Yay! My Book on Slavery in the British Empire Has Been Published with Lulu

On Monday I finally got the proof copies I ordered of my book, The Global Campaign, which I’ve just published with Lulu, the print on demand service. The book’s in two volumes, which have the subtitles on their first pages The British Campaign to Eradicate Slavery in its Colonies. The book’s in two volumes. Volume One has the subtitle The Beginnings to Abolition and the British Caribbean, while Volume Two is subtitled Africa and the Wider World.

My blurb for the book runs

British imperialism created an empire stretching from North America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, much of whose population were slaves. Global Campaign tells how slavery in the British Empire arose, the conditions and resistance to it of the peoples they enslaved, and the steps taken to end it by the abolitionists across the Empire and the metropolitan authorities in London.

The first volume of this book, Volume 1: The Beginnings to Abolition and the British Caribbean describes the emergence of this Empire, and the attempts to end slavery within it up to end of apprenticeship in 1838.

Volume 2: Africa and the Wider World describes how the British tried to end it in their expanding Empire after 1838. It describes how abolition became part of the ideology of British imperialism, and spurred British expansion, annexation and conquest.

The two volumes also discuss the persistence of slavery after abolition into the modern world, and its continuing legacy across continents and cultures.

The contents of vol. 1 are an introduction, then the following:

Chapter 1: the British Slave Empire in 1815
Chapter 2: From Amelioration to Abolition
Chapter 3: Abolition, Apprenticeship and Limited Freedom, 1833-1838.

Vol. 2’s chapter are

1: Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Lagos
2: India, Ceylon, Java and Malaya,
3: The Pacific, Australia, New Zealand and Fiji
4: West Africa and the Gold Coast, 1874-1891
5: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt and Sudan
6: East and Central Africa
7: Zanzibar and Pemba
8: Legacies and Conclusion

Both volumes also have an index and bibliography. I also drew the cover art.

Volume 1 is 385 pages A5, ISBN 978-0-244-75207-1, price 12.00 pounds.
Volume 2 386 pages A5, ISBN 978-0-244-45228-5, price 12.00 pounds. Both prices exclusive of VAT.

The books are based on the notes and summaries I made for the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum of some of the official documents they’d acquired from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on slavery. I also supplemented this with a mass of secondary reading on slavery, the slave trade and the British Empire. It’s a fascinating story. I chose to write about slavery in the British Empire as a whole as I found when I was looking through the documents that slavery certainly wasn’t confined to the Caribbean. It was right across the world, though most of the published books concentrate on slavery in the US and the Caribbean. There has been a recent book on slavery and abolition in British India and Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and I remember seeing a book on the British campaign against slavery in the Pacific, published, I believe, from one of the antipodean publishers. I doubt very many people in Britain are aware that it existed in India and Sri Lanka, and that attempts to outlaw it there date from c. 1798, when the British judge of the Bombay (Mumbai) presidency ruled that it was illegal. Similarly, general histories of slavery do mention the infamous ‘coolie trade’ in indentured labourers from India and China. They were imported into the Caribbean and elsewhere around the world in order to supply cheap labour after the abolition of slavery in 1838. However, they were treated so abysmally in conditions often worse than those endured by enslaved Blacks, that it was dubbed by one British politician ‘A new system of slavery’. There’s an excellent book on it, with that as its title, by Hugh Tinker, published by one of the Indian presses.

General books on slavery also discuss the enslavement of indigenous Pacific Islanders, who were kidnapped and forced to work on plantations in Fiji and Queensland in Australia. But again, I doubt if many people in the UK have really heard about it. And there are other episodes in British imperial history and the British attempts to curb and suppress slavery around the world which also isn’t really widely known. For example, abolition provided some much of the ideological impetus for the British conquest of Africa. Sierra Leone was set up in the late 18th century as a colony for freed slaves. But the British were also forced to tackle slavery and slaving in the Gold Coast, after they acquired it in the 19th century. They then moved against and conquered the African kingdoms that refused to give up slaving, such as Ashanti, Dahomey and the chiefdoms around Lagos. It’s a similar story in east Africa, in what is now Tanganyika, Zambia, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Malawi. The British initially wished to conquer the area as part of the general European ‘Scramble for Africa’, and their main rivals in the region where the Portuguese. But the British public were also aware through the missionary work of David Livingstone that the area was part of the Arabic slave trade, and that the indigenous peoples of this region were being raided and enslaved by powerful local African states, such as the Yao and the Swahili as well as Arabs, and exported to work plantations in the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba off the east African coast. At the same time, Indian merchants were also buying and enslaving Africans from that area, particularly Uganda.

The British were also concerned to crush slavery in Egypt after they took control of the country with the French. They encouraged Khedive Ismail, the Egyptian ruler, to attempt to suppress it in Egypt and then the Sudan. It was as part of this anti-slavery campaign that the Khedive employed first Colonel Baker and then General Gordon, who was killed fighting the Mahdi.

At the same time, Stamford Raffles in Singapore and Raja Brooke of Sarawak justified their conquest and acquisition of these states as campaigns to end slavery in those parts of Asia. The British also took over Fiji at the request of the Fijian king, Cakabau. White Americans and Europeans had been entering the country, and Cakabau and his advisors were afraid that unless the country was taken under imperial control, the settlers would enslave the indigenous Fijians. Indeed, Cakabau had been made king of the whole of Fiji by the colonists, though he was acutely aware of how he was being used as a figurehead for effective White control of his people. At the same time, the White planters were also forming a White supremacist group. So he appealed to the British Empire to takeover his country in order to prevent his people’s enslavement.

British imperial slavery started off with the British colonies in the Caribbean and North America. I’ve ignored slavery in the US except for the period when it was part of the British Empire. The Canadians ended slavery nearly two decades before it was formally outlawed throughout the British Empire. It was done through enlightened governors, judges as well as abolitionists outside government. The country’s authorities did so by interpreting the law, often against its spirit, to show that slavery did not legally exist there. There were attempts by slaveowners to repeal the legislation, but this was halfhearted and by the 1820s slavery in Canada had officially died out.

After the British acquired Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa, the very beginning of the modern state of South Africa, they were also faced with the problem of ending the enslavement of its indigenous population. This included the indigenous Khoisan ‘Bushmen’, who were being forced into slavery when they took employment with White farmers. At the same time, the British were trying to do the same in Mauritius and the Seychelles after they conquered them from the French.

The British initially started with a programme of gradual abolition. There was much debate at the time whether the enslaved peoples could support themselves as independent subjects if slavery was abolished. And so the abolitionists urged parliament to pass a series of legislation slowly improving their conditions. These regulated the foods they were given by the planters, the punishments that could be inflicted on them, as well as giving them medical care and support for the aged and disabled. They also tried to improve their legal status by giving them property rights and the right to be tried in ordinary courts. Special officials were set up, the Guardians and Protectors of Slaves, to examine complaints of cruelty.

This gradualist approach was challenged by the female abolitionists, who grew impatient with the cautious approach of the Anti-Slavery Society’s male leadership. They demanded immediate abolition. I’ve also tried to pay tribute to the struggle by the enslaved people themselves to cast off their shackless. In the Caribbean, this took the form of countless slave revolts and rebellions, like Maroons in Jamaica, who were never defeated by us. At the same time a series of slaves came forward to accuse their masters of cruelty, and to demand their freedom. After the Lord Mansfield ruled that slavery did not exist in English law in the late 18th century, slaves taken to Britain from the Caribbean by their masters presented themselves to the Protectors on their return demanding their freedom. They had been on British soil, and so had become free according to English law. They therefore claimed that they were illegally kept in slavery. As you can imagine, this produced outrage, with planters and slaveowners attacking both the anti-slavery legislation and official attempts to free the slaves as interference with the right of private property.

This legislation was introduced across the Empire. The same legislation that regulated and outlawed slavery in the Caribbean was also adopted in the Cape, Mauritius and the Seychelles. And the legislation introduced to ensure that indentured Indian and Chinese labourers were treated decently was also adopted for Pacific Islanders.

Slavery was eventually abolished in 1833, but a form of servitude persisted in the form of apprenticeship until 1838. This compelled the slaves to work unpaid for their masters for a certain number of hours each week. It was supposed to prepare them for true freedom, but was attacked and abandoned as just another form of slavery.

Unfortunately slavery continued to exist through the British Empire in various forms despite official abolition. The British were reluctant to act against it in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Java and Perak in what is now Malaysia because they were afraid of antagonizing the indigenous princes and so causing a rebellion. In Egypt they attempted to solve the problem by encouraging the slaveowners as pious Muslims to manumit their slaves freely as an act of piety, as the Prophet Mohammed urges them in the Qu’ran. In the Caribbean, the freedom the former slaves enjoyed was limited. The British were afraid of the plantation economy collapsing, and so passed legislation designed to make it difficult for the freed people to leave their former masters, often tying them to highly exploitative contracts. The result was that Black West Indians continued to fear re-enslavement long after abolition, and there were further riots and rebellions later in the 19th century. In British Africa, the indigenous African peoples became second class citizens, and were increasingly forced out of governmental and administrative roles in favour of Whites. Some colonies also conscripted African labourers into systems of forced labour, so that many came to believe that they had simply swapped one form of slavery for another. The result has been that slavery has continued to persist. And it’s expanded through people trafficking and other forms of servitude and exploitation.

The book took me on off several years to write. It’s a fascinating subject, and you can’t but be impressed with the moral and physical courage of everyone, Black and White, who struggled to end it. I chose to write about it in the British Empire as while there are many books on slavery across the world, there didn’t seem to be any specifically on the British Empire. Studying it also explains why there is so much bitterness about it by some people of West Indian heritage and how it has shaped modern politics. For example, before South Sudan was given its independence, Sudan under the British was effectively divided into two countries. In the southern part of the country, the British attempted to protect the indigenous peoples from enslavement by banning Arabs. They were also opened up to Christian evangelization. In the Arab north, the British attempted to preserve good relations by prohibiting Christian evangelism.

I also attempt to explain how it is that under the transatlantic slave trade, slavery became associated with Blackness. In the ancient world and during the Middle Ages, Whites were also enslaved. But Europeans started turning to Black Africans in the 14th and 15th centuries when it became impossible for them to buy Slavs from eastern Europe. So common had the trade in Slavs been that the modern English word, slave, and related terms in other languages, like the German Sklave, actually derive from Slav.

It’s been fascinating and horrifying writing the book. And what is also horrifying is that it persists today, and that new legislation has had to be passed against it in the 21st century.

The ‘I’: Tweezer’s Husband Scuppered Talks with Labour

More personal embarrassment for Tweezer. Today’s I has a story by Katie Grant ‘Philip May ‘scuppered cross-party talks” suggesting that May’s determination not to hold proper talks with the other parties, and particularly not with Labour, may have been due to the insistence of her banker husband. The article on page 9 runs

Theresa May’s husband “scuppered” attempts to secure a cross-party deal for a customs union with the EU by persuading the Prime Minister to keep fighting for her Brexit deal, it was claimed yesterday.

Philip May was said to have urged his wife not to cave in to Labour demands for a permanent customs union, instead encouraging her to push for a Brexit deal that could win over Tory Eurosceptics and their allies in the Democratic Unionist Party.

Mr May’s intervention, according to the Sunday Times, is said to have led Downing Street chief of staff Gavin Barwell to accuse him of thwarting attempts to communicate with the Labour party.

Mr Barwell reportedly said that the Prime Minister’s “rock” had helped to “scupper” attempts to reach out to Labour MPs. But a Downing Street spokesman described these claims as “utter bunkum”.

The article goes on to say that he has intervened on two occasions before, persuading Tweezer not to resign after the 2017 general election, and then later that year after she had a coughing fit at the Tory party conference.

But hold on! Wasn’t the failure of these talks all due to Corbyn and the Labour party refusing to meet May and her team, as said by the right-wing press and Fiona Bruce on Question Time? Er, no. Corbyn rightly wanted nothing to do with them, because there was no point. They weren’t any kind of talks, as only one side would do the talking. Tweezer simply wanted to tell them to support her wretched catastrophe of a deal, and was not going to listen to what they wanted.

It was never a genuine attempt to reach out across the aisle. It was just show. Like her highly staged events where she tried to persuade us that she was meeting ordinary people and listening to them.

No matter how much she tries to cling on to power, it’s very clear that a sizable portion of her party despises her. She only – narrowly – survived her ‘No Confidence’ vote because she pledged to leave office and not take them into the 2020 elections. Now it seems that part of the Tories are losing even this little bit of patience with her.

Tweezer is a disaster, who care nothing for her country and its people, and who just wants to cling to power as long possible. It’s time to prise this barnacle off the ship of state. Get her out, and Corbyn in!

Vox Political Right Again! May Prepares Plan for Martial Law Post-Brexit

Mike’s keen eye for the direction events are taking us has been vindicated once again. A little while ago he predicted that Tweezer was preparing legislation to declare a state of martial law in the event of serious civil disruptions following a ‘No Deal’ Brexit. These would be caused by shortages of food and medicine. As Mike reminds us, there was a commenter, who doubted whether 3,500 troops could hold down a country of 60 million people.

Now it seems Mike was exactly right. According to the Sunday Times, which Mike acknowledges is a dodgy source, and the I, Tweezer has indeed prepared a plan to declare martial law in just such an event, and quotes the relevant passage from the latter paper. Cause obviously, he doesn’t want to give money to the Mendacious Murdoch Machine.

Mike’s on something of a roll here, as he was also proved right about Brexit negatively affecting Jaguar Landrover. They’ve stopped production for an extra week because of uncertainties over Brexit. He was also right when he said that after criticizing Rachel Riley and her supporters for fake anti-Semitism claims and trolling a schoolgirl with anxiety issues, he’d also get attacked. And he was.

How bad will the situation be post-Brexit. Well, the I’s article quotes one source, who says that it will be worse than the disruption caused by volcanic ash, and would be comparable to a major Europe-wide war.

Mike concludes his article with the comment

Of course, martial law is an extreme measure that would be imposed only in dire need – or if a government is desperate to keep power in spite of the will of the people.

Do you trust Theresa May not to follow the latter path?
See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/01/27/martial-law-plan-for-post-brexit-britain-shows-this-site-was-right-again/

Well, no, I don’t trust Tweezer to put country ahead of party, or even her own personal interests. She’s never done so in the past, and won’t in the future. Ian Hislop called Gordon Brown ‘Mr Limpet’ after the 2010 election on Have I Got News For You because of Brown’s determination to hang on to power even after the losing the election. The Lib Dems claimed that they were willing to form a coalition with Labour, but only if Brown went. He refused, so they joined the Tories. Except that they’d been in talks with the Tories for weeks before, and the whole claim that they were willing to support Labour was a sham. But Tweezer surely deserves to be called ‘Mrs Limpet’ because of her determination to cling on to power, regardless of the harm her government is doing to this country and, hopefully, the future of the Tory party.

Corbyn has repeatedly been attacked because his policies of supporting the nationalization of the utilities and strong unions and workers’ rights supposedly threaten to take this country back to the 1970s.

But it’s Tweezer who’s doing that.

It’s been under watch that last week there was a terrorist bombing in Ulster, and she’s preparing to declare martial law because of civil unrest and shortages. The last time I recall this happening was during the ‘Winter of Discontent’ in 1979, when it was all blamed on the trade unions. And friends of mine in the Smoke told me they were affected by a power cut. Again, the last time I remember this happening was back in the 1970s when Ted Heath was trying to show the miners, who really ran the country. Well, as the election showed, it wasn’t him.

This is Tweezer and the Tories’ Brexit Britain: power cuts, potential shortages and martial law. And this time they can’t blame Labour nor the unions.

Get Tweezer out, and Corbyn in, before Tweezer really does turn this country into a dictatorship.

Jean-Claude Juncker Tells May to Follow Corbyn’s Plan to Avoid Irish Backstop

A jubilant and highly amused Chunky Mark posted this little video up on YouTube on Saturday, reporting a very interesting development in the Brexit crisis that the lamestream press really didn’t want to put on their front pages. The head of the EU, Jean-Claude Juncker told Tweezer in a private phone call on Friday that they’d only be prepared to renegotiate the Irish backstop if Britain became a permanent part of the customs union. Which, as Chunky Mark delightedly reminds us, is Corbyn’s plan.

The news was released over the internet. It was in the Guardian, but not in its sister paper, the Observer. But it shows that Corbyn was right all along. The Artist Taxi Driver then declares that the world and its institutions should be recognizing Corbyn as the real head of the UK, not Theresa May.

Absolutely. And clearly the anti-socialist press don’t want to put it on their front pages because if they do, it scuppers everything they’ve said about Labour having no proper policy on Brexit, or that he’s not supporting the remain campaign as strongly as he should. And in the state of Tweezer’s party over the mess they’ve made of Brexit, where they’re near total collapse and are bringing down the country with them, it would have given Corbyn a significant boost.

It would have shown everyone that Corbyn should be in charge of Brexit, and that only he has a chance of resolving this wretched crisis Cameron, Tweezer, Boris, Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg have dragged us into. And that’s the last thing the anti-socialist press of Blairites and Tories, constantly demanding greater privatization and welfare cuts, wants to do.

Enough of this! It’s time to get May out, and Corbyn in!

Right-Wing Shill Charlie Kirk Personally Experiences Failures of America’s Private Medicine

Charlie Kirk is an American Conservative mouthpiece. A little while ago he got very angry at some public meeting his was holding with The Young Turks Cenk Uygur. Uygur committed the terrible crime of asking him how much money he was making. This set Kirk off ranting that ‘He lived like a capitalist every single day’ before rushing off the stage and apparently challenging Uygur to a fight, asking him if he ‘wanted to go’. Fortunately, he managed to calm down and return to the stage without engaging in fisticuffs.

Kirk’s on record as saying that ‘Healthcare is not a right’ and raving about how wonderful America’s private medical system is. It’s therefore highly ironic that he should have experienced its failings first hand. A few days ago Kirk’s mate, Kyle Keshuv, sent a tweet stating that he was outside Cedar Sinai hospital in LA with Kirk. Kirk had put his back out, gone down to the hospital seeking help, only to be told there were no beds available and he’d have to wait on a bench outside. The tweet carried a photo of Kirk lying on said bench, and ended with ‘Cedar Sion Hospital – Disgrace’.

In this video from The Young Turks, hosts Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss the incident, laughing at Kirk and his comments about the superiority of American healthcare. They state that they’re only doing so because Kirk is actually now well. Sam Seder also carried the story on his show with the news that Kirk was now in the hospital. He was confined to bed, couldn’t physically stand, but still stood for freedom. The Turks in this video comment on Kirk’s apparent sense of entitlement – he doesn’t believe that people have a right to healthcare, but when it’s him in trouble, he wants to be first in the queue. He also believes that the American healthcare system could be made better through more competition lowering costs. They point out that LA has many excellent hospitals. He could, using his own logic, have gone elsewhere, and then written a bad review of his treatment at Cedar Sion hospital on Yelp.

Uygur and Kasparian defend the hospital, saying that it’s a good one. Uygur himself has taken his child down there many times. But you do have to spend a long time in queues. He also makes it clear that its failings of the American medical system that makes him support Medicare for All. He points out that the system exists in Norway and Northern Europe, and that it’s part of a mixed economy. America also has a mixed economy. Uygur also points out that he’s a capitalist, but it’s because, as a progressive, he wants everyone to have access to good healthcare that he supports Medicare for All and believes medicine should be in the state part of the equation. Everyone, even Charlie Kirk, should have proper medical care. Although Kasparian states that she thinks Kirk shouldn’t have it so much as everyone else.

I’m putting this up because it shows the failures of the American healthcare system, a system which the Tories and New Labour wish to import to Britain. Thatcher wanted to privatise the NHS completely, but was only stopped by a massive backbench rebellion. And the fact that her personal private secretary, Patrick Jenkin, returned from America pointing out how rubbish it was. But she still wanted a certain percentage of Brits to have private health insurance. And the Tories and their counterparts in the Labour party, the Blairites, have been determined to privatise the health service ever since. Alan Milburn wanted to reduce the NHS to nothing but a kite mark for privately provided services.

According to the privatisers swarming around Thatcher, Major, Blair, Cameron and Tweezer, private industry always provides better quality service than the state, even in healthcare. If you believe some of the twaddle coming from American supporters of their rubbish system, the healthcare is wonderful and you don’t have to wait to be seen. The truth is, it’s expensive, millions of Americans can’t afford private health insurance. I understand the figure is now up to 20 per cent of the population. 40,000 Americans die each year because they can’t afford proper medical care.

But you won’t hear any of this from Nuffield Health or BUPA and their adverts on the TV, nor from Virgin Healthcare or the other private healthcare firms trying to get a piece of that sweet NHS action. Nor will you hear it from Tory health secretaries, like Andrew Lansley or Jeremy Hunt. Or even from Lib Dems like Nick Clegg, who claimed that privately run healthcare, as on the continent, was associated with excellent health outcomes. Or some similar piece of bullsh*t managerial jargon.

The whole Tory/Lib Dem idea has been to run down the health service to the point where the middle class will start turning to private healthcare. The endpoint of that is the American, for-profit system, where if you’re poor, you go the Emergency Room or a charity hospital. And that’s it. It’ll return the healthcare in this country to the appalling state it was in before the Second World War. But who cares if millions of poor suffer and die through disease, so long as the private healthcare company they and their donors head makes big bucks.

Don’t believe their lies, and don’t believe that they’re not trying to privatise the health service. Stop them. Get Tweezer and the rest of the loathsome Thatcherites out, and Jeremy Corbyn and Labour in.

Thatcher Wanted Ulster Loyalists to Assassinate Irish Premier Haughey

I found a very interesting piece for conspiracy watchers over at Zelo Street, posted on New Year’s Eve 2017. It discusses a report in the Irish Independent that Charles Haughey, the Irish Taoiseach, was a sent a letter from the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1987 warning him that MI5 wanted them to assassinate him. It said that MI5 and MI6 had set up a smear campaign against him, and that the two intelligence agencies and British special forces had used them to kill Irish nationalists from 1972 to 1978 and again in 1985. The letter was written on UVF headed noted paper, and signed Capt. W.E. Johnston, the pseudonym used by the leaders of the UVF in their correspondence. The letter revealed that the MI5 agent gave the terrorists details of Haughey’s cars, his photographs of his home, his island, Inishvickillane, his yacht, Celtic Mist, and details of his trips to Farranfore airport in Kerry and the aircraft he used. The Loyalists said that they had no love for Haughey, and had killed 17 men using information provided by the British security services, but they weren’t going to be used by the British dirty tricks department.

The letter was released under the Irish government’s 30 year rule. A more detailed version of the story appeared in the Groaniad, which claimed that Gerry Adams had been seeking to find a way to stop the IRA’s campaign of violence in 1987. It was also reported by the Beeb.

Zelo Street commented on the very selective memories that they Tory faithful have about Thatcher. They love her for supposedly standing up to the EU superstate, while forgetting all that guff about Britain being in the heart of Europe. She’s supposed to have taken a stand against terrorism, but there were allegations she ran a shoot to kill policy in Northern Ireland, that led to the SAS blowing away a party of IRA terrorists in Gibraltar. When the Thames Television documentary Death on the Rock revealed that British forces had the IRA unit under surveillance all the time, and could have captured them without bloodshed at any moment, it was stripped of its broadcasting license. Zelo Street describes that as just being a piece of ‘routine vindictiveness’.

The article concludes

‘But the issues raised by this revelation – the manipulation of Loyalist paramilitaries by UK security agencies, and what Mrs T knew and when – remain unaddressed.

And one conclusion can be drawn all too readily: when those on the right start calling “Terrorist sympathiser” on the likes of Jeremy Corbyn, they need to be reminded of exactly who the real terrorist sympathisers are. They aren’t in the Labour Party.‘

See: http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2017/12/margaret-thatcher-terrorist-sympathiser.html

Not that Haughey may have been entirely pure and innocent of terrorist plotting himself. Well over a decade ago Lobster reported that the Irish Republican magazine, An Phoblacht, had run a story claiming that Haughey had been funnelling guns and weapons to the IRA in Northern Ireland. They IRA were to start a campaign of unrest, which would allow the Irish military to enter the province as a peace-keeping force. And Lobster has stated since its very beginning in the early 1980s that the British secret state was running all manner of dirty tricks in Northern Ireland, including embedding special SAS undercover units in the regular army as covert death squads.

Thatcher bears the ultimate responsibility for the plot to assassinate Haughey, because, as the Zelo Street article points out, the secret services report to her. Evidence from the other dirty tricks MI5 was running in that period shows that she had exactly the same opinions they did. The head of the CIA, James Angleton, and the leaders of MI5 all thought that Harold Wilson was a KGB agent, as did Thatcher herself, and MI5 ran a smear campaign in order to remove him from office and install the Tories. I don’t doubt for a single minute that the British secret state was very glad that she won the 1979 election, or that they had any reservations about any order they received from her to murder the Irish premier.

This report of an assassination plot by MI5 against Haughey is another piece that there really are conspiracies and covert plots by secretive groups to affect government. They’re run by the world’s intelligence agencies, big business, right-wing pressure groups like the Freedom Association and diplomats, through organisations like the Pinay Circle, the World Anti-Communist League, and Western Goals. They are very real, unlike stupid and murderous conspiracy theories about reptoid aliens from Zeta Reticuli and Jewish Communist bankers. But the latter rubbish is all too often held up by academics and writers like David Aaronovitch to discredit research into these real covert groups by claiming that they are representative of the milieu as a whole. They tar everyone with the same brush so that people won’t accept the reality that there are real extra-parliamentary groups seeking to determine government policy and the fate of whole nations.

There are real conspiracies. This was one of them, and Thatcher was terrorist supporter.

No Sun, No Fun in Bristol? Yaaay!

This is intriguing. When Dad went down to get a copy of the I this morning, he overheard the harassed newsagent telling perplexed customers that he didn’t have any copies of the Scum or a number of other papers because they weren’t available for the Bristol region for another three hours and were being reprinted. The Mirror was still in stock, though, so that’s one paper that wasn’t affected by whatever was wrong with the others.

It’s all very mysterious! All I can think of is that the Scum and some of the other foul denizens of the right-wing press have made some kind of glaring mistake, or perhaps printed something very libelous, and so have had to be recalled and pulped. But that’s just my view of what’s happened. I wonder if Private Eye will have something to say about this in their next ‘Street of Shame’ column?

Ah, it makes you want to sing the old song

‘So tell me why,
There’s no sun up in the sky,
Stormy weather…’

Rapper Fab 5 Freddy to Host Beeb Film on Renaissance Art

More arts news. Also according to yesterday’s I for Thursday, 24th January 2019, the New York rapper Fab 5 Freddy is due to hos a Beeb documentary about the Renaissance. The article, written by Adam Sherwin, ran

Move over Simon Schama, Fab 5 Freddy wants your spot. The New York hip-hop pioneer and former graffiti artist is the unlikely choice to present a BBC 2 documentary on Italian Renaissance Art.

Fab – real name Fred Brathwaite – was approached to do the film, ‘A Fresh Guide to Florence with Fab 5 Freddy’, after the BBC learnt that he was an art lover who worked closely with Jean-Michel Basquiat in the early 80s, curating the cult artist’s Manhattan shows.

“Amidst superstar artists such as Michelangelo and powerful patrons such as the Medicis, Fab discovers groundbreaking images of a multi-racial and multi-ethnic society that have slipped through the cracks of art history,” the BBC said. (‘A ‘Fresh’ take on the Renaissance’, p. 21).

It might be a surprising choice, but it seems to be a good one in line with current arts policy of getting different voices to open up the arts. A number of BAME artists have appeared in the news complaining that there aren’t enough Black artists shown in museums and art galleries, and that when they were small they weren’t interested in visiting them because there was nothing for them there. It therefore looks like the Beeb is trying to appeal to a younger, Black audience with Fab 5 Freddie in order to stop it being viewed as just something made by old White guys for White guys.

I am also not surprised that they chose a former graffiti artist for other reasons. Archaeologists have been working with graffiti artists for several years now in order to explore rock art and its links with modern graffiti art. I can remember attending an archaeological seminar at Bristol university at least six years ago in which one of the speakers presented a piece about their research about the graffiti in a particular area of one of the Spanish towns. And Radio 4 a few years ago also presented a programme about rock art which included comments from some of Britain’s leading street artists.

As for the Renaissance, Florence was a major centre of trade and industry, but historians have pointed out in books like The Renaissance Bazaar that many of the commercial innovations that made the Renaissance possible had their origins further east in the Islamic world. This was also a period when Europeans were turning from the Slavic east to Africa for a supply of slaves, so that you do find Blacks portrayed in art in this period. Not that they weren’t here before, of course. A 12th century manuscript from London in the National Archives shows a Black person, while one of the books that used to be stocked in shop in Bristol’s M Shed was on Blacks in fifteenth century England.

I’ve no doubt critics of the programme will decry it as ‘dumbing down’ and complain about ‘diversity’, but this could be a programme worth watching because of the original insights Fab 5 Freddie could bring.

Dyson Claims Not Leaving Britain Because of Brexit; Still Hypocrite Though

There was outrage a few days ago when James Dyson announced he was shifting his company headquarters from Malmesbury to Singapore. Dyson was one of the leading voices for Brexit, claiming that it would allow us to trade with the rest of the world outside the constraints of Europe. Now that this has actually happened, Dyson isn’t so keen. And people have been understandably furious.

So furious in fact that Dyson has issued a statement denying that he’s leaving the UK because of Brexit. No, according to him, the decision was taken months ago. It’s all because he was afraid that the ten hour time difference between Britain and Singapore would make running the Singaporean plant from the UK difficult. Mike over at Vox Political found this story unconvincing, and he’s right. Mike asked

Isn’t it more feasible that he just wants to avoid having to pay increased import-export tariffs, and wants to avoid increased taxes that are likely if Brexit harms the economy in the way the experts expect?

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/01/24/im-no-hypocrite-says-dyson-of-singapore-move-does-he-expect-us-to-believe-him/

Someone else who didn’t believe all this spin and horse sh*t was Zelo Street, who reminded their readers that 18 years ago, Dyson told the Beeb that he would leave the UK for the Far East unless we joined the European single currency. Yep, the single currency that has bankrupted Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. And Andrew Adonis tweeted another reason, quoted by Zelo Street: Singapore signed a free trade agreement with the EU three months ago, so if Dyson moves his HQ there, he has more access to European markets. Zelo Street concludes

“Dyson urged Britain to walk away, even to the extent of not securing a deal with the EU, while all the time he was planning to move his HQ somewhere which would secure him access to … the EU. As the saying goes, you couldn’t make it up.

Do as I say and not as I do, says James Dyson. There speaks another phoney patriot.”

See: http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/01/james-dyson-eure-hypocrite.html

But that is not all. As I’ve said before, Dyson’s a big, molten god of industry here in the West Country, and there was a report about this on the local Beeb news programme, Points West. Dyson, pictured wearing his ‘Harry Potter’ glasses, once again denied that he was leaving Britain because of Brexit, and said he would continue to maintain his plants in Malmesbury, Hullavington and Bristol. The piece interviewed a lady from the town’s chamber of commerce, who said they had absolute faith in him, and talked to some of the people there. It’s fair to say they had mixed opinions. Some were convinced that he’d honour his commitment to the town, while one lady was less sanguine, and said it made her furious.

I’m not convinced either. Dyson has repeatedly shown how little faith and commitment he has in Britain. As I said in an earlier article, he demanded that Bath give his firm more land a few years ago. When they were unable to, he upped and moved to the Far East. He could have remained in the UK, even bringing jobs to depressed areas like the north. He didn’t. He followed the usual neoliberal logic and jumped ship to take advantage of the Developing world.

He’s a hypocrite and a liar and I have zero confidence in his continuing commitment to the people of Britain and particularly the West Country.

250 + Companies to Leave UK for Holland Due to Brexit

According to yesterday’s I for Thursday, 24th January 2019, the Dutch are claiming that more than 250 firms currently based in the UK are planning to move across the North Sea to them due to Brexit. The article on page 10, entitled ‘More than 250 firms plan to relocate from UK to the Netherlands’ by Nigel Morris and Benjamin Butterworth began

More than 250 companies are looking to follow Sony by moving from the UK to the Netherlands because of Brexit, it emerged yesterday.

The Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency (NFIA) said that scores of companies with UK headquarters had expressed interest in relocating, and the number was expected to rise.

Many business chiefs have been dismayed by Theresa May’s refusal to rule out leaving the European Union without an agreement, leaving Britain immediately operating on World Trade Organisation rules.

The article then goes on to list some of the companies moving. They were Sony, Panasonic, which moved last year, P&O, while the car maker Bentley was stockpiling parts.

It quote Michiel Bakhuizen of the NFIA as saying

“The number of businesses we are in contact with for a possible arrival is growing. At the start of 2017 it was 80. At the start of 2018 it was 150, and now it’s more than 250.

“This increase will continue and it is not strange, because there is great uncertainty at the moment in Britain. And if there’s one thing that’s bad for business, it’s uncertainty.”

One of Tweezer’s little minions said in reply that it was clear that companies around the world would continue to invest in Britain and its people. Against this was the Labour MP Rupa Huq, who backs a second referendum. She said

“This shows the shrinking appeal of Britain as a decision-making base for top companies as a result of Brexit.

“The Japanese were supposed to be a top ally for Brexit, but time and again they have been shocked at the scale of self-destruction.” The below the article was another which also listed other firms leaving the UK. These included the Japanese financial houses Nomura Holdings and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group; HSBC, which is moving its HQ from London to Paris; Barclays and Bank of America, which are moving to Dublin, MoneyGram, which is going to Brussels; the European Medicines Agency, which is going to Amsterdam; the European Banking Authority is going to move to Paris, while the German engineering company Schaefler is going to close two of its plants, in Plymouth and Llanelli.

Brexit is going to be a disaster for Britain. but it’s going to be great for rich financiers like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage, because they can move their investments around the world without worrying about losing profits. It’s the rest of us, who depend on manufacturing and trade in goods for our jobs and businesses, who will take the real hit.

We were lied to by the leaders of the ‘Leave’ Campaign, who were chiefly members of the Tory right. Well, it’s high time to kick the Tories out of office and put in someone who really can clear up this mess: Jeremy Corbyn.