes throughout several millennia. When they are there happiness. Deeply embedded in the history and culture. And even in the language.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
The standards of this age with respect to slavery are identical to those of any other point in history: most slaves find it objectionable.
So yes, I do judge the slave traders by the standards of the age.
But what do you gain by being shrieky about it? The slave traders in question were abominable, but they are long dead. If their horrible earnings were translated into objects and landscapes of great beauty let's just celebrate that fact and preserve the buildings and landscapes.
I don't think the only two states here are "shrieky" or "celebration". And a more careful reading of what I wrote above (i.e. actually reading it) will show that I'm saying we should tell the truth about history. That is itself an act of preservation. Fetishising the past destroys it.
Yes, but you are overcooking it. For instance: I am no fan of Churchill's at all - I think he was principally a great showman - but you do yourself no favours at all by referring to his "crimes." He didn't commit any. I know what you mean, but talking about him in that way is shriekiness.
Sorry, but no, I'm not accepting that. The magnitude of the horrors that Churchill inflicted upon some people deserve even stronger words than crimes, and, in point of fact, probably were literally crimes in some cases. In the aftermath of the second world war, the Nuremburg Principles make it clear that everyone all the way up to head of government are is liable. Surviving Nazis were rightly tried. Clearly the excesses of the Nazi crimes far exceeded those committed by the democratic Allied powers, but Britain did things during the war that matched some of the actions that were judged German war crimes.
And that doesn't even touch his pre-war crimes.
One can have ones "Churchill was magnificent" narrative if you want; there's truth enough in that. But you can't say he wasn't a shit of the highest order. Because there's truth in that too. I see no reason to minimise the magnitude of those acts. Real human lives were destroyed because of his carelessness and malice, and it dishonours those innocents to quibble, wrongly, that we should mind our use of the word "crime".
Churchill, despite his brief flirtation with the Liberal Party was basically an old school traditional Tory.
I can understand why the left have little time for him other than his role in WW2 (and the NT entry does not even mention that). However for Tories such as myself Churchill remains an icon along with Thatcher.
Thanks for trying to add to the conversation.
I added to it, just not in the way you liked
I didn't dislike it either... it was just something that happened and then was over. Like a leaf falling from a tree. At night. In the forest. On an empty continent.
I don't agree with the airbrushing of History, however I would be happy for the appropriate Ayrshire council to demand the removal of the name "Trump" from Turnberry Hotel. Any council, that with the will of the voters, wants Adolf Hitler Crescent or Joseph Stalin Avenue replaced with something less controversial is fine by me too.
To be honest I have more pressing issues to consider, one would think so would Robert Jenrick. What a hateful little weasel of a politician he is!
Yeah, they're not getting a rise out of me. That said, I'm not a fanatical decentraliser, but I think this could reasonably be delegated all the way down to town councils. If Grantham wants to have a Margaret Thatcher Boulevard, that's fine with me. But if Jenrick wants to insist on something else, I don't really care.
As I understand it, it's anyway only council-owned property where the council gets to choose. In Waverley we periodically get told that develop X has named its new road Shakespeare Heights or whatever, and we can only object is the name is obscene or would cause confusion with somewhere else in the borough.
There is nothing really new in that statement or anything definite. The key sentence being...
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And does it really matter much? We know the virus originated in Wuhan and the Chinese attempted to cover it up at the start, though their efforts to control it since put the US and UK to shame.
Well it matters if China had an outbreak in the lab of a known isolated virus and covered it up for months, compared to some novel unknown virus that then they tried to massively downplay while scrambling about trying to work out what it was. One is very very bad, the other is far worse.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
Yes, indeed.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
A friend lives in Beijing, teaching Engliah for 20+ years.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
I can fully believe that, but Chinese citizens are subjected to tremendous levels of propaganda and actively misinformed by their own government when it suits them.
There is no such thing as a free press there.
He organises a 5-a-side football league for Europeans living over there.
Last summer they were unable to book any 5-a-side pitches in his part of Beijing as no one wanted to deal with Europeans.
It's so alien to how we live or even think that they live and think its very hard to talk about the Chinese way in any sort of informed view as what matters to the public and government are not remotely what we'd imagine.
China is one of the most authoritarian and undemocratic nations on earth now, even Hong Kong is getting more restricted.
Its people get told what to believe and despite economically being more advanced than North Korea, politically it is still not much different. The Communist Party controls all.
Don't remotely disagree.
But I hear that the Beijing population, certainly the ones my friend interacts with in Beijing, are totally content with this approach.
The impression I get are the middle class of Beijing have no interest in our way of operating, their system suits them quite well thank you very much.
To ignore that misses the point entirely.
Further to above.
My friend was in Thailand when Beijing went into lockdown.
On returning to Beijing he had to self isolate in his flat.
He had state police knocking on his front door a few times each day to ensure he was at home, the state left his groceries outside his door each day.
The population expect that level of control and seem to be content with it.
China is currently only 153rd out of 167 nations in the Democracy Index.
Last is North Korea. Looks like not much prospect of any improvement there then.
Hong Kong was 75th and a beacon of freedom as well as prosperity in the region. That now looks under threat.
When did the USA slip into 'flawed democracy' I wonder.
UK not doing great on functioning of government and political culture.
Only 22 'full democracies' is a depressing number.
Civil liberties was a high score in HK. That'll be a precipitous drop.
At least we remain a full democracy though. Ironically, despite the turbulence of the last few years, our score improved because we had so many elections and referendums with higher turnout which allowed for greater democratic participation.
Good stuff.
I wonder if obligatory voting improves your score as it means more democratic participation, even though it is enforced and denying people the option to stay at home.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
The issue I have is that historical figures should be judged by the standards and laws of the times they lived in. Not by modern standards, and certainly not by the most extreme progressivist views, exposed by so many to make themselves feel better.
The standards of this age with respect to slavery are identical to those of any other point in history: most slaves find it objectionable.
So yes, I do judge the slave traders by the standards of the age.
But what do you gain by being shrieky about it? The slave traders in question were abominable, but they are long dead. If their horrible earnings were translated into objects and landscapes of great beauty let's just celebrate that fact and preserve the buildings and landscapes.
I don't think the only two states here are "shrieky" or "celebration". And a more careful reading of what I wrote above (i.e. actually reading it) will show that I'm saying we should tell the truth about history. That is itself an act of preservation. Fetishising the past destroys it.
Yes, but you are overcooking it. For instance: I am no fan of Churchill's at all - I think he was principally a great showman - but you do yourself no favours at all by referring to his "crimes." He didn't commit any. I know what you mean, but talking about him in that way is shriekiness.
Sorry, but no, I'm not accepting that. The magnitude of the horrors that Churchill inflicted upon some people deserve even stronger words than crimes, and, in point of fact, probably were literally crimes in some cases. In the aftermath of the second world war, the Nuremburg Principles make it clear that everyone all the way up to head of government are is liable. Surviving Nazis were rightly tried. Clearly the excesses of the Nazi crimes far exceeded those committed by the democratic Allied powers, but Britain did things during the war that matched some of the actions that were judged German war crimes.
And that doesn't even touch his pre-war crimes.
One can have ones "Churchill was magnificent" narrative if you want; there's truth enough in that. But you can't say he wasn't a shit of the highest order. Because there's truth in that too. I see no reason to minimise the magnitude of those acts. Real human lives were destroyed because of his carelessness and malice, and it dishonours those innocents to quibble, wrongly, that we should mind our use of the word "crime".
Comments
https://twitter.com/_SaveOurStatues/status/1350563049665679364?s=19
We all knew that.
Austerity and Brexit have created more social division than any policies since at least the 1930s.
In fact, the entire country is a bunch of lefties, and I'm the only one left in the majority.
My own jaundiced view of the man comes from my Australian grandmother.
That's why simple racial caricatures of the past (very fashionable today) can be so divisive.
The NT report even hat-tips the fact the Romans had slavery "but it wasn't racially bound", as if that somehow makes it not as bad.
In reality, they enslaved anyone and everyone they could, including sometimes their own children and families.
I do not think that withdrawing your funds will have any effect whatsoever on the National Trust though. If 25% of their members did then maybe, but I honestly think very few see it as you do.
Hinduism (54.7%)
Islam (26.6%)
Christianity (18.4%)
Other or none (0.3%)
How confident are you that we'll all stand up to scrutiny in 100 years by the standards and values of the 22nd Century?
I don't think I'm in as small a minority as you think.
In any event, I need to do what I believe to be right in accordance with my own sense of integrity.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9155109/Prince-Andrew-asked-online-troll-help-discredit-sex-accuser.html
At our house, for example, we lived there over 200 years. It evolved and changed, but the Trust decided they wanted to eliminate all the “modernisations” we had done because they “weren’t in keeping”with the 18th century country house story they wanted to present. We had to fight hard (and ultimately pay) to stop them airbrushing many generations of our life. Good Henry and Henry the Magnificent were impressive people, but there is so much more to my family than them.
most slaves find it objectionable.
So yes, I do judge the slave traders by the standards of the age.
Indian independence came after WWII, by which time he'd come round to dominion status, but by then of course it was too late.
As for the 'fragility' nonsense - that's just a silly psychological tactic to shame people who disagree with you into compliance. 'Oh, if don't let us smash your windows that means you're suffering from Window Fragility and you wouldn't want that, would you?'
No, I just like my windows the way they are. Is that too much to ask?
https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/local/dundee/1891501/military-needed-to-speed-up-scotlands-slower-covid-19-vaccinations-angus-council-leader-says/
However a huge percentage of residents live in independent homes (it’s more consolidated in Scotland) so that might be an explanation?
Doesn't mean it's wrong.
https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1350364468027469824?s=19
We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
And, on top of that, you have the CCP refusing to allow WHO staff access to China to investigate this further.
Why? What do they have to hide?
https://twitter.com/christopherhope/status/1350573464768421888?s=20
https://twitter.com/christopherhope/status/1350573466324512769?s=20
And a more careful reading of what I wrote above (i.e. actually reading it) will show that I'm saying we should tell the truth about history. That is itself an act of preservation. Fetishising the past destroys it.
Anyway the German federal election in September will be more important than today's internal CDU result.
But anyone celebrating the fact that locally elected politicians in a country cannot even make such irrelevant decisions about their local areas tells you everything you need to know about this massively overly centralised, London centric nation we live in.
We need huge, massive devolution of decision making, the idea that locally democratically elected politicians cannot make such decisions tells you all you need to know about the authoritarian government that we have that tells us how we should manage our local areas from hundreds of miles away.
Shocking how little democracy we have at anything like a local level in this country, it's so undemocratic.
And no, I really don't care one way of the other about the statues, I care about the people having a say on their lives and their locality.
But it is clear US intelligence services best attempts at trying to find this out hasn't been able to establish any proof for either scenario.
But it's very difficult to find proof when China won't allow access to WHO investigators to confirm that or make all of its own evidence available for peer review and interrogation.
Maybe they've calculated that the truth if it came out would be so damning that they've prefer to be heavily criticised for obstructionism and just let everyone wonder and theorise instead.
The lcoals consider Covid to be a western virus that they have dealt with very well and the west failed totally.
He experiences anti-western racism as a result.
The way the average Chinese person sees the world, the priorities for the Chinese government to keep their population happy, are not remotely aligned to what most in the west think.
Making it harder to create or change road names just seems like it will cause a headache at some point, it's a function which usually gets no notice or care whatsoever, and sounds like this might make it more complicated than it needs to be.
There is no such thing as a free press there.
Some council recently did an exercise then removed a statue. Whether one disagrees or agrees with the removal I'd find it hard to argue against that - it wasn't simply torn down, they looked into it, and local representatives made the call. That's local democracy. There's higher protections for very old and significant stuff in any case.
Dartmouth currently has more Covid than in the previous 9 months combined.
Last summer they were unable to book any 5-a-side pitches in his part of Beijing as no one wanted to deal with Europeans.
It's so alien to how we live or even think that they live and think its very hard to talk about the Chinese way in any sort of informed view as what matters to the public and government are not remotely what we'd imagine.
Awhile back saw episode of Prof. John Lewis Gates's genealogy show on PBS that featured actor-comedian-writer Wanda Sykes.
Turned out one of her ancestors was a White woman indentured servant who had a child by a Black slave. At a time when Virginia colony law said, if the mother was free, the child was free.
However, it was NOT long before the law was changed, so that ANY child whose mother OR father was a Black slave, the child was enslaved. AND Black by law.
Thus in short order, it became a social, economic, legal principle, that no White person could be a slave; indentured, imprisoned, transported, but NOT enslaved, at least not in Virginia.
Along with the corollary principle, that no Black person was presumed to be free, without absolute positive proof, but instead was presumed to be a slave, in fact born TO be a slave.
This from Wanda Sykes's wiki page
" Sykes' family history was researched for an episode of the 2012 PBS genealogy program Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr. Her ancestry was traced back to a 1683 court case involving her paternal ninth great-grandmother Elizabeth Banks, a free white woman and indentured servant, who gave birth to a biracial child, Mary Banks, fathered by a slave, who inherited her mother's free status. According to historian Ira Berlin, a specialist in the history of American slavery, the Sykes family history is "the only such case that I know of in which it is possible to trace a black family rooted in freedom from the late 17th century to the present."
French drugs firm 'days away' from production on 60million doses of Britain's FOURTH coronavirus vaccine... before it's even struck a deal with the EU
Chief executive Thomas Lingelbach said Valneva’s vaccine, which has been produced with financial aid from the UK Government, is about to go into mass production at its plant in Livingston, Scotland.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9155273/French-drugs-firm-days-away-making-60million-doses-Britains-FOURTH-coronavirus-vaccine.html
Won't be approved at best until the summer though.
Its people get told what to believe and despite economically being more advanced than North Korea, politically it is still not much different. The Communist Party controls all.
Unforgivable.
So on that basis of alternate candidates this year it is the CSU's turn and Soder should be the CDU/CSU candidate.
But a deep, ingrained distrust. It is much, much wider than it is here, but not as deep.
But I hear that the Beijing population, certainly the ones my friend interacts with in Beijing, are totally content with this approach.
The impression I get are the middle class of Beijing have no interest in our way of operating, their system suits them quite well thank you very much.
To ignore that misses the point entirely.
Further to above.
My friend was in Thailand when Beijing went into lockdown.
On returning to Beijing he had to self isolate in his flat.
He had state police knocking on his front door a few times each day to ensure he was at home, the state left his groceries outside his door each day.
The population expect that level of control and seem to be content with it.
It seems my guide in English Harbour is wise to continue her 'slavery-free' presentation, in the event you wind up on her tour.
In the aftermath of the second world war, the Nuremburg Principles make it clear that everyone all the way up to head of government are is liable. Surviving Nazis were rightly tried.
Clearly the excesses of the Nazi crimes far exceeded those committed by the democratic Allied powers, but Britain did things during the war that matched some of the actions that were judged German war crimes.
And that doesn't even touch his pre-war crimes.
One can have ones "Churchill was magnificent" narrative if you want; there's truth enough in that. But you can't say he wasn't a shit of the highest order. Because there's truth in that too. I see no reason to minimise the magnitude of those acts. Real human lives were destroyed because of his carelessness and malice, and it dishonours those innocents to quibble, wrongly, that we should mind our use of the word "crime".
1. Is this the opening wedge for the creation of the dangerously hegemonic (or visa versa) Greater East Cornwall Co-Prosperity Sphere? Which has been the dream of extreme Cornish nationalists (or visa versa) since the First Cornish Rebellion of 1497 and their (previous) high-water mark at the Battle of Deptford Bridge.
2. In the interests of world peace and European friendship (or visa versa) should the UK offer up Rockall as permanent site for G7 Summitry? Would give needed stability to post-COVID global economic inter-dependency AND great amusement to the resident skua & etc. Should also discourage inflated entourages, out-door photo ops and other distractions to high-level decision-making.
Last is North Korea. Looks like not much prospect of any improvement there then.
Hong Kong was 75th and a beacon of freedom as well as prosperity in the region. That now looks under threat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
...Wait
You seem to have great trouble in recognising that your version of democracy really is not remotely on the radar of importance the huge swathes of the largest nation on the planet.
It's really not a failure or even a negative in their minds, our way of doing things is the failure as they would see it.
I can understand why the left have little time for him other than his role in WW2 (and the NT entry does not even mention that). However for Tories such as myself Churchill remains an icon along with Thatcher.
UK not doing great on functioning of government and political culture.
Only 22 'full democracies' is a depressing number.
Civil liberties was a high score in HK. That'll be a precipitous drop.
To be honest I have more pressing issues to consider, one would think so would Robert Jenrick. What a hateful little weasel of a politician he is!
The Chinese Communist Party runs the Government and no opposition parties are allowed.
It is not merely absence of a version of democracy, there is basically no democracy in China at all.
Power comes through rising up the career ladder of the Communist Party.
The State Department Report is not that.
National unity. Order. Lack of starvation.
These have been recurrent themes throughout several millennia. When they are there happiness.
Deeply embedded in the history and culture. And even in the language.
As I understand it, it's anyway only council-owned property where the council gets to choose. In Waverley we periodically get told that develop X has named its new road Shakespeare Heights or whatever, and we can only object is the name is obscene or would cause confusion with somewhere else in the borough.
I wonder if obligatory voting improves your score as it means more democratic participation, even though it is enforced and denying people the option to stay at home.