Historical Slavery Commemoration Groups Plans Slavery Museum in Bristol

Bristol was, along with London and Liverpool, one of the major centres of the transatlantic slave trade. According to last Friday’s edition of the local paper, the Bristol Post, for the 24th February 2023, a group of activists and radical historians have put forward plans to turn the former Seaman’s Mission on the city’s harbour into a museum of slavery. The building is owned by the brewery Samuel Smith’s at the moment. They’re intending to sell it, but are demanding £1 million. The museum is the idea of the Abolition Shed collective, who admit that at the moment they don’t have the money for it, but have submitted plans in order to start a public debate about it.

The Collective is composed of the Bristol Radical History Group, the Countering Colston Group and the Long John Silver Trust. They are backed by the architects Marshall & Kendon, who have drawn up the plans for the suggested museum and education centre. The architect’s planning brief said

“The Abolition Shed Collective believe they have an imaginative reuse the historic buildings are crying out for – an Interpretation Centre or Museum for a Memorial to the Victims of Enslavement to be sited nearby – right where this history actually happened in the 17th and 18th centuries.”

“To tell the story of anti-slavery campaigners that, combined with African agency and resistance of the enslaved themselves, brought an end to this heinous crime against humanity. Bristol was the pre-eminent slave trading port in the world between the 1720s and 1740s, and this vital fact is little acknowledged , it was also home to one of the strongest pro-slavery lobbies in the country that did their best to continue the slave-system right up to Emancipation in the 1830s and beyond.”

The group first tried to get a museum set up in the O&M shed building, but the city council sold it to developers. The city’s elected mayor, Marvin Rees, is also unconvinced that the city needs such a museum. The Collective’s Mark Steeds said that the intention was to create a place where people could learn about the city’s past and commemorate its victims.

“This is about getting this issue out there and discussed. We want to start a conversation about Bristol, its history and how we can all acknowledge and learn from it. Too often, whenever there’s a talk about street names and statues, it becomes divisive. What we want to do is have somewhere everyone can go and learn more about about this part of Bristol’s history that is not really told, acknowledged or remembered, ‘he added. (p. 6).

This could be interesting. Bristol’s Black community has long complained that the city is somehow covering its participation in the slave trade. The city’s deputy mayor, Asher Craig, said in a Radio 4 interview a few years ago that she wanted a museum of slavery for Bristol. In practice, when one group came to her with plans for one, she turned them away and told them to find the money elsewhere. The Bristol Cable, a small local paper, has complained that Bristol should have a museum of slavery comparable to those at Liverpool and Nantes. I’m sceptical, because it seems to me that such museums are less commemorative than a form of moral reproach and recrimination by the Black community at Whites, and present slavery as something only White people did to Blacks. But this could be different, if it also talks about the Abolitionist movement in Bristol.

My Email to the Local Labour Party about the False View that only White Europeans Were Responsible for Slavery

I had an email from my local branch of the Labour party in Bristol this morning informing that they will be out this weekend canvassing people about the issues that matter to them. I wish them the very best of luck. Twelve years of Tory misrule have just about wrecked this great country and are forcing millions of ordinary, hardworking Brits into poverty. Not to mention the continued exploitation and impoverishment of the disabled and unemployment through benefit sanctions, work capability tests and all the rest of the welfare reforms that they have pushed through to enable them to stop paying benefits to people, who genuinely need it, all on the flimsiest of pretexts.

But one issue in Bristol that particularly concerns me is the way the slave trade is represented in exhibitions, the media and in education. Bristol was one of the major cities in the UK slave trade, along with London, Liverpool and I think Glasgow in Scotland. Although the slave trade was banned in 1807 and slavery itself abolished in 1837, it still casts a very long shadow over the city, just as it does the country generally. This was shown three years in the BLM riot that brought down the statue of Edward Colston and in a motion passed by the city council calling for reparations to be paid to the Black population. What concerns me about this is that it seems to me that a distorted image of slavery has arisen, in which White Europeans and Americans are seen as uniquely responsible and culpable for it. I am worried about the apparent lack of awareness that it existed right across the world and long before Europeans started enslaving Black Africans for labour in the plantations of the New World. It also appears that the BBC is determined to push this distorted image, as detailed by the group History Reclaimed and their document identifying the bias in twenty BBC programmes, several of which were about slavery. These included the edition of The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan when he went to Sierra Leone and Enslaved, presented by Hollywood actor Samuel L. Jackson. I therefore sent a reply stating my concern about this issue and the way it was handled by the local council. This runs

‘Dear Neil,

Thank you for your email letting me know that the party will be out this Saturday canvassing people in Bedminster about the issues that matter to them. I am afraid that long term illness prevents me from attending. However, apart from the continued cuts to public services forced on the mayor by central government cuts, there is one local issue that is of deep concern to me. This is the presentation and public knowledge of the history of slavery. Slavery has existed since antiquity and across the globe. Some of the earliest records come from the ancient near eastern town of Mari, which detail the sale of slaves and other properties. You can find lists of slaves on noble estates from ancient Egypt. Slavery also existed in the Muslim world, India and China. It also existed in Black Africa long before the emergence of the transatlantic slave trade. In some African societies, the proportion of the population that was enslaved varied between 30 to 70 per cent. By and large the slaves acquired by White European and American merchants were purchased from Black African slavers. Duke Ephraim, the king of Dahomey, had an income of £300,000 a year from slaving. There are records of British merchants to Africa being offered slaves Black chiefs. After abolition some of the slaving tribes attacked British trading posts in order to make us resume purchasing their human wares. Britain also paid compensation to former African slaving nations after abolition. In the 1850s we also fought a war with Dahomey in order to stop them enslaving the other local peoples.

But I am afraid I find little awareness of these issues in Bristol and among people generally. I am worried that this is creating a false view of the trade in the public, in which slavery, and particularly Black enslavement, is wholly the fault of Whites. This includes a lack of awareness that White Europeans, including British people and Bristolians, were also enslaved during the Turkish conquest of the Balkans and the Barbary pirates from Algiers and Morocco from the 16th century on till the French conquest of Algeria in the 1820s. I feel very strongly that this is creating an ideological motivated demonisation of Whites, especially if coupled with Critical Race Theory, which holds that all Whites are racist and will remain so.

I also feel this situation has been exacerbated locally by the motion passed a year or so ago calling for the payment of reparations for slavery, introduced by Green councillor Cleo Lake and seconded by Deputy Mayor and head of Equalities Asher Craig. This called for funding to be given to Black organisations rather than individuals, so that they can create sustainable, prosperous Black communities. This is obviously a noble aim, but the stipulation that the money should cover all Afrikans, as councillor Lake styles all Blacks, in the context of reparations means that Britain has accepted a moral responsibility for compensating people,. who were never enslaved by us, and which includes the vary African nations that committed the raiding and brutality that supplied the slaves. It also has nothing to say against the celebration in some African countries of these slavers, like Efroye Tinobue in Nigeria. It also erases from history the White victims of slavery.

I sent emails last year to Mdm. Craig and Councillor Lake pointing out these defects. I regret that I never received a reply. But this issue still has a particular urgency in Bristol. In previous correspondence, Asher Craig informed me that the local government was planning a new, ‘One Bristol’ curriculum for schools, which would foreground Black people. I have absolutely no qualms about Black Bristolians receiving the educational help they need, nor being included in our city’s history. But I am afraid that this curriculum will place the blame for slavery solely on White Bristolians and that this will lead to further racial division and prejudices.

I would very much like the local council to ensure that whenever slavery is taught or exhibitions on it mounted, its antiquity and the fact that other peoples, such as Black Africans, Arabs, Indians and so on were also involved, and that Whites were also the victims of the trade. This need not be an extensive treatment, but it should be there.

I hope you will take on board these concerns and recommendations, and wish you and the other party members all the best campaigning on Saturday.

Yours faithfully,

David Sivier’

I’ll let you know if I get a reply.

Governor of California Discussing Paying Reparations for Slavery

Last week Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, proposed that the state should pay reparations for slavery. This would consist in a payment of $220,000 to Black Californians descended from slaves. Newsom had previous passed or proposed legislation for the payment of a monthly amount to homeless trans people for a fixed term of one year. This was because there was a disproportionate number of trans people living on the streets, and the payment was to allow them to begin to purchase or rent a home. Newsom’s proposal to pay reparations for slavery was discussed by the Lotus Eaters over here and there’s a video by Black Conservative Perspective in America criticising it. The Black Conservative was not impressed, calling it divisive and playing a clip of Black speakers before the California state legislature or whatever demanding more. One man wanted the payment to be in a fixed amount of gold for each enslaved ancestor. An angry man wearing the red fez and tie of the Nation of Islam ranted about how God had a particular hatred of America and if the money wasn’t paid, He’d destroy the country with an asteroid or something. The Black Conservative considered that these payments would be inflationary, that the money would go on cars and cocaine, and that it would never be enough. People would always come back asking for more.

These are legitimate criticisms. Simon Webb, of History Debunked, made a video attacking the reparations for slavery campaign a few months or so ago. He also thought that it would cause racial divisions rather than solve them, and illustrated it with this example. Say there were two people living next to each other, in identical houses and with the same amount of wealth, but one was Black and the other White. If the Black man received £40,000 simply as compensation for his ancestors being enslaved but not for anything he personally had done, it would cause the White man to become resentful. It might not be true everywhere and of every White person – some may well share the opinion that it’s right Blacks descended from slaves should receive reparations for the suffering of their ancestors. But many others may well become extremely resentful. It could easily result in insults, abuse and worse. When Bristol city council passed a motion a year ago calling for the payment of reparations, Deputy Mayor and head of Equalities Asher Craig received an enormous amount of abusive messages.

I’m also sure that the Black Conservative also has a point about some of the prospective recipients squandering the money. I don’t doubt that some Blacks would use the money wisely to improve conditions for themselves and their children. But I can also see others wasting the money on expensive luxuries, like top of the range cars. There have been a number of stories in the past about people who’ve won millions on the National Lottery and who’ve then spent it all with nothing to show for it so that they’re back as poor as before. This has been done by people regardless of race, White and Black alike. I am also afraid that if these sums were paid, the gangster element in the Black community would use it to expand their violence and drug dealing, as criminals of any colour would if suddenly given a massive cash boost. Perhaps some would use it to leave the gangs and crime behind and try and establish themselves as respectable, law-abiding citizens. You’d hope so. But I think rather more criminals would simply use it to finance more of their destructive lifestyle, which would cause further damage to the Black community. And I am also afraid that whatever was paid would never be enough, and that they would always come back for more.

Thomas Sowell in one of his books argued against slavery reparations. He felt that the people, who were victimised and responsible for it are now dead, and so beyond our ability to help or punish. He also argued that whatever profits America had made from slavery had vanished in the bloodbath of the American Civil War. Furthermore, the guilt for something as terrible as slavery could not be absolved simply by paying money. He also made the point that no society could survive a moral viewpoint in which it had to be constantly criticising itself and paying compensation for the acts of the past. I think these are excellent points.

When Bristol passed its motion calling for reparations, the practical measures made it seem more like a call for further affirmative action for the Black British community as a whole justified through the connection to slavery. The motion ruled out payments to individuals. Instead they should be paid to Black-led organisations which would work to improve conditions and create sustainable, prosperous Black communities. All Blacks were to benefit from this, not just those of Afro-Caribbean or slave origin. While it’s better than Newsom’s proposal in providing for their real, collective benefit of the Black community rather than just the compensation of individuals, there are real moral problems with this as well. By including all Black, it also makes the British state morally responsible for people we did not enslave and who may themselves be descendants of the very slavers who sold their human cargo to us. It also ignores the fact that other nations, like the Arabs and Indians, were also involved in the African slave trade and the fact that White Europeans, including Brits, were also the victims of enslavement in the Turkish conquest of the Balkans and the Barbary pirates. I sent email messages to Craig and Cleo Lake, the Green councillor who proposed the motion, but got no reply. This, in my opinion, shows their absolute contempt for those challenging the notion.

In the British context, it could be argued that any profits Britain acquired from the slave trade were spent on our efforts to stamp it out through the activities of the British West African squadron and its patrols as well as a wider campaign against slaving and slavery during the Empire. There is also the problem that some of the countries responsible for kidnapping slaves also want reparations paid to them, even though some of their chiefs became extremely rich from the trade’s profits. The Caribbean nations, or some of them, have also demanded reparations. Some of this has been to deflect attention from the failings of their own rulers, while I don’t doubt that the venal kleptocrats are looking at a source of further money they can steal and loot. There’s also a question of the amount paid. Britain paid £20 million in compensation to the slaveowners at abolition, something that has been bitterly resented by some Black activists, just as it was by some abolitionists at the time. This translates into billions in today’s money and we only stopped paying it off a few years ago. If we were to pay a commensurate amount today, I think it would bankrupt us. And I can’t see that being to anyone’s benefit in Britain.

So far I think Newsom is on his own on this issue, and it remains to be seen whether he goes ahead with it. But this could be one issue to watch, as it’s possible other states will take it up, as well as activists over here.

My Suggestions for this Issues the Lotus Eaters Should Tackle

Sargon and his chums in the Lotus Eaters have asked their readers to send them suggestions for what issues they should write articles about. I’ve therefore sent them three in the comments section. These aren’t suggestions about what they should do about their libertarianism, their frantic support of privatisation and free market capitalism when both are disastrously failing. Nor did I tell them what they could do about their support for Donald Trump, who may well be making a come-back bid to be president. They just wouldn’t publish them and I expect all I’d get would be a storm of anger and abuse from their supporters if they did. Instead I just sent them three suggestions regarding the skewed attitudes among anti-racist activists regarding the historiography of slavery, the failure to protest against the Pakistani grooming gangs and demands for autonomous communities by Islamic theocrats and Black activists. Here’s the comments I left:

‘I could present you with a list. I’d like it if you could tackle the way the historiography of slavery is being skewed. I’ve got the distinct impression that the anti-racist activists demanding reparations for slavery do not want it taught in schools or people made aware that slavery was universal and not invented by Whites; that it existed in Europe long before Europeans enslaved Africans; that Africans were also enslaving other Africans long before the transatlantic slave trade, and that some African states were not only complicit but did extremely well out of it. They also do not want to hear how the British government began improving conditions for slaves before abolition, nor how we attempted to abolish indigenous slavery in other parts of the British empire and around the world. They don’t want to know that Indians also enslaved Africans, or that the Arab slave trade resulted in the export of 14 million slaves from the continent. And above all, the really don’t want the Barbary pirates discussed. They have been erased from the narrative about slavery in the view of one academic author because they don’t fit with the idea that Whites enslaved Blacks, not the other way round. And the French postmodernists have a very racist view of them in which the pirates are ‘nationalists’ and their ‘white victims ‘imperialists’.’

‘Going further, the utter failure of the anti-racist left to protest against the Pakistani grooming gangs. Following Callum’s coverage of Unite’s and Stand Up To Racism’s protest against Tommy Robinson and his film about the rape of Telford, I wrote to Unite and SUTR complaining about their failure to protest against the gangs. I suggested that the organise a multicultural march against them, ’cause Whites have protested with Blacks on their campaigns against racism. No reply. I wrote to my local paper, the Bristol Post, suggesting this, and also to the Independent. No reply. I also wrote to Asher Craig, Bristol’s deputy elected mayor and head of equalities and children’s services. She’s a Black woman who said she wanted a museum of slavery in Bristol. No reply there either. This said very clearly to me that when it comes to racism, for the anti-racist left racism against Whites does not matter.’

‘And if you really want to be controversial, you could write a piece about colonialist attitudes among Muslims and Blacks. This exists. Anjem Chaudhury’s outfit in Belgium, Sharia4Belgium, wanted a separate Muslim territory in that country, governed by sharia law and with Arabic as the spoken language. The same demands were made over here in some of the literature published by the British Muslim publishers. A more recent argument I came across a couple of years ago explicitly ties it to the colonisation of America. The way the British encouraged other nations to settle in their colonies by allowing them to preserve their culture and laws, these Muslims argue that Muslims in the west should also be allowed to retain their laws under the protection of the British state. I’ve also seen Black British writers and politicos demand separate spaces for Blacks and autonomous communities.’

I know there are issues about people from the left dealing with right-wingers like Sargon and his crew. These are issues that I’d like the left to tackle. But they really don’t want to tackle them or see them discussed. And so, unfortunately, the only avenue is to take them up with the right and see if they will.

I’ll let you know if I get any replies.

My Emails to the Local Labour Party and Bristol’s Head of Equalities and Children for a Multicultural Protest Against the Grooming Gangs

One of the other issues that really concerns me at the moment is continuing revelations about the Pakistani grooming gangs. Last week it was revealed that gangs in Telford had preyed on a further thousand victims, and that this had been ignored by the police and the local authorities. I’m absolutely disgusted by this, and infuriated by the response of these organisations and the left to it. There were angry scenes at a council meeting in Oldham last week when the council blithely claimed that there had been no cover-up. a Tory councillor shouted that there was, and he had one of the victims of these gangs there to prove it. I’ve also heard it alleged that it’s still going on. This is being used by the right to discredit the left, meaning particularly the Labour party, as the local authorities that allowed it to go on for decades were Labour. Various right-wing channels and YouTubers are stating that the left prefers rapists to accusations of racism, which is absolutely correct. But it also shows an underlying, profound inability in the left to deal with anti-White racism.

The anti-racist movement and its various organs, like the former Commission for Racial Equality, were set up to deal with anti-Black and anti-Asian racism, particularly after the race riots and the stabbing of a Black man just for having a White girlfriend at the Notting Hill Carnival. And there was a lot of very blatant racism, right down to the bullying of peeps from ethnic minorities by their workmates. There really were signs saying ‘No dogs, no blacks, no Irish’. And the continuing poverty, poor educational performance and marginalisation of the Black community has continued this focus on Black racial welfare. At the same time, the biased reporting in the right-wing press of Black crime and the victimisation of Whites in Black and ethnic majority areas was a part of a wider campaign against non-White immigration. This was rightly attacked as racism, especially as the real Fascists of the BNP and National Front used it as part of their political campaigns, while making up a few facts of their own. One of the grotesque examples of this was Nick Griffin or one of his wretched storm troopers telling his minuscule legions that Stephen Lawrence was a crook at school who forced the other kids to give him their dinner money. Completely made up! But when did that bother the political heirs of Hitler and Goebbels? What this has done is made the left in particularly absolutely terrified of acknowledging, let alone combating, anti-White racism.

This hasn’t been the case all the time. The Independent journo Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote a report for the CRE about anti-White racism, and the issue was discussed in the Guardian. But this was two decades and more ago. And the left is continuing to mishandle the issue of the grooming gangs by signally failing to protest against them. It means that the issue is being exploited by racists and islamophobes like Tommy Robinson. The left, meanwhile, protests against him while saying nothing about the racism against the White girls who were raped and exploited by the gangs.

I believe there is a way to tackle this, and that the left has the resources within it. I think what is needed is for the left to hold multicultural rallies against the gangs, just as Whites have marched with Blacks and Asians against racism and prejudice against them. I have therefore sent emails suggesting this to my local branch of the Labour party and to Asher Craig, the deputy mayor for Bristol and head of children and equalities for the city. My email to the local Labour party runs

‘Dear Sir,

I am writing to you as a member of the local Labour party to express my growing concern about the recent revelations of the rape and racist abuse of White girls by grooming gangs of men of Pakistani origin. I am particularly dismayed by what I feel is the complete lack of an appropriate response by the Labour party and the local authorities. In towns and cities like Bradford, Oldham and Rotherham, these gangs were allowed to get away with their predations for decades because the police and local authorities were afraid of being accused of racism. This past week it has emerged that a further 1,000 girls were raped and abused of the decades in Telford. This abuse has been confounded by police officers turning up to talk to one of the victims because she appeared on GB News to talk about her experiences. This grotesque inaction and the attempts by the police and authorities to contain this story, complete with denials that there has been any cover-up, reflects extremely badly not just on the police and local authorities in those areas, but on the left and the mainstream anti-racist movement generally. There have been videos about this scandal on YouTube that make it very clear that the posters believe that the authorities cannot be trusted and that the Left as a whole finds the racist abuse of White girls perfectly acceptable. The anti-trans activist Kelly-Jay Keen has put up a video, for example, with the title ‘the Left – Better a Rapist than a Racist’. The right-wing YouTube group The Lotus Eaters have been covering this issue for years, expressing similar views about the left. And the anti-immigrant YouTuber, ‘We Got A Problem’ included on his video about the issue the advice that people should start organising themselves to protect their children against such predatory gangs because the police and authorities won’t protect them. This is a call for vigilante gangs and racist lynch mobs, and the first step to Fascism. 

I believe that this issue has and is being disastrously mishandled by the left and the conventional anti-racist movement because of a long-standing failure to treat anti-White racism equally with anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. This seems based on the fear that any mention of racism by Blacks and Asians towards Whites will spark race riots and bring back the spectre of Enoch Powell and his notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. But the opposite seems to be the case, as people are going back to Enoch Powell because of the left’s refusal to tackle these gangs. See recent posts by the History Debunked channel. While the left appears to give the impression that racism towards Whites is acceptable, it is islamophobes such as Tommy Robinson who are successfully manipulating the issue so that they appear inclusive. A few months ago Robinson, formerly of the anti-Islam organisations the EDL and Pegida UK, as well as the BNP, held a rally in Birmingham to promote the launch of his film, ‘The Rape of Birmingham’, complete with interviews with the abused girls. There was a counterprotest by Unite and Stand Up To Racism. However, instead of demonstrating that they were also against the grooming gangs, they simply shouted the usual slogans of ‘Refugees welcome’ and ‘Off our streets, Fascist Scum’. But it was Robinson’s group that really appeared to be inclusive and genuinely anti-racist. Their video of the rally prominently shows a young Black man wearing a ‘Black and White Unite and Fight’ anti-racist T-shirt.

This is what the Left needs to be doing. A few decades ago it was prepared to discuss and condemn anti-White racism as well as racism against Blacks and Asians. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote a report on it for the Committee for Racial Equality back in 1997. In the early part of this century, a Muslim Guardian journalist wrote a piece in that paper stating that working class Whites and ordinary Muslims should united against Islamist organisations like Hizb-ut Tahrir. And I have heard complaints from other moderate Muslims that they have received zero coverage and support from mainstream British society in their protests against the preachers of hate in their religion.

I feel very strongly that what is needed is a multicultural rally bringing Whites, Blacks and Asians together to condemn the grooming gangs and their predations as part of the wider anti-racist movement, to show that every form of racism, against all ethnic groups, is equally unacceptable. After all, Whites have shown their support for their Black friends in marching with them against their discrimination in the Black Lives Matter rallies, for example.

While Bristol is not one of those cities what has been preyed upon by these gangs, I believe it can play a major part in combating them through launching such a rally. Bristol has a diverse, multicultural population with Bristolians of all colours enjoying events such as the St. Paul’s carnival and the Asian melas, as well as the Pride events last weekend. I feel it is absolutely imperative that a multicultural rally should be staged to combat this racism, not just for itself, but to nip in the bud any further exploitation of it by the racist right.

It would be excellent if the Labour party in Bristol, or just the local Labour party in south Bristol, could organise such a rally or march, even if only on a small scale. I understand that there is no monthly meeting in August, but if this affair continues to develop then I will try and put forward this suggestion as a motion at the September meeting. In the meantime, if you can suggest other people or organisations I should contact to get this going, I would be very grateful.

I eagerly await your response.

Yours sincerely,

David Sivier’

And here’s my email to Craig

‘Dear Asher,

I am writing to you in your specific capacity as the official in charge of child services and equalities in our great city. I am very much concerned by the recent revelations about the grooming gangs of men of Pakistani heritage and the way their predations on vulnerable White girls were ignored by the police and authorities because of fears that they would be accused of racism. This past week, as I’m sure you know, it has been revealed that there were a further 1,000 girls abused by these gangs in Telford. I am deeply worried at what I believe is the disastrous way Labour and the anti-racist organisations are handling this crisis, and the way it is now being perceived and exploited by the right. Thanks to this mishandling, many people now believe that the Labour party regards such abuse as perfectly acceptable. The anti-trans activist, Kelly-Jay Kean, has put up a video entitled ‘The Left – Better a Rapist than a Racist’. The Lotuis Eaters, a right-wing, Libertarian YouTube channel, have devoted a stream of videos to this issue, which they regard as a form of anti-White racism. And not only is the Labour party tarnished by this inaction, but so is are the police, the BBC and the authorities generally. The anti-immigrant YouTuber ‘We Got A Problem’ posted a video last night stating that people should organise themselves to protect their children because the authorities would not protect them. This is a call to set up vigilante groups, with the attendant danger of racist lynch mobs. As I’m sure I needn’t tell you, the first step on the road to real Fascism is when there is a profound breakdown of trust between the authorities and their citizens on issues of race and nation.

I also believe that the racist right are far better at exploiting this issue,, and are doing so because they are doing what the left should be doing, but isn’t. The islamophobe Tommy Robinson, formerly of the EDL, Pegida UK and, I gather, the BNP, held a rally and a public showing of his film ‘The Rape of Birmingham’ a few months ago. He was met by a group of counterprotesters from Stand Up To Racism and Unite the Union. But they did not tackle Robinson on the subject of the grooming gangs. They merely recited the usual anti-racist slogans of ‘Fascist scum off our streets!’ and ‘Refugees welcome’. But they did not recognise that here there was a genuine, serious issue of the racist abuse and victimisation of White girls or demonstrate any support for the victims. When someone from the Lotus Eaters asked them if they did agree with the girls’ abuse, they said that of course they didn’t. But this isn’t good enough. They have to publicly show that they don’t. And they haven’t. Their failure to do so very much contrasts with Robinson’s own presentation of himself and his supporters. He claims not to be racist, and in the video he made of his rally there is a young Black man amongst his supporters, wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Black and White Unite and Fight’. This is what the left should also be doing about these gangs.

For decades now, White people have marched in support of Blacks and other people of colour against racism and discrimination. I’m sure you remember the marches against the BNP and institutional racism in the 1980s and musical events in that decade and the ’70s by Rock Against Racism. I strongly believe that we need similar multicultural rallies against the grooming gangs. I realise that as head of equalities for Bristol your specific focus is tackling racism and improving conditions for the Black community. But the Black community, in my experience, is also able and willing to discuss racism and racist abuse directed against Whites. The I journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown authored an official report into anti-White racism by Blacks and Asians in 1997, and a Muslim Guardian journalist called for moderate Muslims and the White working class to unite against Islamist organisations such as Hizb ut-Tahrir. One of the complaints of moderate Muslims is that they are given no media coverage or support when they demonstrate against their religion’s preachers of hate.

I believe very strongly that the only way to tackle this is to organise a multicultural rally bringing Whites, Blacks and Asians together to condemn the gangs. We have to show unity, and that all forms of racism are equally unacceptable, just as White support for Black Lives Matter two years ago showed that the wider community despised anti-Black racism. I realise the gangs are a northern phenomenon, but there have been suggestions that it started in the south. And while Bristol hasn’t been touched by them, I believe the city could play a leading role in this because of its diverse population and the popularity of multicultural events such as the St. Paul’s Carnival and the Asian mela.

It is absolutely imperative that this should be done to show that Labour and the authorities are not complacent about any kind of racism, and that paedophile gangs of whatever colour are not welcome in our city.

As the head of equalities, I hope you may be able to organise such a rally for the city. If you cannot, I would be grateful if you could direct me to someone who could.

I eagerly await your reply.

Yours sincerely,

David Sivier.’

I’ll let you all know if there’s a reply.

Bristol and Labour’s Elected Mayor, and the Arguments Against

On the fourth of May parts of the country are due to go to the polls again. These are mostly council elections, but down here in Bristol it’ll be for a referendum on the system of elected mayors the city has had for the past few years. At the moment the elected mayor is Marvin Rees for Labour. His predecessor, Ferguson, was supposedly an Independent, but he had been a Lib Dem. He personally promoted himself by wearing red trousers, even at funerals when he toned the colour down to dark claret. His first act was to change the name of the Council House to City Hall for no real reason. His administration was responsible for running through a programme of immense cuts. He intended to make £90 million of them, but told Bristolians that they shouldn’t be afraid. He also turned down grant money from central government to which the city was qualified and untitled. I heard at a meeting of the local Labour party that he left the city’s finances in a colossal mess, and it has taken a great effort for Marvin’s administration to sort them out.

The local Labour party has thrown itself four-square behind the elected mayoralty. It’s being promoted in the election literature from the party, boasting about how, under Rees, 9,000 new homes have been built, green power and other initiatives invested in. The opposition parties, by contrast, have wasted council taxpayers’ hard earned money on trivialities.

I think the party is also holding an on-line meeting tonight to convince members that the system of elected mayors is a positive benefit. Speakers include Andy Burnham amongst other prominent politicos. One of the claims being made is that elected mayors are democratic and transparent, whereas the previous committee system meant that decisions were taken behind closed doors.

But I am not convinced by any means that the elected mayoralty is a benefit.

Bristol South Labour MP Karin Smyth has stated that she is also no fan of the system. She has made it plain that she is not criticising Marvin’s administration, and is very diplomatic in her comments about his predecessor. But she has described the system as ‘too male’ and believes that the city should go back to being run by the council, whose members were elected and in touch by their local communities. The anti-male sexism aside, I agree with her. There have been studies done of business decision-making that show that while a strong chairman is admired for leadership, collective decision-making by the board actually results in better decisions. And one criticism of Rees’s government in Bristol is that he is not accountable to local representatives and has zero qualms about overruling local communities.

Here’s a few examples: a few years ago there were plans to build a new entertainment stadium in Bristol. This was due to be situated just behind Temple Meads station in an area that is currently being re-developed. It’s a superb site with excellent communications. Not only would it be bang right next to the train station, but it’s also not very far from the motorway. All you have to do if your coming down the M32 is turn left at the appropriate junction and carry on driving and your at Temple Meads in hardly any time at all. But Marvin disagreed, and it wanted it instead located in Filton, miles away in north Bristol.

Then there’s the matter of the house building at Hengrove Park. This is another issue in which Rees deliberately overruled the wishes of local people and the council itself. Rees decided that he wanted so many houses built on the site. The local people objected that not only was it too many, but that his plans made no provision for necessary amenities like banks, shops, doctors’ surgeries, pharmacies and so on. They submitted their own, revised plans, which went before the council, who approved them. If I remember correctly, the local plans actually conformed to existing planning law, which Marvin’s didn’t. But this didn’t matter. Rees overruled it. And I gather that he has also done the same regarding housing and redevelopment in other parts of south Bristol, like nearby Brislington.

Rees definitely seems to favour the north and more multicultural parts of the city over the south. And I’m afraid his attitude comes across as somewhat racist. South Bristol is largely White, though not exclusively. There are Black and Asian residents, and have been so for at least the past forty years. Rees is mixed race, but his own authoritarian attitude to decision making and the reply I got a few years ago from Asher Craig, his deputy-mayor and head of equalities, suggests that he has little or no connection to White Bristolians. When I wrote to Asher Craig criticising her for repeating the claim that Bristol was covering up its involvement in the slave trade, despite numerous publications about the city and the slave trade going all the way back to the ’70s, in an interview on Radio 4, she replied by telling me that I wouldn’t have said that if I’d heard all the interview. She then went on about the ‘One Bristol’ school curriculum she had planned and how that would promote Blacks. It would be diverse and inclusive, which she declared was unfortunately not always true about White men. This is a racial jibe. She may not have meant it as such, but if the roles were reversed, I’m sure it would count as a micro-aggression. And when I wrote to her and Cleo Lake, the Green councillor from Cotham, laying out my criticisms of her motion for Bristol to pay reparations for slavery, I got no reply at all.

A few years ago I also came across a statement from a Labour group elsewhere in the city, stating that Blacks should ally themselves with the White working class, because they did not profit from or support the slave trade. This is probably true historically, but it also reveals some very disturbing attitudes. Support for slavery has become something of a ‘mark of Cain’. If you have an ancestor who supported, you are forever tainted, even if you are the most convinced and active anti-racist. And Critical Race Theory and the current craze for seeking out monuments to anyone with connections to the slave trade, no matter how tenuous, is part of an attitude that suspects all Whites of racism and tainted with complicity in the trade, except for particular groups or individuals. It disregards general issues that affect both Black and White Bristolians, such as the cost of living crisis and the grinding poverty the Tories are inflicting on working people. These problems may be more acute for Black Bristolians, but they’re not unique to them. Working people of all colours and faiths or none should unite together to oppose them as fellow citizens, without qualification. But it seems in some parts of the Labour party in the city, this is not the attitude.

Rees’ overruling of local people in south Bristol does seem to me to come from a certain racial resentment. It seems like it’s motivated by a determination to show White Bristolians that their boss is a man of colour, who can very firmly put them in their place. I may be misreading it, but that’s how it seems to myself and a few other people.

Now I believe that, these criticisms aside, Rees has been good for the city. He was very diplomatic and adroit in his handling of the controversy over the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue, despite the obvious disgust at it he felt as a descendant of West Indian slaves. But Rees ain’t gonna be mayor forever. Indeed, he has said that he isn’t going to run again. There is therefore the distinct possibility that his successor won’t be Labour. And then there’ll be the problem of opposing someone, who always has the deciding vote and can overrule the decisions of the council and the rest of his cabinet.

The people of Bristol voted for the system following a series of deals between different parties to get control of the council, where the individual parties by themselves had no clear majority. It convinced many people that the system allowed them to get into power over the heads of the real wishes of Bristol’s citizens. Now the Lib Dems and the Tories are demanding an end to the system. It’s clearly a matter of self-interest on their part, as obviously they are trying to abolish a Labour administration and the system that supports it.

But I believe that on simple democratic principles the elected mayoralty should go and the city return to government by the council.

Oh yes, and they should start calling it the Council House once again, instead of continuing with Ferguson’s egotistic name for it.

My Email to Bristol Green Party about Their Slavery Reparations Motion on the Council

I’m still furious about the motion for the payment of reparations for slavery to Britain’s Black community which was passed last year almost unanimously by Bristol council. It was introduced by Cleo Lake, the then Green councillor for Cotham, a ward in the northern part of the city, and seconded by Asher Craig, the deputy leader of the council and head of equalities for the city. All the parties of the left supported – the Greens, Labour and Lib Dems. It was only opposed by the Conservatives, who said it was well meant. In many ways it was a continuation of the affirmative action programmes giving aid to Black communities. It was very definitely not, as the proposer stated, a hand-out to individuals but finding to Black organisations to create prosperous, self-sustaining Black communities.

My problem with this is the connection to slavery. This is a more complicated issue than simply rich western Whites dragging Blacks off to oppression and forced labour in the plantations. Slavery existed in various forms in Africa long before the arrival of Whites in the continent. Black states, some of which had slave populations of 75 per cent, preyed on each other, and sold them to outsiders like the Arabs. They were also enslaved by the Turkish empire and Christian Abyssinia. From east Africa they could be exported overseas as far as India, where Bengal had been a major slave trading centre since the 14th century and Indonesia. At the same time, the Barbary pirates, Muslims from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, raided Europe from Spain and Italy to Britain, Ireland and Iceland, carrying off 1 – 2/12 million Whites. But this isn’t mentioned in school history and, although there are an increasing number of books about it, I doubt very many people are aware of it. In America and Europe the global nature of slavery is played down so that the focus is almost wholly on Black transatlantic slavery.

This is understandable as slavery is held to be the ultimate source for the continuing problems of the Black community – unemployment, drugs, crime, racism, poor academic performance and marginalisation and alienation from mainstream society. But the result has been a gross simplification of the historical reality. Critical Race Theory, which developed from Marxist legal scholarship in the 1970s, simplifies the racial situation in the west into oppressed Blacks versus privileged Whites. All Whites benefit from the dominant position in society, even if they despise racism. And all Blacks, regardless of socio-economic status, are oppressed. Lake and Craig’s proposal follows this logic by demanding such payments for all ‘Afrikans’, thus making White collectively responsible for slavery, even when it was others that were really responsible.

I’ve written to Lake and Craig about this, and got no reply. Last Sunday I sent an email to the Green party in Bristol about it. I got no reply to that either. I don’t think they’re capable of defending their position. Or just arrogant and ignoring me as one of the ‘little people’. Here’s the email.

‘Dear Sir,

I am writing to you now to express my grave concerns about last year’s motion in the city council, proposed by Cleo Lake, then your councillor for Cotham, and seconded by Labour deputy leader and head of equalities Asher Craig, to pay reparations for slavery. I have absolutely no objection to the practical form these reparations were to take, which was in fact to be funding to Black led organisations to create prosperous, sustainable Black communities. I am very much aware of the poverty and marginalisation experienced by the Bristol Black community, and do support initiatives to improve their conditions. And it is, of course, entirely natural and appropriate that this should be guided by the community itself. But I am very concerned about the way this funding was linked to the reparations movement and the decision that it should apply to all ‘Afrikans’. This showed, at best, a poor understanding of the history of African slavery. At worst it appears to be anti-White, separating Bristolians into good, virtuous, persecuted Blacks, and evil, persecutory Whites, who should feel guilty for the crimes of the ancestors, according to the principles of Afrocentric history and Critical Race Theory.

In fact Black Africans were enslaving other Black Africans long before the transatlantic slave trade, and continued to do so long after Britain had officially banned the slave trade and slavery itself. The proportion of slaves varied from state to state from around 30 per cent to as high 75 per cent. In west Africa the principal slaving nations were the Ashanti, Dahomey, Whydah and Badagri. In east Africa they included Abyssinia and the Yao, Marganja and Swahili peoples. These states became extremely rich through the trade in human suffering. Duke Ephraim of Dahomey, for example, raked in £300,000 per year. Black Africans were also enslaved by the Islamic states, such as the Turkish empire in north Africa and the Sultanate of Oman one the east coast. Black Africans were exported to the Middle East, India and south-east Asia. If reparations are to be paid to all ‘Afrikans’, then this means also paying them to the descendants of those who enslaved them and profited by selling them to Europeans and Americans.

There is also the additional problem in that many of these states were paid compensation and subsidies by the British government to support them economically after the loss of such a profitable trade. But I see no awareness of this in Lake’s motion. An additional problem is that some of these states have no remorse over their ancestors’ participation in the abominable trade. There are statues and streets named after Efroye Tinobue in Nigeria, a powerful female merchant who became a kingmaker in Nigerian politics in the 19th century. But she was also a slaver. There is a very strong debate in Nigeria and  Ghana about the role of the chiefs in the slave trade, and Liverpool’s museum of slavery was widely praised by some Nigerians for including their role. But there seems to be little knowledge or engagement with this fact. Nor do Lake and Craig show any awareness that White Bristolians were also among the Europeans enslaved by the Barbary pirates. In the 16th century five ships were taken from Bristol harbour, and in the 17th they briefly established a base on Lundy. But councillor Lake seemed unaware or unconcerned about this.

I realise that this comes from the belief that the transatlantic slave trade is the direct cause of the inequalities experienced by the contemporary Black community, but I fear that this the proposal has grotesquely simplified the historical reality. I am not sure how many Bristolians are aware that other nations were also involved in the slave trade, like the Spanish and Portuguese. It seems to me that the call for payment of reparations to all ‘Afrikans’ makes Bristol responsible for African enslavement carried out by other nations.

And I am very concerned about the racial politics involved the call. It seems to be strongly influenced by Afrocentrism, which holds that Whites are inferior, and intrinsically more cruel and exploitative than Blacks, and that slavery did not exist in Africa before the appearance of Europeans and Arabs. It also seems to partake of Critical Race Theory, which also considers that all Whites are privileged racists, even when they oppose racism. This has become very topical in recent weeks with the report that Brighton and Hove council, led by the Greens, has voted to include it in their school curriculum.

I very much regret that for these reasons I find Councillor Lake’s motion deeply flawed and simplifying history to a grotesque and racially divisive degree.

I know that the motion was proposed and passed a year or so ago. But I have written to both Councillors Lake and Craig about this, and so far not received a reply from them. And I believe this issues has not gone away but has increased with the debate over the teaching of British history and Critical Race Theory.

 would be very grateful, therefore, to hear your views and explanations in answer to my concerns. You may contact me at my email address —-

Yours faithfully’,

Andrew Laurence Mocks Brighton and Hove for Introducing Racial Guilt for White Pupils in Schools

Andrew Laurence is a right-wing YouTuber, whom I normally wouldn’t bother with. He posts videos satirising the Left in the character of an extremely ‘woke’ academic. I largely don’t find them either funny or witty. They’re mostly just the usual trite Tory talking points about the loony Left, Corbyn and so on. But this time he has a point. His rant, in the guise of the woke professor Dr Gideon Micropenis, attacks Brighton and Hove council for having introduced Critical Race Theory into its schools. This seems to be based on an article in today’s Telegraph, which reports that children are being taught that if they’re White, they’re at the top of a racial hierarchy, and at the bottom if they’re Black. The council’s currently governed by the Greens, who seem responsible for this material. Laurence slams it as teaching White kids to feel guilty about the slave trade, for which they personally aren’t responsible and have absolutely nothing to do with. Here’s the video

The Torygraph article by Ewan Somerville, on which his rant is based, ‘Children aged seven to be taught that they are not ‘racially innocent”, begins

‘Children as young as seven are to be told they are not “racially innocent” because they view “white at the top of the hierarchy” as part of diversity training for teachers.

Brighton and Hove City Council has been accused of “indoctrinating” children through its five-year plan for an anti-racist education system, which endorses critical race theory and white privilege – contentious ideologies that have sparked protests.

The council states that all teachers require the training, which will inform “specific racial literacy-focused lessons” for pupils. The Green-controlled authority is in a row with parents opposed to the classes and one has launched a petition to have the training scrapped, which has attracted 4,000 signatures.

Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, has previously told the Commons that schools teaching white privilege as an uncontested fact are breaking the law.

The Telegraph has obtained recordings, PowerPoint slides and reading lists that form the “Racial Literacy 101” sessions. Teachers began the training in the autumn term, and 300 have undertaken it so far. 

Brighton is the first British authority to roll out such training, and the hour-long session covers the history of the slave trade and racism in contemporary society.’

The article also reports that a petition against it has been started by a man, Adrian Hart, whose son is at sixth form college in the town, with the campaign group Don’t Divide Us.

While I really don’t have much time for Laurence and his right-wing humour, this time I think he’s absolutely right. Critical Race Theory is a nasty postmodern doctrine that rejects class as the instrument of social oppression and replaces it with race. All Whites are held to be privileged, while Blacks are held to be oppressed. It also rejects claims that racism has improved, holding instead that it has simply become better hidden. Furthermore, its adherents bitterly oppose the civil rights legislation introduced following the heroic protests and demonstrations by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X because these have had the effect of incorporating Black people into bourgeois society. Critical Race Theory began as a radical movement within American Marxist lawyers, and it believes that the only way a true anti-racist society can be created is through revolution. It aims to increase racial consciousness and agitation to that end, rather than bring people together. See the relevant chapter on CRT in James Lindsay’s and Helen Pluckrose’s Cynical Theories (London: Swift 2021). And it is indeed venomously anti-White. There are clips on the web of a young Black woman, Angela Shackleford, telling a class room of Whites that they were not born into a humanity and are devils to her. It does absolutely nothing to solve the problem of racism, bring Whites and Blacks together or really improve conditions for Blacks. It just seems to me that it merely increases racial resentment on the one hand and racial guilt on the other.

As for the Greens, in Bristol Cleo Lake, the Green councillor for Cotham, introduced a motion in the local council last year, that reparations for slavery should be paid to ‘all Afrikans’ in the city. This would actually take the form of increased grants and funding to Black organisations to create prosperous, self-sustaining Black communities. It was seconded by Asher Craig, the head of Equalities at the council and the deputy mayor, and passed by all the parties except the Conservatives. And unfortunately, I think this time the Tories were right.

I don’t have a problem with increased funding for Bristol’s Black communities, as there are problems with unemployment, drugs, and crime, along with feelings of marginalisation. But it shouldn’t be connected to the slave trade, at least, not for all ‘Afrikans’. It makes Britain assume responsibility for African peoples we didn’t enslaves, and who themselves actively participated in the trade as well as practised it within their own states. It also does what CRT does, and divide people into virtuous, enslaved Blacks and evil White oppressors.

It further looks to me from Lake’s statement about ‘all Afrikans’ that she’s an Afrocentrist. This is a pseudo-discipline that holds that the Egyptians were Black and created the roots of modern, western civilisation, which the Greeks and Romans stole. It also claims that they created a unified culture in Africa after colonising them. It claims that every achievement of African culture and civilisation is therefore due to the ancient Egyptians, and where this is mixed by practices viewed as barbaric, such as human sacrifice, it is due to racial degeneration. It further holds that there is a single African psychology and philosophy held by both western Blacks and Black Africans. Blacks are held to be less logical, but more emotional, intuitive and communal in organisation compared to Whites. Who are supposed to be competitive, aggressive and exploitative, among a number of other unpleasant features. Some Afrocentrist writers have described Whites as ‘albinistic mutants’. I don’t know if Lake holds these extreme views, but it seems very much to me that she holds at least some Afrocentric views. To me, this makes her entirely unsuitable for formulating a genuinely workable racial policy or for teaching an objective history of Africa and its relations with the outside world.

Critical Race Theory and Afrocentrism have nothing positive to say or add to real discussions of race and Black history and should be banned.

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.

Rightwingers Outraged at Acquittal of the Four Who Toppled Colston’s Statue

As a Bristolian with long personal roots in the city, I feel I’ve got to tackle this. The four people responsible for pulling the down the statue of the 18th century slave trader and philanthropist in a massive Black Lives Matter protest last year were on trial for it this week. They were charged with criminal damage, and yesterday were found ‘not guilty’ by the jury. And the right has been predictably incensed. The story’s on the front page of the Daily Mail, which reports that the jury may have been placed under pressure to acquit by the defence, which urged them ‘not to be on the wrong side of history’. The prosecution is therefore planning to appeal the decision. Nigel Farage has released a video on YouTube about it. Mixed-race Tory commenter Calvin Robinson has appeared on GB News talking about it. And inevitably the Lotus Eaters have also released a video about it, with Callum and one of Sargon’s other mates expressing their poor opinion of the whole thing. The message from the right has been the same: this decision imperils every statue in Britain, because it legitimises attacks on them through an appeal to the emotions of the attacker regardless of the letter of the law. Calvin Robinson in his interview on GB News agreed with the two journalists, one Black, one White, that you had to be very careful about limiting people’s freedom of expression. However the decision to acquit was, he explained, based on a legal loophole in the criminal damage law. This permits such damage, if the property damaged or destroyed itself serves to promote a crime. The argument made by the accused in a feature about them in the Groan was that the statue constituted a hate crime against Black Bristolians. The right-wing critics of the decision have therefore argued that this makes every statue unsafe, as an emotional reason could be found for any attack on them. The person, who vandalised Churchill’s statue last year could get off because, despite defeating Fascism, Churchill was a racist and imperialist. They have also made the point that the decision also means that Conservatives also have a right to tear down Marx’s bust in London, as he was also racist and anti-Semitic, quite apart from the millions murdered under Communism. Darren Grimes, the repulsive spawn of the Guido Fawkes site, said that he could also therefore tear down the statue of Friedrich Engels in Manchester.

Jury Freedom and the Historic Acquittal of Guilty Murderers

Yesterday Simon Webb of History Debunked also joined the debate, comparing the decision to the jury’s acquittal of the attackers of three policemen during a riot in 1820s London. The cops had been stabbed, and one killed, but the jury acquitted their attackers because the cops had attacked in a particularly aggressive and provocative manner. Webb stated that back in the 17th and 18th centuries judges could and did send juries back to reconsider their verdict, and even imprison them if they didn’t give the right verdict as directed. It was, of course, a great improvement to allow the juries the freedom to judge themselves rather than according to the opinion of the beak. But this did raise problems in cases like this. Indeed. Juries won the right to judge freely according to their own judgement following arguments for such free trials by the Levellers and particularly when William Penn, a Quaker and the founder of Pennsylvania, was put on trial for preaching his radical views in Bristol. The jury repeatedly refused the judge’s order to find guilty, and were even imprisoned. They eventually won out, and the trial helped established true British justice.

Allegations of Bias against Witness David Olasuga

One of the other objections to the trial was that one of the witnesses was the historian, David Olasuga. whom the Lotus Eaters describe as a Black activist and who admitted that, had he been able, he would have joined the mob in toppling the status. There is indeed a problem with Olasuga as some of his historical interpretations are questionable. For example, he and Reni Edo-Lodge turned up in video by the Beeb laying a plaque in Liverpool to a victim of racist lynching. Except that Wootton, the lynched man, had been part of a gang of West Indians, who had launched an attack on a group of Swedes and Russians. When a cop intervened, the West Indians repeated stabbed and tried to slash his throat. They retreated to a house where someone, probably Wootton, shot three policemen, before he was chased down to the docks trying to escape. He was hardly an innocent victim. Olasuga has been one of the Black historians claiming that historically, Britain had a much larger Black community than it probably did. He claims that there were Blacks in Roman Britain. History Debunked has shown that this largely comes from one of the legions at Hadrian’s Wall coming from the Roman province of Mauretania. This has been confused with the present day country in West Africa. However, the Roman province of Mauretania was further north in Morocco. I think there are perfectly reasonable questions of bias in Olasuga’s testimony.

Political Bias in Prosecution of Vandals

And then have come the various commenters sneering and deriding Bristol. I’ve seen the usual rants about how it’s a ‘Communist’ or ‘left-wing’ shithole; it’s a lefty university town, and as terrible as Liverpool or London. Rather more interesting was one comment from a working class Bristolian, who had been having a meal at a cafe in the city, whose customers were largely Black West Indians. These people had all been solidly against the decision. I can well believe it. I don’t think the Black community Bristol or elsewhere in our great nation is a monolithic bloc. Just like other racial groups, like Whites, Asians or Jews aren’t either. As for the four defendants, they were White middle class liberal kids, who most likely didn’t come from Bristol. There was also speculation about what would happen if someone vandalised a statue to a Black personality, like Nelson Mandela. Would this be treated the same way? Not if the example of the vandalism done to a mural of Marcus Rashford was an example. Although the messages sprayed on it weren’t racist, it was nevertheless treated as a racist hate crime. Actually, you don’t have to look that far for a similar example. After Colston’s statue was torn down, a bust in one of Bristol’s parks of a Black writer and dramatist was vandalised and the cops were after those responsible.

Some Black Bristolians Genuinely Upset at Statue

As for the feelings of fear or outrage that the defendants claimed justified the attack, the Black interviewer on GB News and Robinson both questioned whether Black people are so emotional fragile that they would be upset simply walking past Colston’s statue. Some may well not be, but others definitely were. Asher Craig, Bristol’s deputy elected mayor, head of equalities and city councillor for St. George’s, was on Radio 4 last year giving her opinion about the statue and Bristol’s historic connection to the slave trade. The programme also talked to others about it, including one ordinary Black woman. She said that she felt physically sick having to walk past it on the way to work every morning. I understand and sympathise. I think her example was far better and more persuasive than the various political activists angrily demanding that it should be torn down. It was the voice of an ordinary, working-class woman, about how the statue affected her.

Arguments for the Preservation of the Statue

It also has to be stated that Black Lives Matter’s attack was deliberately against the wishes of Bristolians themselves. There had been several polls in the past about whether the statue should be taken down or not. The majority of people voted against it. Paul Stephenson, one of the organisers of the Bristol bus boycott in the 1960s against the bus company’s refusal to employ Blacks, gave his opinion on the issue in an interview with Philippa Gregory in the 1990s. Gregory had just had her novel, A Respectable Trade, about the Bristol slave trade adapted for television and there was an exhibition about the city and slavery then at the City Museum and Art Gallery. It has since been moved and is now on display, sans title, at the city’s excellent M Shed Museum. Stephenson has something of a mixed reputation. To some he’s a respected civil rights activists, while others regard him more a deliberate troublemaker. He declared to Gregory that Colston was a bloody mass murderer responsible for a ‘Holocaust in Africa’. This follows the statement of W.E.B. DuBois, the pioneering American Black rights activist, that slavery and the slave trade were a Black Holocaust. It sounds like hyperbole, a deliberately emotional exaggeration, but I believe it’s based on the accounts of 19th century anti-slavery activists about the fierce tribal violence generated by the slave trade, and the devastation of whole regions as a result. But Stephenson also said that he didn’t think the statue should be torn down. He believed it should remain standing with an additional note to remind people of his crimes. A similar argument was made by the Lotus Eaters, who felt that statues should be left standing, even though they may be to terrible people, because they’re history. And we need to learn from history if we are to move on.

It’s a perfectly good argument, and one advanced in the ’90s by radical anarchist band The Levellers. They took their name from the radical, proto-democrat, proto-socialist sect during the British Civil War. They also believed in ‘Godly reformation’ and so, along with the other merchandising at their concerts were copies of the Bible and Christopher Hill’s Marxist study of the British Civil War, The World Turned Upside Down. I particularly remember one of their songs that had the lines ‘I believe in justice, I believe in vengeance, I believe in getting the bastard’. But they also released a song protesting about the decision by Manchester’s Labour council to rename the town’s historic Free Trade Hall. They objected to it because it was the destruction of history and an attempt to rewrite the past. It’s strange and rather disconcerting that they should have the same view on this issue from a libertarian left perspective, as the Tories.

Lastly, it needs to be remembered that Colston was not honoured for enslaving Blacks. The statue was put up long after that was over. Rather it was because he was a great philanthropist, who gave much of his fortune away in charity. There were schools named after him and funded by his largesse. My old school used to celebrate Colston Day in his honour, when the children were given a few days off. A few were specially honoured and went to a special service at Redcliffe Church, where they were given a Colston bun.

Bristol Great City

Now for a few remarks on the decision and the views of the various right-winger, who have sounded off about it. Firstly, Bristol isn’t a shithole. It’s a large, great city with a proud history of trade, exploration, industry and invention with excellent museums and theatres. The Bristol Old Vic and its theatre school have a particularly excellent reputation and have produced some of the country’s great thesps. It has it’s problems. I believe that the Bristol’s Black community is one of the three largest in the country, along with Birmingham and London. It has its problems with marginalisation, lack of educational achievement, unemployment, drugs and violent crime, though this is by no means confined simply to Blacks. But it’s not particularly left-wing. Some areas, like Stokes Croft, have a reputation for radical politics. I’ve heard local people refer to it as ‘the people’s republic of Stokes Croft’. Other areas are Conservative, and all the shades of political opinion in between.

Academic Freedom and Marxist Indoctrination at Universities

As for the universities, the comment blaming them for the decision comes from the standard right-wing attitude that the unis are full of Marxists indoctrinating students. In fact, universities, courses and individual lecturers vary immensely. Some universities had a reputation, even in my day, for being hotbeds of left-wing activism, others were more Conservative. It also varies with the course you’re on. There hasn’t, traditionally, been much opportunity for far left-wing indoctrination in maths, science, medicine and engineering courses because of the nature of those subjects. Although it’s creeping in now in the form of ethnomathematics and the demands that the achievements of Black scientists and mathematicians should be particularly taught, it’s mostly been confined to the humanities. There have always been Marxist historians. These include the very well respected Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Saunders, and there is a specific Marxist view of history. You are taught about this on the historiography courses in history at University, along with other forms of history, such as women’s history, social history, what Butterfield called the ‘Whig view of history’ and more conservative and Conservative views. I’ve been taught by lecturers with feminist or left-wing views. I’ve also been taught by people with far more traditional views. I also know lecturer who determined to keep their political views out of the classroom. University is supposed to be a place of free speech and debate, and it’s important that this is maintained. Students should be encouraged to read sources and the historical literature critically, and make up their own views. This means an engagement with Marxism as well as other ideologies. I think Bristol university has particularly come under fire because it’s rather more conservative and traditional compared to the newer universities. It received funding from the Colston charities when it was established early in the last century. Hence I believe the granting of a chair in the history of slavery to a Black woman. It also has relatively few Black students, which contrasts with the population of the city as a whole. This is partly because it has very high standards, and as a rule Blacks generally have poorer grades than other racial groups. It is also no doubt because when I was young, going away was seen as part of university education and so you were discouraged from applying to the local university. Hence the university is now trying to give greater opportunities to study to more Blacks and ethnic minorities.

Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory and the Marxist Attack on Western Culture

Now I largely agree that the acquittal of the four defendants has set a dangerous precedent because it allows people to attack public monuments they dislike or which are controversial. James Lindsay, one of the group with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose that has attacked postmodernist Critical Theory, has argued that ideologies like Queer Theory and Critical Race Theory are deliberate attacks on traditional western culture and Enlightenment values. They are aimed at destroying the past to create a Marxist future, just as Chairman Mao did during the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. One of the ancient monuments the Red cadres smashed as part of the campaign against the ‘Four Olds’ was the tomb of Confucius! This sounds like an idea straight out of loony right-wing paranoids and conspiracists like Alex Jones and the John Birch Society, until he backs it up by reading chapter and verse from the founders of such postmodernist Marxism, like Marcuse, Horkheimer and others. And yes, I can quite believe that vandalism to a monument to a Black politico or celebrity, like Nelson Mandela, would be treated far differently and as a terrible hate crime than the attack on Colston.

But regardless of the defence’s plea to the jury to ‘be on the right side of history’, I think there would always have been pressure on the jury to acquit. Colston was a slave trader and had been controversial for decades. They naturally wouldn’t have wanted to acquit people who attacked a monument on that score, rather than the philanthropy the statue commemorated. And the defendants make a good point when they say that ‘he no longer speaks for Bristol’. There were others in the city who opposed the slave trade. As well as the slavers and the West Indian planters, Bristol also had a large abolitionist movement. If you go a little way from the centre of Bristol into Redcliffe, you’ll find the Georgian church where Jeremiah Clarkson, one of the leading 18th century abolitionists, collected the testimony of Bristol’s slavers as part of his evidence against the trade.

Other Statues Not Vandalised

As for other statues, none of those in the surrounding area were touched. Not the statue to Edmund Burke, the politician and founder of modern Conservatism through his book, Reflections on the Revolution in France. The Lotus Eaters are offering it, or reading through it, as their ‘book of the month’. I wonder if they’ll mention that Burke’s statue was signally left untouched by the rioters. As was the statue of a monk in Lewin’s Mead, which had before the Reformation been a monastic complex. They also failed to destroy the statue of Neptune and a sailor on the docks. Queen Victoria was left untouched on nearby College Green. They also didn’t destroy the statue of John Cabot outside the Council House, sorry, ‘City Hall’ and the Central Library. This was despite various ‘spokesmen’ for the Black community claiming that the City’s celebration of his discovery of Newfoundland and America, following Columbus, was a celebration of slavery. There may well be similar defences used on similar attacks on other statues, but I think such attacks will be far more difficult to defend. Churchill was indeed a racist and an imperialist, as well as personally responsible for sending troops to gun down striking miners in Wales. But to the vast majority of severely normal Brits he was also the man, who helped save Europe and the world from Nazism and the Axis. And that would also count powerfully in the case against anyone who vandalised his monument.

Historians also Successfully Defend Controversial Statues

As for testimony from historians, this can work against the iconoclasts. The BLM fanatics trying to get the statue of Cecil Rhodes torn down at Oxford university claimed that he was somehow ‘South Africa’s Adolf Hitler’. Now Rhodes was a grotty character and an imperialist, but this goes too far. Rhodes’ biographer tackled this claim on social media, at which the BLM protesters making it went quiet. They couldn’t refute it, and so went silent.

I therefore do not feel that other statues are necessarily in a greater danger than previously because of the acquittal.

Then there’s the question of any possible statue to replace it. There are rumours that it could be a Black person. Well, if there is, it should be of a Black person, who actually had contact and lived in the city. One of Bristol’s sporting heroes way back was a Black boxer. One of my aunts was friends with his daughter. I’d say this gentleman would be a good candidate for such a statue, because as a sports hero he united everyone from left and right, as well as being a citizen of Bristol.

Nigel Farage has suggested a memorial to the British navy. Absolutely. The British West India squadron did excellent work patrolling the seas for slavers. And they were by no means all racist. Captain Denman, giving evidence on a massacre of 300 unsold slaves by one of the West African slaving states to parliament, made the point that ‘it is remarkable given the advances they have made in the arts of civilisation’. He clearly believe European civilisation was superior, but had been particularly shocked because the African peoples responsible for the massacre were also comparatively civilised. Africans serving or aiding the British navy were also given the compensation payments awarded to British tars when they suffered injury and loss of limbs.

We also patrolled the waters between east Africa and India to stop western and Arab slavers, and one antipodean historian has written that in the Pacific, the royal navy was the chief protector of its indigenous peoples against enslavement.

It also needs to be remembered that one of the reasons for the British invasion of Africa was to stamp out slavery and the slave trade. I’ve no doubt that the main, if not the real reasons were simple hunger for territory and resources, and to stop those areas falling into the hands of our European imperial rivals – France, Germany, Italy and Portugal. But some of the officer involved took their duty extremely serious, such as Samuel Baker and Gordon of Khartoum. The Mahdi, against whom Gordon fought, and his followers were slavers outraged at the British government’s ban on it and the enslavement of Black Sudanese. There are therefore excellent reasons for putting up a memorial to the British navy and armed forces.

And I would also support a statue to Jeremiah Clarkson for his work in the city bringing the horrors of the trade to light.

In the meantime, despite the right-wing outrage at this act of vandalism, I think we should view the attack on Colston’s statue as a special case.

Claims of a general threat to British history because of it may well be exaggerated.