A lot of people have been suggesting that the real reason the Orange Generalissimo wants to get his grubby hands on Greenland is because of its mineral wealth. The argument that he wants it for US national security simply don’t make sense. There’s a video on YouTube of an expert on a British TV interview knocking it down one point after another. First of all, there are already 18 US bases on Greenland. The US has never asked for more, even though the Greenlanders would be perfectly willing to let them. There also aren’t Chinese and Russian ships nosing around Greenland’s waters. There are, however, plenty of Chinese and Russian ships nosing around the American waters off Alaska.
I got this piece yesterday, reproduced from the American radical magazine Jacobin, from the Democrat newsletter Daily Dose of Democracy. It clearly demonstrates that behind Trump’s belligerent demands for Greenland to be handed over to America are the US big tech companies, who have their eyes very firmly set on the precious minerals locked beneath its icecap.
‘The tech billionaires behind Trump’s Greenland push Lois Parshley, Jacobin: “President Donald Trump started his second term with his sights set on Greenland. When Trump first proposed buying the arctic nation during his first administration, it was treated like a joke. But in a phone call last week with Denmark’s prime minister, who controls the autonomous territory’s foreign policy, the president doubled down on his efforts to seize power. In the ‘aggressive and confrontational’ conversation, Trump threatened tariffs if he didn’t get his way. In a news conference earlier this month, he also refused to rule out the use of military force. Now Denmark is taking him seriously: on Monday, it announced a $2 billion military expansion in the Arctic. Though the island is not for sale, the president emphasizedGreenland’s importance to US national security. Left unspoken: a US takeover could weaken the country’s mining laws and ban on private property, aiding Trump donors’ plans to profit from the island’s mineral deposits and build a libertarian techno-city. The president’s renewed intention to take over Greenland has reignited debates over its sovereignty, as the country grapples with the trade-offs between economic opportunity and independence from Denmark. As the country’s glaciers recede, it’s also facing sweeping climate-driven transformations, threatening traditional industries like fishing and hunting and exposing valuable mineral resources. These shifts have prompted interest from powerful players associated with Trump. Tech moguls in the front row of his inauguration, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, are also investors in a start-up aiming to mine western Greenland for materials crucial to the artificial intelligence boom. That company, KoBold Metals, uses artificial intelligence to locate and extract rare earth minerals. Their proprietary algorithm parses government-funded geological surveys and other data to locate significant deposits. The program pinpointed southwest Greenland’s rugged coastline, where the company now has a 51 percent stake in the Disko-Nuussuaq project, searching for minerals like copper. Just two weeks before some of its investors were glad-handing at the Capitol celebrations, KoBold Metals raised $537 million in its latest funding round, bringing its valuation to almost $3 billion. Among the contributors was a leading venture capital firm founded by Marc Andreessen, an early Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has helped shape the administration’s technology policies, including consulting with Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency as a self-proclaimed ‘unpaid intern.’ In addition to KoBold, Andreessen has also backed other ventures eyeing the arctic nation: he is a significant investor in Praxis Nation, a project aiming to use Greenland to establish a “crypto state,” a self-governing, experimental community built around libertarian ideals and technology like cryptocurrency. The venture is also funded in part by Pronomos Capital, a venture capital group founded by the grandson of economist Milton Friedman and bankrolled by libertarian figures such as Peter Thiel, whose own family reportedly managed a uranium mine in Namibia. Pronomos aims to create private, business-friendly charter cities like Praxis, often in developing countries where investors could write their own laws and regulations. These ‘broligarchs’” now have the ear of the president. Thiel has been a significant supporter of Trump, throwing millions of dollars behind him throughout his political career and introducing him to current Vice President J. D. Vance.”‘
I’ve just started reading Vince Cable’s Money & Power, in which he discusses 16 leading politicians and economists and their policies. These include Edmund Hamilton, Bismarck, Lenin, Roosevelt, Erhard, the architect of the German Wirtschaftswunder, Tage Erland, who was responsible for much of the SDP’s success in Sweden, Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore, Park of South Korea, India’s Manmohan Roy, Juan Peron, Shinzo Abe, and Donald Trump. There’s also Maggie Thatcher, of course, though I’m definitely putting off reading the chapter on her. These are important politicians and economists, but they also seem to reflect Cable’s own views on privatisation and the free market. The SDP did well in Sweden by largely keeping the economy private and using its profits to fund the country’s welfare state. Manmohan Roy liberalised the state economy after years of socialist planning, which had created an economic disaster by the mid-70s under Indira Gandhi. Erhard was a liberal, who championed the free market and small businesses against nationalisation, big business and socialism. He liberalised the German economy from the strict economic controls imposed on a defeated Germany that had had its economy and manufacturing destroyed by the war. Abe revitalised the Japanese economy, moving it away from the strict war time controls geared to export through a mixture of Keynesian public works and various fiscal stimuli. Although the gaol still seems to be to maintain the country’s focus on export. As for Trump, his economic ideas are contradictory. He’s a small-government republican, who distrusts trade deals because he thinks they’re a zero-sum game which America will lose. He doesn’t like trading blocs, because he feels he can get a better deal through one on one negotiation.
I’ve glanced at the chapter on Thatcher. It concludes by noting one of the New Labourites that ‘we’re all Thatcherites now’ and that her main legacy is nationalism. Well, that’s one, obvious part of it. But in fact her legacy is an utterly wrecked economy, failing welfare services and an impoverished working class. Privatisation is massively unpopular, but continues to be promoted by the political, media and corporate elite. Mind you, Cable also asserts that Corbyn was wiped out electorally because he was returning the party to Marxism. The Labour party, as a whole, has never been a Marxist party although some of the early socialist groups that initially formed it were. And neither was Corbyn, despite the screams of the press. As for Thatcher, I prefer this assessment of Thatcher by Seumas Milne in his book, The Revenge of History: The Battle for the 21st Century (London: Verso 2012)
‘Not only in former mining communities and industrial areas laid waste by her government, but across Britain Thatcher is still hated for the damage she inflicted – and for her political legacy of rampant inequality and greed, privatisation and social breakdown. Now protests are taking the form of satirical e-petitions for the funeral (Gordon Brown wanted a state funeral for her) to be privatised: it is goes ahead there are likely to be demonstrations in the streets.
This is a politician, after all, who never won the votes of more than a third of the electorate; destroyed communities, created mass unemployment; deindustrialised Britain; redistributed from poor to rich; and, by her deregulation of the City, laid the basis for the crisis that has engulfed us twenty-five years later.
Thatcher was a prime minister who denounced Nelson Mandela as a terrorist, defended the Chilean fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet, ratcheted up the cold war, and unleashed militarised police on trade unionists and black communities alike. She was Britain’s first woman prime minister, but her policies hit women hardest, like Cameron’s today.
A common British establishment view – and the implicit posi8tion of The Iron Lady (the filmography of her with Meryl Streep) – is that while Thatcher took harsh measures and ‘went too far’, it was necessary medicine to restore the sick economy of the 1970s to healthy growth.
It did nothing of the sort. Average growth in the Thatcherite ’80s, at 2.4 per cent, was exactly the same as in the sick ’70s – and considerably lower than in the corporatist ’60s. Her government’s savage deflation destroyed a fifth of Britain’s industrial base in two years, hollowed out manufacturing, and delivered a ‘productivity miracle’ that never was, and we’re living with the consequences today.
What she did succeed in doing was to restore class privilege, boosting profitability while slashing employees’ share of national income from 65 per cent to 53 per cent through her assault on unions. Britain faced a structural crisis in the 1970s, but there were multiple routes out of it. Thatcher imposed a neoliberal model now seen to have failed across the world.
It’s hardly surprising that some might want to put a benign gloss on Thatcher’s record when another Tory-led government is forcing through Thatcher-like policies – and riots, mounting unemployment and swingeing benefit cuts echo her years in power. The rehabilitation isn’t so much about then as now, which is one reason why it can’t go unchallenged. Thatcher wasn’t a ‘great leader’. She was the most socially destructive prime minister of modern times.’ (pp. 247-8).
That was published, according to the book’s notes, on 5th January 2012. People aren’t rioting today, but they are protesting and striking. And the myth of Thatcher as the great leader needs to be assaulted and destroyed to bring her wretched policies and their legacy to an end, both by the Tories themselves and by New Labour entryists like Starmer.
This is a grim video about the persistence of slavery around the world today. It comes from the List 25 channel on YouTube, which is one of those channels that specialise in presenting the top ‘x’ number of different facts. In this case, it’s countries which still retain slavery and lure the poor and foreign migrants seeking work into bondage. It describes the state of slavery and its causes in each country, as well as noting at the outset the general causes, such as sex trafficking, forced marriage, child servitude, bonded labour, war, poverty and migration due to climate change. There are 49.6 million people in slavery today, and the number is growing by 2 million a year.
The list starts with the countries with the lowest number of slaves and ends with the highest. It runs from Kuwait at the no. 25 spot, to India at no. 1 with over 18 million slaves. The other nations are: Cambodia, Libya, South Sudan, United Arab Emirates, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Philippines, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, United States, Russia, Indonesia, Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Bangladesh, Nigeria, North Korea, Mauretania, Pakistan, Burundi and China.
In the case of Kuwait, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, the slave system seems to be based on these countries’ Islamic migrant sponsorship laws. These require immigrants to be sponsored by individuals or organisations in these countries, who then take away their passports. Migrant workers suffer horrendous living and working conditions, and women find themselves forced into domestic servitude and sexual abuse. The situation is so bad that one of the Asian countries supplying migrant workers to one of these countries recently warned its citizens not to go to one of the Gulf Arab states because they would be exploited. There are similar situations in Cambodia and Indonesia, where migrant workers are lured into these nations with promises of work and good pay, only to find themselves stripped of their rights, dignity and autonomy by ruthless exploiters.
Slavery in Libya has exploded partly through the enslavement of Black migrants trying to pass through the country to get to Europe. The video discusses the CNN documentary that revealed this, and the international outrage it caused. Something similar is also behind the persistence of slavery in Turkey, where many of the enslaved are migrants from war-torn and poverty stricken countries in the Middle East, who have sought asylum in a country that is safe and politically stable. This is also part of the causes of the over one million people enslaved in the US, who are migrants from the south who fall into the clutches of criminal gangs due to the immigration laws. And this is apart from the system of forced labour in the American prison system. Slavery in Russia tends to be people from the Middle East, though it also includes Nigerians and other Africans. As with countries like Cambodia and the Arab countries, they’re lured in with promises of work and good pay, as well as opportunities to get to Europe.
In some of the other countries, slavery takes the form of state mandated forced labour. In Eritrea this is its conscription of the country’s youth into military service. There is no set limit to this, and it can last for decades, and conscripts are often used on non-military projects. Uzbekistan uses a system of traditional forced labour for harvesting cotton, which the state tries to disguise as a traditional, voluntary custom. And in North Korea it’s the forced labour of this Stalinist Communist state, all done while telling its citizens they live in a socialist paradise.
In Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi, warfare, either domestic or in the surroundings states, has resulted in the enslavement of children as soldiers. In China, some parents sell their sons to childless couples. In nations like Iran and Afghanistan, the slaves are people from dirt-poor regions trying to find work in more prosperous areas, only to be enslaved by criminal gangs.
Religious and race-based slavery also exists. Although slavery had been banned in Sudan since the 1920s, it re-emerged with the Islamofascist National Islamic Front, who enslaved the Black tribes and subjected them to forced conversion to Islam. Slavery in Mauretania is caste-based, and historically began when the lighter skinned, Arabic-speaking Moors from the north conquered and enslaved the indigenous, darker skinned people.
The presenter states that this list only barely scratches the surface of slavery around the world today, and is very much upset that ‘it’s still a thing’. He can’t understand how it still exists, and is so upset that he fluffs the videos ending.
It’s a disturbing but necessary video. The concentration on the historic injustice and horror of transatlantic slavery can blind people to the fact that it was practiced outside Europe and still persists. Back in the ’90s there was an excellent book on modern slavery, Disposable People, that I can remember reviewing for the database on materials on slavery at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum. At that time the global slave population was about 22 million – obscenely high, but since then the number has more than doubled. It was a sobering, chilling read. It covered the enslavement of workers in the logging and mining camps of Brazil, Thailand and the other southeast Asian countries of the Golden Triangle. One of the atrocities the book describes was an incident where a prostitute’s customer in one of the frontier Amazon towns cut her head off, and then motored up and down the river waving her severed head around. Utter scum.
The piece on Eritrea explains some of the videos about migrants to Britain I’ve also caught on YouTube. Many of the Channel migrants come from the country. There was also a video put up by one of the anti-immigrant vloggers of a group of women protesting against a hotel housing them in their town. They were arguing with one of the migrants, an Eritrean. At one point a car beeped or banged. The man crouched down and started wailing with his hands over head, before coming to himself and standing up and continuing to talk calmly and reasonably. This looks to me very, very much like real PTSD, either from warfare or genuine, brutal physical abuse and maltreatment. Assuming it’s not put on, I think this man is the genuine article – someone who really is trying to find asylum and not just work.
The kidnapping and sale of children in Chinese culture has been a problem since the 19th century. One of the governors of Hong Kong, James Pope Hennessey, tried to combat the kidnapping of girls with the cooperation of the indigenous Chinese community. Unfortunately, it failed, partly due to cultural resistance from the Chinese, or part of the community, that resented an attack on a traditional custom. The girls sold frequently got better food and clothing from their purchasers, so it was claimed, than they did from their real parents.
Some African peoples also have a custom whereby poor parents send their children to live with wealthier relatives, in the hope that they will get a better education and opportunities. This can result in the child’s abuse and enslavement. I wondered if that was behind the horrendous death of Victoria Climbie 23 years or so ago. The girl had been sent by her African parents to live with an aunt and her boyfriend in London. These monsters abused and tortured the poor child until they finally murdered her.
As for India, this is the reality of the state that Modi’s trying to build. And despite its iniquities, the postmodernist crowd are doing precious little to demand change and reform. The followers of Postcolonialism are only interested in injustice when it can be blamed on the imperial powers and won’t criticise traditional culture. This has naturally angered the country’s feminists.
Some of this rise in slavery is also due to global neo-liberalism. The book Falling Off The Edge describes how this has resulted in a race to the bottom of countries repealing workers’ rights, extending hours and lowering pay in order to make labour as cheap as possible to compete globally. These are the countries that Priti ‘Vacant’ Patel and the rest of the authors of Britannia Unchained told us lazy Brits to copy so that Britain could compete against them.
I also have to say that I would have much more sympathy with the protesters and activists campaigning against the legacy of the historic transatlantic slave trade if they were also campaigning against its modern incarnation. But they don’t. One of the defenders of this attitude said in the I that it would be a distraction. Perhaps, but it would also be necessary.
There are organisations and charities fighting to combat slavery, like Anti-Slavery International, which grew out of Britain’s abolitionist movement, and African organisations run by former slaves. These need more support if we are ever to eradicate this evil from the planet.
Nigel Biggar: Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (London: WilliamCollins 2023).
Nigel Biggar is a professor of Moral Theology at Oxford, and this book is his rebuttal of the current attempts to portray the British Empire as a monolithic force for evil, a racist project that resulted in the extermination, enslavement and oppression of millions of the world’s indigenous peoples. A monstrous empire comparable to the Nazis’ Third Reich about White Britons should feel not pride but deep shame. Biggar recognises that the days of empire are over, but considers that the contemporary attacks on British imperialism and legacy are part of a wider attack on White British identity. In this book, he presents the case for the empire as a positive force. He revisits particular incidents and episodes in British imperial history, such as slavery, the Raj and Colonel Dyer and the Amritsar Massacre, the treatment of indigenous Canadians in the mission schools and the mass famine they experienced, British rule in Egypt, the extermination of the Tasmanians, Trevelyan and the Irish Potato Famine, The Anglo-Boer War, the British expedition of 1897 against Benin and the Maoris in New Zealand, and presents a far more positive case. Time after time he shows that damning comments from colonial officials showing them as racist genocides indifferent to the suffering of the colonised have been distorted. In one instance, it was actually made up from parts of three different comments. Trevelyan, the head of the British Civil Service at the time of the Irish Potato Famine, is a case in point. He is rightly admired for his work cleaning out the corruption and modernising the Civil Service, but has been roundly condemned for his supposedly uncaring attitude towards the starving Irish. I’ve forgotten the exact quote, but it runs something like ‘it’s all their fault for not being properly sensible and providing for themselves.’ In fact, this was only half of what Trevelyan said. He carried on to say that he did not believe this was the case, and was fully behind the government giving state relief to the famine victims.
British Governor of Tasmania: A Defender, Not Genocide, of Aboriginal Tasmanians
The same is true of the British governor of Tasmania in the early 19th century, who attempted to round up aboriginal Tasmanians in a vast net in order to deport them from mainland Tasmania to an offshore island well away from White settlement. He is supposed to have said something about indigenous Tasmanians being doomed to extinction by Whites as part of the natural, inevitable process of events and that they should be expelled from the country in order for it to be given to Whites. The governor did say that, but as with Trevelyan, it was only half of what said. He continued by stating that he did not believe this to be the case. Indeed, he was intensely concerned about the maltreatment and murders of the Tasmanians by the White settlers. His attempt to round up the remaining indigenous Tasmanians and relocate them offshore wasn’t done to benefit Whites, but was intended to protect the Tasmanians from White brutalisation and abuse. And so he goes on, throughout the book, going back to the original sources and documents to show how specific incidents and individuals have been misrepresented as part of the attack on British imperialism. There’s even something positive to say about that blackguard Cecil Rhodes. Biggar acknowledges that Rhodes isn’t a poster boy for the British empire. Nevertheless, there are instances where he showed genuine concern for Black Africans. For example, during the 19th century a small Black electorate emerged in South Africa. It was numerically tiny, consisting of about 5,000 people. Nevertheless, it existed. And when there a move by the South African authorities to disenfranchise them, Rhodes stood up to oppose it. In another incident he personally went deep into African tribal territory to settle a dispute over land he had acquired for White settlement with the African nation from whom he had acquired it. His party was small, consisting of himself and a few colleagues. As part of the settlement reached with the indigenous people, he returned several hundred acres to them. And when he founded the Rhodes scholarships to Oxford, he deliberately left it open to students of any colour.
Controversy Over Biggar and His Investigation of Imperialism
Imperialism, and especially British imperialism, is intensely controversial and Biggar has personally suffered for his attempts to investigate and examine it away from the assumption that it is automatically malign. He wanted to teach a course at Oxford on imperialism. This was to be not just about British imperialism, but also that others, such as China. This resulted in a storm of protest and denunciations by hundreds of people, including not just students but also Oxford faculty. These protests in turn led him to write the book. Its publication was troubled. It was originally taken up by Bloomsbury, but they cancelled their contract, but fortunately Biggar found another publisher in WilliamCollins. Since then, he has spoken about the controversies about the British empire and his book on the New Culture Forum and the National Conservative convention. I realise that his attitude towards present-day British and western international diplomacy is very different than mine. He is fully behind the use of military force by the west acting as the world’s policeman, and is scornful of those who oppose it. These people, he believes, want Britain to become something like the minor European countries who remain morally pure by never using their military forces in defence of justice elsewhere in the globe. Having looked at the recent western military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq and the toppling of Gaddafy in Libya, I believe that these ventures were not done from any kind of altruistic concern for these countries’ peoples, merely the entirely selfish interests of western multinationals and the oil industry. Despite my disagreement with his views of present-day international politics, I do believe he has done an excellent job of defending the British empire.
British Concern for a Multicultural Egypt
For example, when it comes to the British takeover of Egypt, he quotes British colonial governors and officials telling the Foreign Office that if there was a conflict between orders from Britain and the interests of the Egyptian people, they would back the Egyptians. This was entirely accepted by their superiors back in Britain. When it came to drafting a constitution for the country, they were concerned that Egyptian citizenship should not be restricted to ethnic Egyptians, but should also include the Christian Copts as well as Armenians, Greeks and other resident ethnic groups. Reading this, I wondered if this was the ultimate origin of the same multicultural attitude that has determined that Britain’s ethnic minorities are as equally British as the indigenous Whites. And the British did not intend to rule the country forever. Initially, they expected to be in charge of the country for only a few years until the Egyptians themselves had learned and mastered modern system of government. But as time went on, this process was increasingly difficult and drawn out, and so the time spent governing the country lengthened. But as imperialism wore on, there was the expectation that Britain was only temporarily holding these territories in trust until their peoples were capable of governing themselves.
Massacres Committed by Indigenous Allies and their Enemies
Elsewhere he shows that British officials themselves were not always racist thugs. Far from it. He quotes travellers to Africa, who observed that the District Commissioners, far from disdainful of the peoples over whom they ruled, were in fact intensely interested in them, keen to show particular items and features of interest to visitors. Some of the atrocities committed by British forces, such as those during the conquest of India and the Mao-Mao rebellion were perpetrated not by White British forces, but by their indigenous allies. In the case of the Mao-Mao, these were generally the result of tribal feuds. And the Mao-Mao were perfectly capable of committing horrendous massacres themselves and atrocities themselves. He quotes one British diplomat or soldier, who entered one African village with Black soldiers after the Mao-Mao had attacked and butchered its people. This was right down to elderly women. Part of the Kikuyu’s motives for rebelling was opposition to British attempts to ban female circumcision. This resulted in a squad of Kikuyu attacking an elderly female missionary known for her opposition to it in her bed. They forcibly circumcised her before murdering her.
Colonel Dyer and the Amritsar Massacre
One of the other atrocities committed by the British army was the notorious Amritsar massacre by Colonel Dyer, in which the British army opened fire on a mass independence demonstration in Amritsar Square. Dyer was afraid that the meeting would result in further disorders and erupt into a rebellion like the Indian mutiny. The massacre has since become a byword for British brutality in India. But the attitude of the British authorities and public at the time was outrage and condemnation, not support. Dyer was recalled to England, there were speeches denouncing his actions in the House, and the Colonel tendered his resignation following notification that the army would not longer employ him. Dyer himself, surprising, appears not to have been racist. He enjoyed mixing with Indian soldiers as much as White British. When he was recalled to Blighty, he found that a squad of Indian NCOs and squaddies had voluntarily drawn up an honour guard to accompany him to the train station. He also demonstrates the hypocrisy of the denunciations of Dyer’s actions, while Indian forces have done exactly the same. There have been 11 massacres of protesters in Amritsar by Indian troops since Dyer. This included one episode where the Indian army forced protesting students to crawl the length of one street just as Dyer had forced his Indian victims.
Annexation of the Transvaal
Biggar also presents an alternative interpretation of the annexation of the Transvaal. This has also become notorious as a British invasion of an independent Afrikaner state. But Biggar goes into some of the issues involved to show that it was rather more than simply a cynical grab for land and imperial dominance by the British. There were concerns about the Afrikaner treatment of the Uitlanders, who formed a sizable minority in the Transvaal. These were frequently White Brits working in the mining industry. And they were especially worried that an independent Transvaal would promote a general Afrikaner rebellion through South Africa resulting in the downfall of British authority. This would not only be bad in itself, but they also feared that it would lead to the enslavement of Black South Africans due to the Afrikaner opposition to the ban on slavery in the British empire.
Benin, ‘City of Blood’
The book also critically examines the literature denouncing the 1897 British expedition against Benin. This has become controversial because the army carried off as spoils of war the famous Bronzes, sculptures of chief’s heads, which formed part of shrines to their vital spirit. It has been seen as yet another attempt by the British to grab land and establish a trade route past Benin to the peoples further north. Benin was an obstacle to trade, true, but another issue was that Benin was actively attacking and raiding other African states for sacrificial victims. This was described by Bacon, the British intelligence officer on the expedition, in his 1909 book, City of Blood. He describes people lying, pegged out on the ground or on sacrificial alters, with cross-shaped cuts in their abdomen by which they were disembowelled. Anti-imperial writers have tried to discredit this account as inventions or exaggerations. One of those who has done so is Dan Hicks, an archaeologist and now museum director who has thrown his weight solidly behind the decolonisation movement. Biggar criticises these attempts, one of which is simply an assertion that it must be an invention.
The expedition was also launched as a reprisal for the murder of a British governor and his party, who had gone to the city lightly armed in order to negotiate some kind of settlement to the dispute. They were subject to an unprovoked attacked, the indigenous bearers shot and butchered, and the governor and his White colleagues murdered and sacrificed.
He also deals with the allegation that the British army’s forcible acquisition of the Bronzes constituted looting under the articles of war. In fact, it was common practice for the British army to seize treasure from defeated enemies, which were then sold to defray the costs of the expedition and provide for the widows of fallen officers. This only became illegal in 1899, two years after the expedition.
Britain and Famine Relief in Ireland
He also considers several instances where the British appeared indifferent to suffering of the colonised peoples, especially from famine. One of these is the notorious Irish Potato Famine. But contrary to the impression given, the British did try to provide famine relief. They opened soup kitchens. However, there were fears that this would lead to welfare dependence, and so the provision of food by the British government was curtailed. It was supposed to be handed over to the Irish relief systems, paid for by the country’s ratepayers. But the British failed to realise that there were far fewer ratepayers in Ireland than in Britain, and as a result the Irish were unable to provide the amount of relief needed. And some parts of the Irish nationalist movement come out of this just as badly. Some nationalists believed that proud, self-respecting Irishmen and women should not demean themselves by accepting British charity.
He also tackles the Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution, showing that initially the mass of ordinary Irish people were against it. By 1919, as the rebels themselves recognised, the causes of popular resentment had been removed. For example, the political disabilities of Roman Catholics had been gradually removed following Catholic Emancipation in the 1830s. One of the rebels’ leaders actually said that the Irish rising was the only rebellion where the majority of the population was against it. What turned Irish public opinion against the British was the brutality of the British forces, and particularly the Black and Tan auxiliaries, charged with putting it down.
British rule in India has also been accused of being responsible for the repeated famines its people suffered. But the book shows that this was due to the country’s climate. There had been repeated famines during the 18th century and 19th century due to these conditions, which were well out of the Ray’s control. As for the notorious Bengal famine, this was caused by the Japanese cutting off grain supplies from Burma.
Canadian First Nations, Famine and the Mission Schools
The book also tackles the maltreatment of indigenous Canadians in the mission schools set up to give them a modern education. These have become notorious for the abuse, starvation and deaths from disease their indigenous inmates suffered. But as with so many things, this is only part of the story. In fact, the British authorities expected indigenous Canadians to become part of wider Canadian society. The western education given in these schools was to prepare them for this. Moreover, the indigenous Canadian nations themselves had appealed to the British to provide them with modern industrial and agricultural training. And just as there were terri8ble schools where the pupils were brutalised and maltreated, so there were others where they were well-cared for with friendly teachers. Former pupils at these schools have written their accounts of their happy schooldays, but these have not been published in the press. Instead, they appear in diocesan and old school magazines. If this is true, then it’s nothing but left-wing censorship and a deliberate distortion of the historical reality.
It then goes on to deal with a terrible famine affecting the north-western Canadian First Nations. This has been denounced as a holocaust, and the British and Canadian authorities accused of deliberately withholding needed aid. But the book demonstrates that such aid was actually beyond the ability of the state to provide it. At the time the north-western territories were governed by only a tiny number of officials and policemen. The number of Mounties in the region number only about 24. And despite the angry denunciations of the famine as a genocide and holocaust, the number of deaths was tiny: 42 or so. I dare say that this could have been proportionately great, given that many First Nations number perhaps a couple of hundred, but this is hardly comparable to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust.
In New Zealand, the British governor reserved four seats on the legislative assembly for Maoris, who were given universal manhood suffrage decades before White men, who were still subject to property qualifications.
Economic and Industrial Benefits of British Colonialism
The book also describes some of the benefits that came with imperialism. Free trade has been blamed for much of the ills that beset its indigenous peoples, but the book shows that at the time, people of all classes of British society passionately believed in it. And not just as an economic system. It was believed that through free trade, nations would no longer go to war with each other. Similarly, across the world the British built railways, established irrigation systems and there was the transfer of technology and scientific expertise from Britain to its colonies. For example, a party of Indians journeyed to Britain to study the new techniques of iron founding and went back to set up India’s own iron and steel industry. They also established the former colonies’ universities. The founders of the Raj were also intensely interested in Indian culture and literature, and it was they who revived the study of Sanskrit. The book recognises that racism did exist. Indeed, he quotes Indian nationalists as stating how they learned to hate Britain due to the abuse they received serving with Whites in the armed forces. But this is just one part of the imperial story.
There are, of course, episodes of imperial history that cannot be remotely justified, such as the slave trade. So that first chapter describes how Britain went from slavery to become the world’s policeman in combatting it across the globe.
Moral Principles and Critical Assessment
As a moral theologian, Biggar is careful to lay out the philosophical principles by which a particular action or course of actions should be judged good or bad. While he is a theologian, the principles themselves are rational and so can be accepted by atheists and religious sceptics. And he is very critical of the ideological qualifications of the empire’s critics. They are, he states, not historians but largely literary critics using a very narrow range of texts. This is a good description of the various academics and students of Postcolonial Studies. Like Critical Race Theory, this is a philosophical revision of Marxism. One of its fundamental texts is the writings of Frantz Fanon, a Black Caribbean author and observer of the Algerian rebellion against France. Fanon’s writings are something of a classic, and published as such, but his attitude towards the truth was, ahem, elastic. He wasn’t interested in whether something was factually correct, only if the narrative served the revolution.
Conclusion
This is a hugely fascinating and informative book, which I enjoyed immensely. But I also felt annoyed, even angry while doing so, as time and again it showed the falsehoods I had grown up with or which have since been produced as part of the ideological attack on the Empire. I felt I had been lied to by perfectly decent people for perfectly understandable reasons. I hope this book helps to clear away those lies.
The history of the British Empire is always going to be controversial, and there are horrendous episodes of brutality and exploitation. The book recognises this complex history, and states that the bad cannot be separated from the good. Niall Ferguson appeared on a radio programme a few years ago to give his views on the British empire. When asked whether he thought the empire had been a force for good, he recognised that much evil had been done, but considered the good narrowly outweighed the evil. I believe that any fair assessment of the British Empire should recognise both aspects in order to come to a fair assessment. At the moment there is considerable pressure to present only negative views and accounts of the British Empire. I hope this book adds balance to this debate.
Even so, like all history, people need to read both sides of the debate before coming to their own, independent conclusions. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the aim of the Critical Social Justice movement, which increasingly demands that only its views should be taught and accepted in schools, universities and business.
‘A new proposed law in Peru could unleash hell in the Amazon, in a massive onslaught against isolated Indigenous communities. Local leaders are trying to block it — and have asked for help to make their call massive, hoping that a groundswell of support from global voices could tip the scales in their favor. Let’s answer their urgent call — and deliver our strong numbers in the corridors of power to block this bill! Sign the petition and share with everyone:
Peru’s lawmakers are about to vote on a new law that could cause a genocide in the Amazon.
This hellish proposal has a target: the sacred lands of isolated Indigenous communities, who are unaware of the danger surrounding them.
Backed by miners, loggers and oil lobbyists, if this law passes, it could strip these isolated communities of their land rights, and create a new wave of invasions, destruction, violence and deadly viruses.
We need to act. Fast!
Indigenous leaders from across the country have taken their plea to the press, organising protests and lobbying lawmakers. But they fear this won’t be enough to stop the law. Now, they have asked our help to make this global — hoping that a groundswell of support from global voices could tip the scales in their favor.
Let’s answer their call — add your voice now, and let’s shield these communities from this hellish onslaught:
Indigenous Peoples have protected over a third of the Amazon rainforest, keeping it intact for generations. But now, private interests are exploiting political instability to dismantle the very law that shields uncontacted communities in Peru, and to satisfy their relentless greed for oil drilling, logging, and industrial agriculture.
This is a fight for survival – and it’s unfair: 25 communities living in isolation, unaware of the danger they face, up against formidable lobbyists determined to undermine the legal protections that help ensure their survival.
We cannot let this happen.
Local leaders are sparing no effort to halt what many call the “genocide bill”, and a million voices from around the world backing their call would show the Peruvian Congress that the world is watching.
Add your voice now and spread the word far and wide. Let’s make this massive and work with local Indigenous leaders to deliver our voices directly to Congress before the vote happens:
Peruvian Indigenous leaders have been crucial in the fight to protect the Amazon and our planet. Now they’re calling on our global community to help them push back against the corporate interests seeking to dismantle the laws that protect the lands and lives of Perú’s uncontacted peoples. Let’s answer their call.
With hope and determination,
Diego, Mo, Luis, Raul, Ana Paula, Laura, Oscar, Miguel and the whole Avaaz team
I posted this video on my Beast Rabban YouTube channel yesterday about the ballad ‘Where the Trouble Lies’, written by Fred Stott, a Barnsley collier to support the children of striking miners during the 1926 general strike. I found it in Roy Palmer’s A Ballad History of England: From 1588 to the Present Day (London: BT Batsford 1979). The book also contains an extract from Walter Greenwood’s autobiography, There Was a Time, about the hardship that came to the workers in his native Salford afford the collapse of the strike. Unfortunately there’s no printed music for the ballad, so it’s just me reciting it as a piece of poetry along with the accompanying piece from Greenwood. I recorded it as I thought it was once again topical now that public sector workers are striking for fair wages above the inflation rate so they can afford to heat their homes and feed their families.
The words of the ballad are:
Where The Trouble Lies
There is trouble in England on this very day.
Royalty owners say there will be while Cooks wants his way,
But its those people who above miners hold the hammer
Who say out of every ton of coal you get we only want a tanner.
It is this class of people who have got the check
Never get out of bed before ten not one day in a week
While just four hours before they awake,
For the idle rich the colliers life is at stake.
They say they need these tanners to send their kids to college,
But its hard luck for the minders to have to pay for their knowledge,
Their children but have tennis and other sorts of games
Whilst a collier can’t afford a fire-guard to keep his off the flames.
A collier’s kid on scooter general scoots,
When he has had it just a week he needs a pair of boots,
But he cannot have any although he uses cheek
For his father is a miner and gets thirty bob a week.
We miners don’t want the Earth to which they owners say we belong,
But we want a living wage, in that there’s nothing wrong.
Nor we cannot help our fore-fathers who fought and lost the land,
So a fair’s day’s work and fair day’s pay, then we shall be a happy band.
The royalties referred to were paid to the landowners, who owned the land on which the mines were situated. They were paid per ton of coal extracted. A.J. Cook was the miner’s leader during the strike. He coined the slogan ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’.
I got this email from the countryside charity CPRE urging people to tweet at the PM to stop the opening of a deep coal mine in Cumbria, which will be highly polluting and damaging to the climate. I’m not on Twitter, but if you feel strongly about this, please feel free to do so yourself.
‘Hi David,
Thanks for being part of the campaign that successfully stopped the return of fracking to the UK. Because of you, we’ve shown that when we come together, change can happen.
But now we need to come together again.
This year, the decision on whether to approve a deep coal mine in Cumbria has been delayed three times – the last being just a few weeks ago as world leaders headed to Egypt for COP27.
The Cumbria coal mine would create 9 million tonnes of CO2 every year – more than all of the currently open UK coal mines combined. This is the last thing we need at a time when experts are warning we have precious time left to prevent catastrophic climate breakdown, the greatest threat facing the countryside today.
The new deadline of 8 December could well be an intentional delay in order to push the announcement until after COP. But whether deliberate or not – we won’t let the government take decisions this big out of the international spotlight.
We want the Prime Minister to know that we’re watching his next move very closely. And we won’t forgive him if his government approves the country’s first deep coal mine in over 30 years.
While the politicians deciding on the Cumbria coal mine have changed, the facts haven’t.
In June, the Chair of the Climate Change Committee said the approval of a new coal mine in West Cumbria in light of the government’s net zero commitments would be ‘absolutely indefensible’.
It would provide, at best, a small number of jobs in an industry set to be made redundant from climate change legislation in the next decade. Meanwhile, the Local Government Association has calculated there could be 6000 green jobs in Cumbria by 2030, with the right investment [1].
We know this mine needs to be refused, and we know that the new PM does listen to public pressure – he wouldn’t have even been at COP without it. So, it’s all still to play for.
Can you tell Sunak to show true climate leadership and stand up for the countryside by refusing the Cumbria coal mine?
Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (Oxford: OUP 1990).
Bernard Lewis is a veteran scholar of Islam, and this book is an examination of the emergence and development of predominantly Muslim Arab racism in the Middle East. The book is a reworking of two previous studies from the 1970s, one of which was first published in French. It started off as part of an academic examination of intolerance, concentrating on religious bigotry. Lewis, however, believed that issue had been solved and so moved on to racial intolerance. Unfortunately, as the past fifty years have unfortunately shown, religious hatred and bigotry has certainly not died out, as shown here in Britain with the sectarian violence in Ulster.
Arab Ethnic Identity Before Colour Prejudice
Islam is viewed as an anti-racist religion, and the Qur’an states categorically that Blacks and Whites are both equal and should be treated as such. This admirable attitude was maintained by its theologians and jurists. However, with the emergence and expansion of the Islamic empires this began to change and prejudice and racism, based initially in ethnic differences and then on skin colour, emerged. The book argues that the pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabs, like the other nations around them, had a strong sense of their own superiority against those of the surrounding peoples. This was based on ethnicity, not colour. A variety of colours were used to describe the variations in human complexion, and were used in relative rather than absolute terms. Thus the Arabs saw themselves as black compared to the ‘red’ Persians, but white compared to the Black peoples of Africa. As the new Arab ruling class intermarried with the peoples they had conquered, so there developed an attitude which saw Arabs of mixed descent as inferior, leading to dynastic conflicts between those of pure and mixed race. Muslim Arabs also saw themselves as superior to converts to Islam from the indigenous peoples of the Islamic empire, and a set of rules developed to enforce the converts’ inferior social status. At the same time, the Arabs formed various explanations based on the environment for the ethnic differences they observed among different peoples. An Iraqi writer believed that Whites had been undercooked in the womb due to the coldness of the environment they occupied. Blacks, on the other hand, were overcooked. The Iraqi people, however, were brown and mentally and physically superior to the other two races.
Development of Anti-Black Prejudice
As Islam expanded into sub-Saharan Africa anti-Black racism developed. This did not initially exist, not least because Ethiopia had been one of the major superpowers in the Arabian peninsula with a superior culture. Muslims also respected the Abyssinians for giving sanctuary to many of Mohammed’s followers during their persecution by the Meccan pagans. Over time, however, an attitude of contempt and racial superiority emerged towards Blacks. This racism even extended towards highly regarded Black Arabic poets and the governors of provinces, who were reproached and vilified for their colour by their enemies. Here Arab racist views of Blacks is nearly identical to those of White European racists. They were seen as lazy, ugly, stupid and lustful. The prurient view of Black women as boiling with sexual desire mirrors the racist attitude towards Jewish women amongst western anti-Semites. On the other hand, Blacks were also seen as strong, loyal, generous and merry. They also had excellent rhythm. Although both Whites and Blacks were enslaved, White slaves had a higher status and different terms were used to describe them. White slaves were mawlana, literally, ‘owned’. Only Black slaves were described as slaves, abid, a term that is still used to mean Black people in parts of the Arab world today.
The expansion of the European states and empires effectively cut off or severely diminished the supply of White slaves, and as a consequence the value of Black slaves began to rise. Unable to afford White slaves and concubines from Europe and the Caucasus, the peoples of the Middle East turned instead to Abyssinians and the Zanj, Black Africans from further south. Abyssinians in particular were prized for their beauty and other qualities, and its from this period that the Arab taste for the beauty of Black Africans rather than Whites developed. And as anti-Black racism developed, so Muslims scholars and authors wrote pieces defending Blacks from racism, not least because many of Mohammed’s Companions had been Black and the emergence of powerful Muslim kingdoms in Africa.
Islamic Slavery and Slave Armies
Islamic slavery was comparatively milder and more enlightened than western slavery. Although technically slaves could not own property and were disbarred from giving evidence in court, there was limitations on the punishments that could be inflicted on them. Muslims were urged to treat their slaves humanely and manumission was praised as a noble act. It was particularly recommended for the expiation of particular sins. At the same time Islam permitted contracts to be made between master and slave allowing the slave to save enough money to purchase his freedom at an agreed date. There were stories of particular Muslims who freed their slaves even in circumstances where punishment would have been expected. One master freed a female slave after she asked him why he was still alive, as she had been trying to poison him for a year. Slaves could rise to high office. The viziers and other chief dignitaries of the Ottoman empire were slaves. Slaves were used to staff Muslim armies, and there were separate regiments for White and Blacks slaves. Sometimes this resulted in battles between the two, as during the dynastic battles where one side used Black soldiers and the other White. The mamlukes, the Egyptian warriors who ruled Egypt and who expelled the Crusaders and stopped the Mongols conquering the Middle East, were White slaves. They were freed after completing their military training and their leaders preferred to purchase other slaves for training as their successors rather than pass on their position to their own children.
Islam’s acceptance and regulation of slavery, like Judaism, Christianity and other religions, as well as the views of ancient philosophers like Aristotle, also meant that there was opposition to its abolition. Muslim defenders of slavery produced the same arguments as their Christian counterparts, including the argument that Blacks and other infidels were better off enslaved as it introduced them to a superior civilisation. When a 19th century British consul inquired of the king of Morocco what steps he was taking regarding slavery and the slave trade, he was politely informed that all the legislation was based on the Qur’an and sharia and that there was no intention of banning slavery as it was permitted by Islam. Indeed, the Ottoman province of the Hijaz, the area around the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, was exempt from the Ottoman ban on slavery and the slave trade after the ulema and nobles declared it to be an attack on Islam, along with legislation allowing women to go in public without the veil. The Turks were declared to be apostates, who could be killed and their children enslaved. Many of the pilgrims to Mecca came with a number of slaves, who acted as living sources of funding. When the pilgrim needed more money, he sold one or two of them.
The Myth of Muslim Non-Racism
In the last two chapters, Lewis discusses the emergence of the view of Islam as completely non-racist and that its slavery was benign. He argues that this was largely the creation of western scholars reacting to the horrors of New World slavery during the American Civil War. Christian missionaries also contributed to this myth. They attempted to explain their failure to make converts by arguing that it was due to Black African revulsion against harsh western slavery. In fact it was due to differences of colour. Islam spread because it was promoted by Black African preachers, rather than White westerners. Particularly influential in the creation of this myth was Edward Blydon, a Black West Indian who was educated in Liberia by the missionaries. He became convinced that Islam was more suited to the needs of Black people, and his books also stressed White guilt, contrasting it with Muslim tolerance. Lewis also believes that the myth is also due to a widespread feeling of guilt among western Whites, which he sees as the modern counterpart to Kipling’s White man’s burden.
Along with the text of the book itself are extensive notes and a documentary appendix containing texts including a Muslim discussion on national character, the rights of slaves and diplomatic correspondence and observations on the 19th century slave trade.
Race and Slavery Compared with Brown’s Slavery & Islam
This book should ideally be read alongside Jonathan A.C. Brown’s Slavery & Islam, as the two present contrasting views of slavery and racism in Islam. Brown is a White, American academic and convert to Islam. While he condemns slavery totally, his book presents a much more positive view of Islamic slavery compared with western servitude and even the conditions endured by 19th century free European workers. He also extensively discusses Islamic abolition and the voices for it, while Lewis lays more stress on Muslim opposition. Brown recognises the existence of racism in the Islamic world, but also emphasises Muslim anti-racist texts like The Excellence of the Negroes. But as Lewis points out, these texts also show the opposite, that there was racism and bigotry in the Muslim world.
Lewis also recognises that Muslim slaves generally enjoyed good conditions and were treated well. However, the real brutality was inflicted on them during the journey from their place of capture to the Islamic heartlands. He also suggests that this relatively benign image may be due to bias in the information available. Most Muslim slaves were domestic servants, unlike the mass of slave labouring on the plantations in America. There were gangs of slaves working cotton plantations and employed in mining and public works, and these laboured in appalling conditions. It may also be that there were more slaves working in agriculture than recognised, because the majority of the information available comes from the towns, and so ignore what may have been the harsher treatment in the countryside.
He also discusses the absence of descendants of the Black slaves, except for a few pockets, in the modern Middle East. David Starkey in an interview for GB News claimed it was because the Muslim slave masters killed any babies born by their slaves. I don’t know where he got this idea. Lewis doesn’t mention such atrocities. He instead suggests that it may have been due to the castration of large numbers of boys to serve as eunuchs in the harems. The other slaves were forbidden to marry and have sex, except for female slaves purchased for that purpose. Slaves were also particularly vulnerable to disease, and so an epidemic lasting five years could carry off an entire generation.
Importance of the Book for an Examination of Contemporary Racial Politics
I was interested in reading this book because of the comparative lack of information on slavery and racism in Islam, despite the existence of books like Islam’s Black Slaves. Lewis in his introduction states that researching the issue may be difficult and dangerous, as it can be interpreted as hostility rather than a genuinely disinterested investigation. I think there needs to be more awareness of the history of Muslim slavery and Islam. For one reason, it explains the emergence of the slave markets in that part of Libya now occupied by the Islamists. It also needs to be more widely known because, I believe, the emphasis on western historic slavery and racism can present a distorted image in which the west is held to be uniquely responsible for these evils.
Mad right-wing YouTuber Alex Belfield has put up a clip from GB News of Nigel Farage wondering why we don’t mine our own coal. Instead of importing it, suggests Nige, we should reopen that mine in Cumbria which has a large amount of it. Well, this might come as a surprise to Farage and Belfield, we did mine our own coal. However, this stopped, and the industry was first privatised and then decimated because Maggie decided that imported coal was cheaper and she wanted to break the unions. The NUM had humiliated Ted Heath when he tried to break them in the 1970s. The result was the three day week and power cuts, a clear demonstration of the union’s power. So Thatcher privatised it, and then broke the NUM with militarised, highly politicised policing backed with obedient TV propaganda with the miners’ strike. And after that was over, the Tories went ahead and did everything that Arthur Scargill warned about and closed down nearly all the pits. The result was the demise of an entire industry and the destruction of whole towns.
Belfield states that he’s a working class lad from a pit village, and rants about how the White working class are neglected and attention paid instead to ‘box tickers’ from ethnic minorities. But there’s an answer to that, and I correspondent Yasmin Alibhai-Brown gave it a few years ago when she appeared on TV with Rod Liddle. Liddle also complains about the marginalisation and official neglect of the White working class. Alibhai-Brown told him that she wasn’t responsible for that. Indeed, she’d actually worked with White, working class pupils. It wasn’t people of colour who destroyed working class communities and self-respect, but Margaret Thatcher.
Dam’ right!
We should be mining our own coal, provided it isn’t too harmful to the planet and we can make a transition to cleaner, greener energy in the long run. But a revived coal industry would need significant government investment to guarantee it, as private industry hasn’t resulted in greater investment in the utilities. Such a coal company might have to be nationalised.
Which would destroy a central plank of Thatcherism.
Actually, despite his denials, I think Belfield, the self-proclaimed ‘Voice Of Reason’ was extremely bothered. I know some of you are sick of me giving him and his YouTube channel publicity, but this is hilarious. But there’s also a very serious point to be made here as well.
A few days ago Belfield put up a video about how he was fact-checked by Google or another group concerned with what it is acceptable to say on YouTube. They challenged him on his estimate of the number of deaths from Covid. Belfield consistently and loudly opposes the lockdown, arguing that’s it’s unnecessary and harming industry, children’s schooling and people’s mental and physical health, among other issues. The stats he cited, which he claimed came from the Office of National Statistics, were part of this argument. He then declared that this showed the ‘lefties’ devouring each other.
He then stated, firmly and loudly, that he was not bothered about it while, like Catherine Tate’s petulant schoolgirl, sounding increasingly extremely bovvered. It was doing him good, because all the people that hate watch him were nevertheless making him rich by clicking on his channel. He then began yet another rant about Guardian-reading, champagne-sipping, oyster-eating ‘Naga Manchushi’ types. And to show how not bovvered he is, he put up another video for days ago on ‘the factchecking scam’. Well, he’s certainly shown he’s not bothered as so far he hasn’t joined Alex Jones in ranting about the globalists. But it’s a moot point how far Jones himself believed the rubbish he spouted.
Now I’ll get to the serious point. On the same day that he posted this, Belfield posted yet another video calling for the NHS to be privatised because of Boris giving PPE contracts to his chums. They supplied duff equipment at well over-the-odds prices. If they were able to fulfil the orders at all. Belfield wants you to believe that it’s the fault of having a nationalised National Health Service.
He’s talking nonsense, malign, dangerous nonsense. The poor performance of the NHS comes from decades of Tory cuts and the piecemeal privatisation that sees NHS contracts given to private healthcare companies, who are less efficient and provide a poorer service. But hey, it’s all done for the profit-motive, so it must be better. NHS Test Trace, and which has also performed spectacularly badly, was NHS in name only. It was completely private, though the Tories didn’t want you to know that. But Belfield doesn’t want you to know how badly NHS Privatisation is failing and how badly we need it renationalised.
Now Belfield is, as far as I can make out, a lone YouTuber broadcasting by himself or with a bare minimum of people helping him. He’s not Fox News, GB News or whatever. But he has 300,000 viewers, which is, as he points out, larger than some of the news broadcasters he tackles and sneers at. He is therefore not without influence, and therefore deserves to be criticised. Even if that runs the risk of being counterproductive.
Much of Belfield’s output could be called ‘tabloid TV’. It consists of a fair amount of celeb gossip, much of it directed at the antics of Katie Price and her continuing attempts to make money from her body and her disabled son, Harvey. There are loud denunciations of woke ideology, as he attacks the TV companies for throwing experienced, quality, but White broadcasters of more mature years off in favour of minority ‘box tickers’. He also strong criticises some of the mad results of the transgender ideology, as when a Scottish law student was accused of transphobia and investigated by her university simply for saying that women have vaginas. And then there are his rants against the channel migrants or the ‘dinghy divers’ as he calls them, who he claims are being treated better than Britain’s own poor and homeless. Well if they are, it’s because of the Tory policies Belfield so loudly supports.
His audience appear to be the same demographic as those attracted to UKIP: older, socially conservative White people who fear immigration and the new morality. This isn’t exclusively so – when he came down to visit Bristol, among the people he met was a woman of east Asian ancestry. I don'[t doubt that some Blacks also watch his channel. There are Black Conservatives and not all of them by any means are supporters of Black Lives Matter, as you can see from the videos by Black American right-wingers making some very acute criticisms of the movement. And it’s these, largely older people Belfield is catering and lying to.
He’s lying when he gives the impression that everything would be better off if the NHS was handed over to private industry. It won’t. It will be worse run and the British public will have to pay for it through private health insurance. That includes Belfield’s audience, the working class people he appeals to with all the guff about being a working-class boy from a pit estate, sneered at and passed over by the BBC Guardian-reading etc middle class people. These are the people, who will find it especially difficult to get healthcare if the NHS was privatised.
And this is why I callout Belfield on this issue.
And I’ve no qualms about admitting that when it comes to NHS privatisation, I am very bovvered.
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