Tony L
Administrator
I’ll happily take ‘skewer’!
Edward Colston: Bristol slave trader statue 'was an affront'
- Thread starter ks.234
- Start date
I’ll happily take ‘skewer’!
Tony L
Administrator
I agree entirely, though Labour still failed to get the message across that the divisions will only increase after the Tories have turned the UK into a low-tax, low-wage economy lacking basic EU human/employment rights, which was the point of Brexit all along...
ks.234
Half way to Infinity
Yes, maybe. But there does seem to be a growing number of issues which is making his gently gently catchy monkey excuse start to look a bit thin. To be clear, I voted for Starmer and would like to see him succeed, but if another party starts to look more socialist than the Labour Party, my allegiances might shift
Coda II
getting there slowly
just gonna put this here in case people didn’t see it
Worth reading the short BBC interview/story
"I wasn't thinking, I was just thinking of a human being on the floor. It wasn't going to end well had we not intervened," Mr Hutchinson said. "I had no other thoughts in my mind apart from getting to safety."
He added: "We did what we had to do. We stopped somebody from being killed."
Tony L
Administrator
New statue unveiled in Bristol (Bristol247).
cooky1257
pfm Member
That's more like it.
jackbarron
Chelsea, London
The compensation slave owners got in 1833 amounted to £17 billion in today's money. This is how much the British tax-payer gave to people who owned and killed slaves while making themselves rich. https://www.theguardian.com
Financial reparation to BAME people by the British government makes complete sense. They can start by giving back the many treasures they looted from foreign countries that are housed in museums.
Jack
cooky1257
pfm Member
This is from the work Laurence Westgaph is doing via Facebook;
Outside the Sefton Park Palmhouse there is a statue of Columbus(both pictured). The inscription on the plinth reads: "The discoverer of America was the maker of Liverpool." Trade with the Americas in enslaved people and slave-produced goods helped to make Liverpool the second city of the empire, the most important transatlantic entrepoint in Europe and arguably the world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The palmhouse itself and the statues that surround it were paid for by Henry Yates Thompson and given as a gift to the people of Liverpool. Although he supported abolition during the American Civil War and came from a family of esteemed unitarians who expressed abolitionist sympathies, his maternal forebears were steeped in slavery over a number of generations. The family owned many plantations in the Caribbean and his mother's father, Joseph Brooks Yates, received more than 43000 pounds in compensation for the more than 2200 enslaved people he owned on his estates in Jamaica when slavery was abolished in 1834. An earlier generation of his family had also owned the "Brooks" slave ship, a diagram of which was used by the abolitionists in a widely distributed pamphlet to highlight the terribly crowded conditions the enslaved had to endure throughout the horrors of the middle passage(pictured).
Outside the Sefton Park Palmhouse there is a statue of Columbus(both pictured). The inscription on the plinth reads: "The discoverer of America was the maker of Liverpool." Trade with the Americas in enslaved people and slave-produced goods helped to make Liverpool the second city of the empire, the most important transatlantic entrepoint in Europe and arguably the world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The palmhouse itself and the statues that surround it were paid for by Henry Yates Thompson and given as a gift to the people of Liverpool. Although he supported abolition during the American Civil War and came from a family of esteemed unitarians who expressed abolitionist sympathies, his maternal forebears were steeped in slavery over a number of generations. The family owned many plantations in the Caribbean and his mother's father, Joseph Brooks Yates, received more than 43000 pounds in compensation for the more than 2200 enslaved people he owned on his estates in Jamaica when slavery was abolished in 1834. An earlier generation of his family had also owned the "Brooks" slave ship, a diagram of which was used by the abolitionists in a widely distributed pamphlet to highlight the terribly crowded conditions the enslaved had to endure throughout the horrors of the middle passage(pictured).
gavreid
Pretty Words...
George Monbiot is excellent today on lying about history
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/16/boris-johnson-lying-history-britain-empire
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/16/boris-johnson-lying-history-britain-empire
Tony L
Administrator
Astonishing and truly horrific stuff. I realise I’m pretty ignorant/poorly educated, certainly when it comes to history, but I knew nothing about that at all. I’m bright enough to instinctively stand against nationalism, tribalism, imperialism and exceptionalism in all its forms, but the catalogue of bloodshed, oppression, forced-labour and theft this shithole of a country is built upon is just beyond comprehension. It’s under every rock, everywhere. Just sickening/numbing to the point one can’t really take it in.
kensalriser
pfm Member
Holy crap. That's good work by Monbiot.
2ManyBoxes
pfm Member
Over my lifetime (born in the 60s) things have changed. It is unthinkable now to have a comic like Bernard Manning on national TV. If you throw bananas at a black player in this country you will rightly be banned. You would be arrested for advertising a flat vacancy as 'no blacks or Irish'. The casual mainstream racism of the 70s has gone. It still exists in some places for sure, there's still work to be done.
Have you noticed that in the recent coverage of Marcus Rashford's campaign against free school meals over the summer, nobody has mentioned his skin colour. it is now totally irrelevant, it never even crossed my mind. Back in the 70s he'd have been 'black football player Marcus Rashford'.
Progress has been very slow, it's taken 50 years to get to where we are now.
I am still stained by my upbringing. I recently had some dealings with someone of this parish who has black skin. As he drove into the car park I noticed that he was driving a nice BMW. A thought from my animal brain popped up with 'how did he earn the money to buy that'. My higher conscious brain was instantly very embarrassed and crushed the thought immediately. I like to think that the width of someone's nose or how big their lips are or how fuzzy their hair is is totally irrelevant to how I behave with them because it is totally and utterly irrelevant to how they are as a human being. But still my background is down there in the sewers of my mind.
ff1d1l
pfm Member
Yeah, excellent.
vince rocker
pfm Member
I would like to think this but it denies the experience of racism which may well have shaped how that person is as a human.
2ManyBoxes
pfm Member
I see what you mean but I was thinking more from a biological mechanistic point of view. After that you get all the layers of upbringing, religion, character etc. My point is that there is no biological relationship between the two. The rest is added afterwards and that's where the racism comes in from sociological sources, not from any inherent biological reason.
TheDecameron
Unicorns fart glitter.
It puts the Federation of Conservative Students “Hang Nelson Mandela” T-shirts into perspective doesn’t it?
gavreid
Pretty Words...
They're all in Government positions now
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ks.234
Half way to Infinity
Matt Hancocks still got his Hang Nelson Mandela t shirts. Lots of them. All folded very neatly and kept in a secret drawer next to the one with his Free Tommy Robinson T shirts
TheDecameron
Unicorns fart glitter.
I think it is time now for a truth and reconciliation process, they could ask Desmond Tutu to chair it, he has the experience and the personal insight and he is an Anglican Archbishop after all. Johnson will attempt a white wash but history shows as with Bloody Sunday, Hillsborough and Stephen Lawrence, you can only hide your dirt under the carpet for so long. I think this will be a task for the forthcoming Labour government- Johnson doesn’t have the integrity and it flies in the face of his ethnic nationalist beliefs.