Bristol Announces Education Report about the Contribution of Different Communities to City

Yesterday a couple of bods from Bristol city council appeared on the news to announce the imminent public of two reports, both dealing with race and community issues. At lunchtime it was reported that there was a report coming out about how the city should educate people about city’s history as a major centre of the slave trade. Then on the 6.30 local news, deputy mayor and head of equalities Asher Craig appeared to tell viewers about another report coming out about another education initiative, this time about the contribution different communities had made to the city. She thought it might perhaps form the basis for a new museum. The report was hailed as bringing communities together.

Bristol’s a port city and so people of different races and nationalities have been living in the city since the Middle Ages. It had a Jewish community, complete with a miqveh or ritual bath, on Jacob’s Wells Road before Edward I’s expulsion of them from England. it also had strong links with Ireland, and it’s possible that there was a community of Bristol merchants in Dublin before Henry IIs invasion of 1169. It also had strong links to Wales, and so there’s always been people from Ireland and Wales here in the city. There were a few Icelandic merchants resident in Bristol in the 15th century. As the city also traded in wine from France and Spain, I’m fairly certain there were also French people and Spaniards here. There were also Black people in Bristol from the 16th century onwards following the emergence of the transatlantic slave trade. However, the bulk of the modern Black population probably really only dates from the Windrush migration. Other immigrants to Bristol include Poles, Russians – there’s a Russian Orthodox church on University Road by the museum in Clifton, Chinese and peeps from India and Pakistan. A few years ago a book was published about Bristol’s diverse immigrant population.

But I don’t think this is primarily about all of the city’s various ethnic communities. I think it’s really an attempt to promote Bristol’s Black community. Last year, when I contacted Craig criticising her for some of her comments about the city’s involvement in the slave trade, her reply talked about the ‘One Bristol’ educational project. This would promote Blacks, and be ‘diverse and inclusive’, which didn’t always happen with White men. I don’t know if that last comment is a deliberate sneer or putdown.

It’s fair to say that the majority Black areas of the Bristol have the same problems and reputation of inner cities elsewhere – drugs, crime, prostitution and violence. When I was growing up people from outside the area drove along Stapleton Road in St. Paul’s with their windows up and the door firmly locked. Nearly two decades ago in 2004 there were a series of murders in the area and it was reported on the news that there was a gun-related incident everyday. I can remember going along the road on the bus to a lecture at UWE and seeing armed policemen on the street. I’ve heard from friends that there are local people in the community collecting and blogging about the area and Bristol’s black history as way of combating the alienation and marginalisation many Black Bristolians feel. From Craig’s reply to me, it looks like the ‘One Bristol’ education project is intended to do something similar by giving a more positive image of the community.

As for educating Bristolians about the city’s role in the slave trade, I’ve grown up knowing about it although there is still the strong belief among some Blacks, repeated by Craig in her interview on Radio 4 last year, that the city authorities have covered it up. In the 1990s the City Museum and Art Gallery staged an exhibition about the city and the slave trade, ‘A Respectable Trade’, named after the costume drama then showing on the Beeb, adapted from a book by Philippa Gregory. The M Shed museum on the city docks also has a gallery about Bristol and the slave trade. There are articles about the city’s involvement in the slave trade on the museum’s website, a slave walk in Clifton and a plaque on one of the warehouses down by the M Shed commemorating the victims who were enslaved and sold by Bristol merchants. The official name for the very bizarre looking ‘horned bridge’ across the dock’s is Pero’s Bridge, after one of the few named slaves who was brought to Bristol itself.

I have to say I’m a bit sensitive about some of the demands for the proper commemoration of the slave trade in the city. It sometimes seems to me that’s it’s being used by angry members of the Black community to attack White Bristol because of the poverty and marginalisation that still plagues their community. Back in the 1990s, for example, when the city celebrated the 500th anniversary of John Cabot’s discovery of Newfoundland, various Black spokesmen declared that it was a celebration of slavery. This followed American Blacks’ condemnation of the celebration of Columbus’ discovery of America a few years earlier. Indigenous Americans also attacked it as a celebration of their genocide. It wasn’t, of course, meant to be a celebration of slavery, but they had a point. Following Columbus discovery of the New World, the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean were enslaved and worked, tortured and massacred until they died out. The Spanish then turned to Black African slaves to replace them. I don’t believe that the discovery of Newfoundland had any direct connection with slavery. That seems to have started in 1619 when Spanish merchants brought a consignment of them to Jamestown, and it seems that initially the English settlers didn’t know what to do with them. However, slavery and all the horrendous methods of repression soon followed. A Black artist produced a picture showing his feelings about the celebration of Cabot’s discovery. It shows the Matthew sailing up the Avon Gorge. watched by cameras from the Evening Post and the local news, while shadowy figures rampage across the suspension bridge. The painting’s now on display in the slavery gallery in the M Shed. To me it demonstrates a bitter mentality that automatically assumes any celebration like it must somehow be about the persecution or exploitation of Blacks, and it seems to me that a similar deep bitterness is driving the demands for proper education about the city’s slavery history. On the other hand, there have been a large influx of newcomers to the city from London and elsewhere, and it’s possible that, not being Bristolians, they really know little about the city and the slave trade. The education initiative could therefore be a response to them requiring to know more.

Points West stated that the report about educating Bristolians about the contributions of Bristol’s multiracial communities will make five recommendations, while the one about slavery will make fifteen. It’ll be interesting to see what they are.

The Nazi Murder of Jo Cox MP

It’s been a week for murder by extreme right-wing nutters. On Monday the world was shocked by the news that a gunman, Omar Mateen, had opened fire in Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Before he was killed in turn by armed police, he had killed 49 people and wounded another 50.

Then on Thursday another maniac, Thomas Mair, shot to death Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen. Cox had just been holding a surgery, meeting her constituents in a library in Birstall, a village in Yorkshire. She was outside the library when Thomas Mair shot her twice, first in the face, and then on the ground, before stabbing her. Mair was tackled by a very brave local man. A witness, Hitham ben Abdullah, said the gun looked homemade. Before Mair attacked her, he was heard shouting ‘Britain First’, or ‘You don’t put Britain first’, either in reference to the Referendum – Cox was a supporter of the Remain team – or the British Nazi group of the same name.

Britain First’s initial reaction was to deny they had any connection to Mair and the murder. Others on the extreme right were all too eager to express their sympathies for the murderer’s actions. Daniel Hall, a member of the Notts Casuals Infidels, from Sutton in Ashfield, posted on their Facebook page that ‘We knew it was only a matter of time before we took it to the next level. We have been mugged off of for far too long.’ Hall is the brother of Jordan, a Kipper and an activist for Pegida. The Notts Casuals Infidels are a mixture of the EDL and the North West Infidels, another anti-Islam group. He also said that another politician, Rachel Maskell, the MP for York Central, needed to ‘disappear’. And the South East Infidels greeted the shocking news of Cox’s murder with a post on Facebook hoping that the murderer was a Muslim.

See the article in Hope Not Hate http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/blog/insider/in-an-hour-of-darkness-fascists-live-out-sick-their-fantasies-4918.

Nick Griffin, now sponging off eastern European Nazis after he was ousted from the BNP, attacked Cox as a warmonger for supporting the bombing of Syria. And the north east branch of the Nazi group, National Action put up a post urging its readers ‘Don’t let this man’s [Mair’s] sacrifice be in vain. Jo Cox would have filled Yorkshire with more subhumans!’

Mair himself had a long history of mental illness. However, it seems he was also a very committed member of the Nazi right. From the late 1990s to the early years of this century he purchased $600 worth of books from National Vanguard Books, the publishing arm of the National Alliance, America’s and the world’s biggest neo-Nazi organisation. The books he bought were manuals showing how guns and ammunition could be made from ordinary ingredients and parts bought in hardware stores. Mair appears to have been very much a peripheral figure in the extreme Far-Right. At one time he attended the meetings of the Springbok Club, a society for pro-Apartheid expatriate White South Africans, and may have gone to the meetings of the ultra-Conservative Swinton Circle/ London Swinton Circle.

As for Britain First, while they’ve disowned him, they did run camps instructing their members how to defend themselves in knife fights, and promised ‘militant action’ and ‘direct action’, against elected Muslim politicians, whom they regard as ‘occupiers’, leading the Islamification of Britain. One of these ‘occupiers’ is the new mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. On the night of her election, Cox was shown with a shawl round her head in the company of some of her Muslim constituents. This would have sent Britain First and similar Nazis into apoplexy, as they would have seen her as a collaborator and ‘race traitor’.
See the Hope Not Hate article: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/blog/insider/a-hater-at-heart-4919
This also makes sense of an comment a ‘John Gaines’ posted over on Mike’s blog at Vox Political, which ran ‘Here we go, what have you Political imbeciles done to our Country? you scum will not stop until we are completely another damn Middle East mess. Never mind ‘Remain’ run for your lives from all political idiots.’ Which shows what a political idiot Mr Gaines is.
See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/06/16/mp-critically-injured-after-shooting-and-stabbing-attack/#comments.

Despite the cruddy attitude from the Far Right, which you’d expect, MPs and the leaders of all the mainstream parties expressed their shock and sadness at Cox’s death. Referendum campaigning has been suspended, and the other parties will not contest Jo Cox’s seat.

Cox was a woman of deep integrity and compassion, by all accounts. She was dedicated not just to her constituents, but had also been an active member of Oxfam. She should have had a brilliant political career ahead of her. Instead she was murdered in cold blood in the street by a maniac. She leaves a husband and two children.

Vox Political on the Strange Disappearance of aIDS Whinging Letter about ‘Outrageous Claims’

Mike put up this story earlier today about the letter Ian Duncan Smith had written, whining about the ‘outrageous claims’ Mike and other bloggers had made about his reforms causing the deaths of the poor and disabled. It seemed for a moment it had mysteriously disappeared. In fact, this seems to have been something of a false alarm. One of Mike’s commenters, however, states that it had vanished, only to reappear on the Commons Work and Pensions website.

Iain Duncan Smith’s latest attempt to justify benefit-related deaths has disappeared from the government’s website

I’ve blogged several times about the way the Spurious Major gallops away at high speed, whenever it looks like he might have meet his opponents. The minister for chequebook genocide simply can’t stop himself. He’s hidden in laundry baskets, run out of the rear entrance in Job Centres, and spoken at early hours of the morning at Tory-run job fairs in order to avoid the angry Great Unwashed. And when he was forced to face the disabled and their carers in the public gallery in parliament at a meeting of the Commons’ Work and Pensions Committee, this mighty general in the tradition of Wellington, Mark Anthony, Julius Caesar and Henry IV, surrounded himself with armed goons.

Now it seems even cyberspace is not safe from his cowardice. He’s starting to run away from people there. Of course, the Tories have form for this kind of thing. Some of us can still remember how a paragraph in one of the papers, written by a leading Tory, which lauded the motto on the gates of Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei, ‘Work Makes You Free’, mysteriously disappeared after someone realised that it made them look like what they are: Nazis. Just that they don’t have the stormtroopers and the jackboots just yet, although no doubt aIDS is working on the forced labour camps. They’ve certainly set up their own system of secret courts, under which you may not even be told under what law you’re charged if this is deemed to be against ‘national security’. We are heading to the old Nazi strategy of Nacht und Nebel – ‘night and fog’, the mysterious disappearance of dissidents.

And like the Spurious Major, Himmler was also not nearly half as tough as he made himself out to be. When he attended an execution by firing squad, he had to be carried away, hysterical. IDS also shows that he wants to run away as from shame and personal danger as possible, even when its Virtual.

Vox Political: Jeremy Hunt Cancels Tory Fundraiser after Junior Doctors Threaten to Show Up

Jeremy Hunt’s parliamentary colleague, Ian Duncan Smith, has a long history of running and hiding from his critics. Faced with the prospect of meeting the victims of his wretched policies, the Spurious Major either runs and hides, or hides behind big men with guns. He’s hidden from protestors in laundry baskets in Scotland, run out the back door of a Job Centre in Bath, and scheduled his speech at a jobs fair run by his local Conservative party in Chingford for early in the morning, so he could get away before the proles arrived. And when he was called to speak to the parliamentary Work and Pensions Committee, he turned up surrounded by armed rozzers. And this idiot fancies himself as a leader of men.

Now, it seems, his habits have spread to Hunt. According to another article over at Vox Political, Hunt was due to appear at a fundraising event for Fairham Conservative Association. This was cancelled after news of the event and its location were circulated on social media, and junior doctors bought tickets. See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/12/jeremy-hunt-meet-and-greet-drinks-event-cancelled-after-junior-doctors-buy-tickets/.

Mike points out that this clearly demonstrates how absolutely unpopular the new contracts are, even if it costs our junior medical professionals £15 a head to tell Hunt to his face.

This reminds me of the various incidents where teenagers have seen their homes comprehensively trashed after they made the mistake of telling the world they were holding a party on Facebook, and suffered an invasion of gatecrashers as a result. Except that this was an event that was open to the public, and the doctors bought tickets. They didn’t just turn up. For some reason, the Tories are putting on a lot of these fundraisers. They did one in the summer, where for a certain amount you could get to go on a nine mile run through the Pennines or the Yorkshire Dales with aIDS. I joked with a friend that I was prepared to go in for that, just to get the opportunity of pushing the dreadful man over a cliff.

But there is a more serious point underlying this: the Tories are clearly experiencing a problem with funding. The actual grassroots membership of the Tory party, easily the largest political party in the country at one time, has shrunk massively. Those that remain in the constituency party are angry that their views were ignored by the parliamentary leaders. This is partly due to Cameron, like Bliar and New Labour, taking the party’s ordinary supporters and voters for granted, and running around rich donors for funding instead. It’s bad for democracy, as it’s leading to the gradual withering away of political parties and their replacement by oligarchies funded and maintained by rich paymasters.

It’s another reason why the Tories hate the unions supporting Labour. They’ve always hated the unions and the union levy, but it means that Labour has a grassroots source of funding that they don’t. And it also means that they’re really afraid of Jeremy Corbyn. Apart from being left-wing, he’s also managed to bring tens of thousands more back to the Labour party.

Against this, the Tories put on cheese and nibbles parties, and hope the proles don’t attend.

Cartoons Against Police Shooting of Blacks

These are a couple of cartoons I came across on 1000 Natural Shocks (over 18s only), bitterly satirising the way American police shoot and kill Blacks unnecessarily. The first is a response to the shooting of a young Black man in Chicago, and the second a more general reaction to the problem. Many of the victims were unarmed, or were actually walking away when they were shot. Some seem to have been killed simply because they talked back to the officer, who responded violently. This situation escalated under the officer pulled his gun and shot his victim.

I’m reblogging these because the Tories are considering arming the police, supposedly to protect us against a terror attack by allowing them to respond immediately, instead of waiting for the armed police units to arrive. There have already been incidents in Britain where the police have shot and killed innocent people, as I’ve pointed out in my last post. This will only increase the problem, till it reaches a crisis, as in America now.

And the presence of armed police on duty against terrorists has already resulted in the death of an innocent man. This was Jean Charles Menezes, the Brazilian student, who was gunned down by the police in London after he was mistaken for an Islamist terrorist. And this was done by supposedly highly trained and responsible police officers. Arming the ordinary police in preparation for suspected terrorist attacks will just make the deaths of innocents like Senhor Menezes more likely.

And it will increase Muslim disaffection. A few years ago, someone wrote a piece in the Independent arguing that the 1980 riots that broke out up and down Britain were not generally about race, but were ‘local insurrections against the police’. This is also true, though much of the rioting was motivated by racial tension. St Pauls in Bristol was one of the areas hit. It’s an area with a highly ethnically mixed population, including Blacks, Whites and Asians. It was a high crime area suffering from high unemployment, and there was a very heavy police presence. One Black resident of the area has said in a piece in one of the papers that there was a feeling at the time that ‘the police were occupying St Paul’s’.

Now consider the immense disaffection that would similarly break out if armed police start patrolling majority Black or Muslim areas. It’ll lead to similar feeling that the police are ‘occupying’ those areas, and drive some, perhaps only a minority, but certainly some, into the arms of the extremists.

We cannot allow this. Good policing is done by consent, not just armed force. And the latter should always be the last resort.

IDS and his Armed Bodyguards: Are the Police Arming themselves against the People

My blog post on the reports that IDS appeared before the Work and Pensions committed surrounded with bodyguards and armed policemen, who intimidated members of the public, including a group of disabled people and their carers, has attracted a lot of attention and comments. Some of the most significant and ominous have been made by Slugabed, Joseph Jesus and CAS.

Regarding the legality of police officers raising the guns at innocent civilians, CAS commented:

‘Police officers broke regulations if they pointed the guns at you and their fire-arms licenses should be revoked. They are trained to never aim a weapon at anyone, even one that is not loaded, unless those people pose an imminent threat and are being arrested. You should never aim a weapon at anyone unless you are willing to shoot them; this is basic firearms practice. Such a weapon may fire accidentally, even with the safety pin in place. Unless you threatened violence, then the police officers should not have raised their weapons. The police complaints commission must be informed as this is a very serious breach and a clear case of misconduct.’

Slugabed stated that if it occurred within the House of Commons, a complaint should be made to the Master-at-Arms, Lawrence Ward. This was confirmed another commenter, Pedanticgeek.

More ominously, he stated:

‘Not long ago I happened to be in the Worshipful Company of Gunmakers’ Proof House in Commercial Road.The cage there was filled with hundreds of semi-automatic rifles in their crates waiting to be proofed. “Police job.Never had so many to be done” said the man working there,”We’ve had to take on extra staff”’.

His report of the police stocking up on weapons was confirmed by Joseph Jesus, who said:

‘I think you will find that the police are tooling up they have also purchased vast numbers of Tasers.

According to gunpolicydotorg

Police in the United Kingdom are reported to have 272,88417 firearms

BBC – Full-time equivalent (FTE) officers in the 43 forces stood at 134,101

So thats a semi-automatic carbine plus a side arm for each officer.

The question is come the crunch whether the rank & file coppers will turn their weapons upon us or their treasonous corrupt political masters, equally the military.

Our best defence it would seem is to inform every member of the above as to the crimes currently being committed by those that rule over us.

This tooling up scenario is echoed in the USA and no doubt the rest of the OECD and EU nations.’

Lallygag said of IDS and his armed guards that ‘If anyone still had any doubt about whether we still live in a democracy, surely the image of IDS surrounded by armed guards ‘protecting’ him from a group of disability campaigners will finally dispel that doubt. We live in a plutocracy. By the rich, for the rich. And they will protect themselves at all costs. Don’t doubt that.’

Indeed. Looking around the bookshelves in Waterstones on Monday I found a book in the politics section arguing that Britain was developing an oligarchy of the super-rich and powerful. This is overwhelmingly, obviously correct. When Blair was in power the gap between rich and poor in this country was wider than at any time since 1832, I believe. Now it is even wider. Never mind Scottish devolution, Britain is rapidly becoming two nations: the poor, including those in work, and the rich, who have never had it so good and are becoming even richer. And the Coalition is governing on their behalf.

The increased stockpiling of weapons by the police forces is extremely alarming, as it shows that they and the Coalition are alarmed at a violent public backlash against their corruption and misgovernment. I am also not surprised that this is in line with other police forces in the Developed World. Neo-Liberalism has been promoted throughout the globe as the solution to the world’s economic and political problems. It’s been foisted on the world’s nations through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. And throughout the world the results have been the same: grinding poverty and deteriorating conditions for the many, obscene amounts of wealth for the very few. Britain is no different to what is being forced on the poor in places as far apart as continental Europe and India, although at the moment our living standards are still much higher than those in the latter. And as the few fear that the poverty and despair they have forced onto their fellow citizens has provoked anger, resentment and the possibility of violence and chaos, so they are arming the police to protect them. This is a return to the worst aspects of the Victorian era, when ‘special constables’ were recruited to deal with the possibility of working class violence, rioting and insurrection, and the infamous ‘Peterloo Massacre’ when the cavalry massacred a peaceful demonstration camped out to protest high prices and poor wages.

It is also profoundly against the best British traditions. George Orwell, in his book, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the British, celebrated British uniqueness. England felt different, not just because of its warm beer, pre-decimal coinage and its people’s bad teeth, but also because their gentleman manners. His book is a polemic arguing for a uniquely British brand of Socialism that would be at once radical, and so traditional that foreign observers would wonder whether a revolution had actually occurred at all. This would, he believed, be brought about by the growing classlessness of British society. He noted that there was now a growing class of people, who were now neither obviously Middle or Lower class. Undoubtedly what has saved this country from violent revolution in the past was the doctrine of class reconciliation. This was expressed in Disraeli’s ‘One Nation’ Toryism, and also Fabian Socialism and the Labour Party. The Fabians believed that Socialism would ultimately benefit everyone in society, and rejected class warfare in order to win the support of the middle classes. I have also mentioned several times that to many British radicals, the presence of standing armies in peacetime was an institution foreign despots used to oppress their peoples, something profoundly at odds with traditional British liberty. I think it’s significant and telling that when Sir Robert Peel founded the metropolitan police force, he deliberately made the unarmed. The police forces on the Continent were armed as part of the fundamental view that they were to be a force actively fighting crime. The British police, on the other hand, were unarmed to show that they were there to assist the victim. I also wonder if an additional reason was also to reassure the British public that our police would not be like that of absolutist monarchies or dictatorships, which were there to suppress political dissent and opposition, but instead simply to protect the citizen, his property and his freedom. Since then the police have been extremely keen to gain the support of the public. One chief constable has even remarked on how they were used politically under Margaret Thatcher to destroy the Miners’ Strike. He even described them then as being ‘Maggie’s army’.

This now seems threatened by the Coalition and their war on the poor, the marginalised and the disabled. It cannot be allowed to continue. If it does, then the police force will turn into exactly oppressive, political force its founders sought to avoid, and the gentleness of British society that Orwell praised will have been destroyed. The growing gulf between rich and poor in this country and an increasingly armed police, distant and contemptuous of the people they are sworn to protect are a far more profound threat than Tory rants about ‘political correctness’ and the louche behaviour of pop stars and TV and sports celebrities.