I also got this email and petition through from internet democracy organisation calling for ‘Cheeselab’ Truss and ‘Queasy’ Kwarteng to scrap their wretched mini-budget. I’ve had absolutely no problems about signing it. Please feel free to do the same if it frightens and appals you as much as it did me.
‘They’ve driven us off a cliff, David.
Markets in panic, pensions on the brink of bankruptcy, rising interest rates, the pound crashing. [1] It’s taken Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng just 6 days to tank the economy with their ‘mini-budget’ – and put OUR livelihoods on the line. [2] Mini-budget, maximum chaos.
This is about the money left in our pockets at the end of the month. Rising interest rates send mortgages skyrocketing. [3] A weaker pound makes clothes and food more expensive. [4] This budget has plunged us into even more chaos, just when we needed urgent help to get through the cost of living crisis.
Millions of us across the country are enraged by their decision to borrow billions to give to the rich – and tank the economy in the process. [5] International financial institutions, the Bank of England and even Tory MPs have savaged the plan. [6] There’s only one option: rip up the budget.
We need to show where the British public stand today. So, David, will you add your name right now to the open letter calling on Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng to RIP UP this disastrous mini-budget? Clicking the button below will add your name automatically.
RIP UP your “mini-budget” and replace it with an urgent rescue plan to save our economy, save families during this cost of living crisis and save our public services already on the brink.Signed,Thousands of members of the public
I was watching one of the Lotus Eaters’ videos early today and I came across a possibly hopeful sign when they were discussing the latest protest by Stand Up To Racism against Tommy Robinson and his documentary about grooming gangs in Telford. I noticed that the Stand Up To Racism protesters were waving placards with the slogan ‘Justice for the Victims – No To Tommy Robinson’. The Lotus Eaters seemed a bit confused over who the victims for whom SUTR were demanding justice were. I don’t know, but I hope it means the victims of the grooming gangs.
I was furious at the response to a protest by SUTR and Unite back in February against Tommy Robinson and his gang when they appeared in Birmingham or Telford to premier their documentary about the ‘rape’ of the town by the Pakistani grooming gangs. Now I have no sympathy for Robinson. He is a violent, islamophobic thug. But his presentation of the film’s public showing was, I felt, far better as propaganda and outdid the protest against it by SUTR. Robinson’s video about the event showed a young Black man wearing a ‘Black and White, Unite and Fight’ T-shirt, which presented his organisation as anti-racist. This is justified, up to a point. The majority of the gangs’ victims were White, and they were racially abused while being raped and brutalised. Not that Robinson’s organisation is genuinely anti-racist: it’s against Islam, and I got the distinct impression that Robinson and his team regard the rape and utterly horrific abuse of the White girls as a convenient stick to beat to beat the British Muslim community.
Stand Up To Racism, by contrast, seemed to mismanage their protest completely. They turned up to shout the usual anti-racist slogans of ‘Fascist scum, off our streets’ and ‘Refugees welcome here’. These are fine against the usual Nazis and racists. But they’re not good enough against Robinson and his film because they ignore the Pakistanis’ abuse of the White girls. This gives the impression that SUTR wasn’t interested in the girls’ suffering and that they are only concerned about racist against Blacks and Asians. Callum, from the Lotus Eaters, had been present at the event and walked over and asked the SUTR protesters if they approved of the grooming gangs. ‘No, of course not’, was their reply. He then asked on the Lotus Eaters’ video why they hadn’t joined Robinson in protesting the gangs. They could have done this without approving of the man himself.
It’s obvious why they wouldn’t want to lend support to Robinson: he’s one of the racists they’re protesting against, even if he claims that he isn’t because Islam is a religion not a race. But I was so annoyed by SUTR’s massive mishandling of the protest that I wrote an email to Hope Not Hate and, if I remember correctly, Stand Up To Racism themselves.
The Hope Not Hate email went:
‘Dear Sir,
I have always been impressed by the great work Hope Not Hate has done and is doing in uniting people of all races and creeds in this country against the threat of racism and Fascism on the one hand, and Islamist religious extremism on the other. I have read with great interest and pleasure about your organisation’s attempts to combat Tommy Robinson and his very real islamophobia. But I am writing to you in this instance to express my grave concerns that the liberal left’s response to his rally and film, ‘The Rape of Telford’, has been so poor and catastrophically mismanaged that by contrast Robinson and his supporters seemed good.
As you are aware Robinson has been exploiting the very understandable and entirely reasonable public fears about the grooming gangs as part of his wider campaign to sow hate against British Muslims as a whole. A couple of weeks ago he turned up in Birmingham to show his film about the grooming gangs, The Rape of Telford, which included testimony from the abused girls. He was met with a counterdemonstration from Unite the union and Stand Up To Racism. And this is where the problems lie.
The counterdemonstrators seemed not to understand that victims of racism in this instance were White and to tackle this issue while at the same time expressing their disgust at Robinson. Instead they shouted the usual slogans like ‘Fascist scum off our streets’ and ‘Refugees welcome’. These are fine and suitable against the usual anti-immigration and racist demonstrations. But here they miss the point. They give the impression that the established anti-racist organisations are so fixated on anti-Black and Asian racism, that they find the very concept of anti-White racism literally unthinkable and have no response to it. This is not the impression they should give, and I’m sure it’s unintentional. One of the members of the right-wing Lotus Eaters YouTube channel actually asked them if they supported the grooming gangs. They replied that they certainly didn’t, but did not reply to his next question about why they weren’t over there with Robinson protesting against the grooming gangs.
They shouldn’t, of course, but this doesn’t mean that they should stay silent when it comes to anti-White racism and abuse. The real issue behind the grooming gangs is that they were allowed to get away with it for so long by the police, social services and local authorities because the victims were White and the authorities were afraid of being accused of racism. There are concerns about how the inquiry has been managed,, with some of the witnesses complaining that they have been instructed to limit their testimony and some of the evidence being redacted. There is speculation that some very prominent people, going as high as Blair’s government, are being protected.
It wasn’t always the case that anti-White racism was ignored. In the 1990s the CRE published a report, written by Independent and i journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown about Black and Asian anti-White racism as it was found that 60 per cent of the victims of a racist incidents were White. In the first decade of this century Sunny Hidak in the Guardian wrote a piece stating that anti-racism must now include poor Whites and attack religious extremist organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir. But this inclusive message seems to have been forgotten or discarded in the age of Black Lives Matter.
I strongly believe that the way to fight Robinson is to take this issue out of his hands. People should be marching against the Muslim grooming gangs, just as they should and do march against White fascists and racists. Indeed, a few years ago when the Islamic preachers of hate were emerging with the Satanic Verses controversy in Bradford, liberal Muslims organised marches and demonstrations against them. But they complained they were given no support from mainstream society. Blacks, Asians, Muslims, Christians, atheists, Hindus and other faiths need to unite and march together against anti-White racism. I believe this is possible and non-Whites would be willing to join such marches and protests if it were organised by genuine anti-racist organisations. You can protest against anti-White racism without supporting fascists and islamophobes like Robinson or the BNP.
But this is what the established anti-racist organisations are failing to do. And I’m afraid their refusal to engage with this is handing Robinson a terrible weapon. If you watch the video he produced with Voice of Wales and Free Man Media on the ‘Rape of Telford’, one of his supporters is a young Black or mixed race man with the sweatshirt bearing the slogan ‘Black and White unite’. This is what the real anti-racists should be doing, but aren’t.
I would like to see it changed, but I’m afraid it seems that you may be the only organisation that will take this on board. I wrote a similar email to Stand Up to Racism a few weeks ago and have not received a reply. I would be very interested to receive your views about this subject, which I intend to place on my blog. You can contact me wit the email below:
Yours with very best wishes,
David Sivier’
I also wrote a series of email to various papers and organisation, including Stand Up To Racism, urging the organisation of a multicultural march against the grooming gangs.
‘Dear Sir,
I’m sure you share my disgust at the recent reports on the Asian grooming gangs and how they preyed on White girls for decades, as well as the way they were allowed to get away with it by police forces and local authorities who were afraid of being accused of racism if they intervened. But I am also greatly concerned about the lack of response to this monstrous scandal by mainstream anti-racist organisations like yours. While White people have been marching in support of Blacks and Asians in their struggle against racism for decades, I very much regret that there have been no such marches in support of these victimised White girls. This, in my opinion, is a grave and odious mistake, as it gives more ammunition and plausibility to islamophobes such as Tommy Robinson.
A few months ago Robinson and his supporters turned up in Birmingham for a public launch of his film about the city’s ‘rape’, which included testimony from the gangs’ victims. There was also a counterdemonstration by your organisation and Unite. However, while the protesters shouted anti-racist slogans against Robinson, they made no public gesture in support of the raped and abused girls. Robinson’s video of the demonstration, however, appears to show his organisation as by far the more anti-racist and diverse. One of his protesters was a young Black man wearing a T-shirt with the anti-racist slogan ‘Black and White, unite and fight’. Unfortunately, I don’t see the mainstream anti-racist organisations doing this against the grooming gangs.
This gives the impression that your organisation and others aren’t concerned about anti-White racism and hate crimes, and that the only racism that matters to you is that against Blacks and other people of colour. Thus Robinson is able to present himself as the only person standing up for these girls against a bigoted and complacent establishment.
I feel very strongly that the only way to combat this is to organise genuinely multicultural rallies against these grooming gangs, just as there have been rallies against the BNP and NF and in support of refugees. I would be very grateful indeed if you could organise one as one of the leading anti-racist organisations here in the UK. I would be particularly grateful if your branch in Bristol could stage one. This is not one of the towns plagued by these gangs, but it has a diverse, multicultural population, who have demonstrated against Robinson and his attempts to stir up hatred against Muslims. Now we need to go further and demonstrate in support of these gangs’ victims as part of the wider campaign against racism. I have also sent an email to the head of Bristol’s equalities and children’s departments in the council about the possibility of organising such a rally.
I would very much like to hear your reply about this suggestion, which I intend to publish on my blog. I look forward eagerly to receiving it.
Yours faithfully,
David Sivier’
If the victims mentioned on Stand Up To Racism’s placards are those of the grooming gangs, and not simply Robinson’s own victims – who are more than entitled to justice themselves after his treatment of them – then it would seem that SUTR has come round to my point of view. Perhaps they received a number of letters like mine from other people who felt the same way.
This is another subject that came up at the local Labour party meeting last Thursday. Local Labour MP Karen Smyth and the others were extremely worried what the Tories would do over here after the Roe vs. Wade ruling was overturned last week in the US supreme courts. They were afraid that the Tories were going to try the same thing over here, and wanted to enshrine abortion rights into UK law, regardless of personal conscience. They were not wrong, as this report by Senna Sandhu in today’s I, which states that the government has removed the commitment to abortion and other sexual health rights in a report from the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office. This begins
‘Government quietly removes commitments to women’s rights after summit on freedom of beliefs
Commitments to abortion and sexual health rights have been quietly removed by the Government from an international pact on freedom of belief and gender equality.
References to repealing discriminatory laws that threaten women’s “sexual and reproductive health and rights” and “bodily autonomy” have been removed from a statement published on the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) website.
The FCDO told i that access to sexual and reproductive health remained a priority and that the statement was amended to get rid of a perceive ambiguity – but did specify the problem.
Lisa Hallgarten, head of policy and public affairs at Brook, which specialises in sexual health for younger people, told i: “The whole point of the original statement is to recognise the need to support the right to religious belief and practice, but ensure it is not at the expense of the fundamental rights of women and girls.
“By changing the language, the purpose and effect of this statement are fatally undermined, and religion appears to trump human rights.”
The original statement was released around the time of the London 2022 International Ministerial Conference on Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB), hosted by the UK Government on 5 and 6 July.’
This could be the beginning of a very nasty wedge. I gather from a report on YouTube that the House of Representatives over the other side of the Pond are seeking to pass legislation protecting same-sex and interracial marriage. Like any government has any business bringing back slavery era laws intended to protect the purity of the White race as part of a raft of legislation intended to keep White from socialising with Blacks. Or any other non-White people.
I remember that after the supreme court ruling, American conservatives were pouring scorn on the fears of left-wingers like Robert Reich that after Roe vs. Wade, the Republicans would seek to overturn same-sex marriage and other recently won rights. Now I note that Michael Knowles, another American conservative, is asking his followers if they support same sex marriage or not. And there was another conservative YouTuber over there who asked which right the Republicans should strike down now. This included same-sex marriage.
Some of the best videos I saw on YouTube commenting on gays obtaining the right to marry after the legislation was passed came from Christians, who very definitely didn’t see it as a threat. There was a woman stating that she was still in a Jesus-centred heterosexual marriage with her husband. Another was of a bloke poking around in a field trying to see if gays had suddenly dropped out of the sky or were hiding in his hay stack doing ‘homosexual things’. Obviously he couldn’t find any, which was the point. Gay marriage affects only gays. It doesn’t affect anybody else, or derogate from the marriage of husband and wife.
But despite all the denials, it looks like the American right is coming for gay marriage. And where they lead, our Tories follow, as this disturbing article reveals.
It’s been years since same sex-marriage was legalised over here. I’ll admit it still seems strange to me, having been a teenager in the 80s. Despite the growing gay rights movement, there was still a vicious homophobia around. I can also remember listening with incredulity when I was a schoolkid when one of the older lads told us about a piece of Wicker’s World the previous night, when the great travel broadcaster had a covered a gay wedding in Las Vegas.
But the world has moved on. Since the 90s young people have been far more tolerant and accepting towards gays. Straight people have gay friends, and the majority of people haven’t been bothered for a long time about the sexuality of certain slebs and their partners. People like Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Julian Clary, Paul O’Grady, Alan Carr and others. I hope that if they try stripping gay marriage away, they’ll have a fight on their hands.
Just like I hope they have a fight if they try stripping these vital women’s rights away.
The conspiracy and parapolitics magazine :Lobster has a new website with a different format. But fortunately it’s still publishing very informed news and comments about the covert political machinations that are rarely reported in the mainstream press, and which the mainstream media and the political establishment would quite often very much like to hush up. And one of these pieces of news, as discussed in the ‘News from the Bridge’ column in the magazine’s current issue, is that Lord Levy is once again abroad in the Labour party obtaining Israeli money for the Labour party. This was the situation about a quarter of a century ago after Blair bumped into Levy at a social gathering at the Israeli embassy. Levy arranged for Blair to get funding from the Israelis and Zionist Jewish businessmen in Britain. This allowed the future war criminal to stay independent of the union’s funding and pursue his programme of turning Labour into a centre-right party based on Thatcherism.
Rather more interesting, however, is the article’s remarks about the current state of the Labour party’s finances. These have declined drastically from the heady days when Corbyn was its leader. Then the party had a membership so large it dwarfed the Tories, making it the largest socialist party in Europe. Its finances were correspondingly extremely healthy too, as these members supported the party through their subscriptions. The Blairites’ campaign to purge the party of socialists and critics of Israel has resulted in a catastrophic fall in membership through decent people being smeared and thrown out of the party as anti-Semites, and other, left-wing members simply walking away due to the Blairites and Starmer taking the party sharply to the right. And they’ve made it very clear that they don’t want traditional Labour people as supporters and activists, as they regard them as Commies, Trotskyites and worse. No, they want to make the party safe for nice Thatcherite neoliberals, who will make the right noises about combating racism, prejudice and so on without necessarily doing anything about them.
But it seems that the loss of the party’s members isn’t the only the reason Labour’s finances are in trouble. Apparently, much of its finances is going to pay the lawyers for their role in defending the party from legal action brought about by the purges. This is no doubt one of the reasons that I, and doubtless other remaining Labour party members, get emails and letters from the party every so often begging for donations. I haven’t responded to them for a number of reasons, one of which is that the party wouldn’t be in its dire financial situation if it hadn’t treated its mass membership and supporters with such absolute contempt that they were either driven out or simply resigned because its leadership no longer represented them.
And there’s an additional racial factor in all this. Very many of the people smeared as anti-Semites and purged were Jews. There are statistics arguing that Jews formed the majority. These were decent, self-respecting folk, who were targeted simply because they didn’t toe the line on supporting Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians. This is sectarian anti-Semitism. It came from that section of the Jewish community which fancies itself as British Jewry’s ‘establishment’ – the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Chief Rabbinate and such rags as the Jewish Chronicle. In fact, as Jewish bloggers and commenters have made very clear, these organisations represent only a declining fraction of the Jewish community. The Board of Deputies really only represents the United Synagogue, whose members also included some of the journos attacking Corbyn in the lamestream media. The I‘s writer, Simon Kellner, was one such, and there were other writers, who appeared in the papers after whom was the note so-and-so ‘is a member of the United Synagogue’. In the fact the Jewish community is as diverse in its members religious and political views as just about everyone else in British society generally. From what I understand, Judaism never has and isn’t a monolithic community and the only people who’ve ever claimed it is are genuine anti-Semites, like the Nazis.
The definition of anti-Semitism the witch-hunters use conflates anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. But the best definition of anti-Semitism is simply hatred of Jews simply for being Jews, regardless of politics or race. And I’m dam’ sure that the Jews purged as anti-Semites by David Evans and Starmer are very aware and have more knowledge of real anti-Semitism than they’d like. Many of them are the victims of real anti-Semitic abuse and violence, or they lost family members in the Holocaust. I read somewhere, I’ve forgotten where, that half of British Jews had relatives murdered by the Nazis. This makes a mockery of the party’s policy of demanding those suspended for anti-Semitism to attend retraining on it by groups like the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Paole Zion.
One of the latest victims of the purges is Jonathan Rosenhead, emeritus professor operations at the London School of Economics. Prof. Rosenhead is Jewish, but that hasn’t stopped the apparatchiks of suspending him for anti-Semitism. They’ve also told him that, despite his lifetime of political activism and his ethnicity/ religion, he has to go for compulsory retraining so he can be told how to think about anti-Semitism. I suspect that Prof Rosenhead could probably give the fanatics running the retraining course lessons on anti-Semitism, what it is, how it arises and how it must be fought, rather than have to listen to their nonsense.
The Lobster article, in fact, gives decent people two reasons not to donate to the Labour party. One is that the money from those donations are going the party’s official, sectarian anti-Semitism in smearing and purging Jewish members, as well as decent gentiles. The other is that the donations are going to the lawyers who fought the party’s victims when they tried to seek justice through the courts. People like Mike, for example, who tried to sue them for breach of contract.
As far as I’m concerned, these are reasons enough to want to tell Starmer or whoever where to stick it the next time they send a message appealing for donations.
They are in this financial mess because of their hostility and persecution of decent people, and I object to being asked to collude in this persecution by funding their legal team. If they need to pay their legal expenses, then they should do what their victims have been forced to do. They should pay it out of their own personal finances, rather than expect the very members they despise to do it for them.
I’m still annoyed about the conduct of the counter-protesters nearly three weeks ago, who turned up to demonstrate against Tommy Robinson’s film ‘The Rape of Telford’. Robinson has been exploiting the issue of the Muslim grooming gangs to push his own violent, deceptive and malign islamophobia against Muslims as a whole. But there is a real issue there, as the gangs were enabled to prey on some many extremely vulnerable girls and young women for twenty years and more because the authorities – the police, local councils and social workers – were afraid of being called racist and starting riots if they did anything to stop them. And the grooming gangs were racists – they mainly targeted White girls, and those girls were physically and verbally abused because they were White. But this aspect of the gangs is ignored by mainstream, liberal anti-racism. There are no crowds of people demonstrating against the gangs chanting ‘Black and White, unite and fight’. The crowd, drawn from the trade unions and Stand Up to Racism, who turned up to protest against Robinson did nothing but chant the usual anti-fascist slogans – ‘Fascist scum off our streets!’ and ‘Refugees welcome’, but did nothing to tackle him on the issue he was exploiting. Although they told Callum of the Lotus Eaters that ‘Of course they didn’t support the grooming gangs’, they didn’t denounce them. They could easily have done so without supporting Robinson. Instead they look worse. Because Robinson’s supporters included a Black man wearing a sweatshirt with the slogan ‘Black and White, unite!’ The counter-protesters, by contrast, marched off before the testimony from the abused girls began. They looked at best complacent, at worst anti-White, because anti-White racism is outside the mindset of liberal anti-racism. They don’t know how to handle it, and my guess is that they don’t really believe it exists or is as important as tackling racism against Blacks and ethnic minorities.
I was so angry I wrote to Hope Not Hate about the issue, suggesting that we needed to incorporate marches and demonstrates against anti-White racism into mainstream, liberal anti-racism. I chose Hope Not Hate because in addition to attacking White supremacism and fascism, it also dared to tackle Islamism and religious extremism. It seemed far more open to attacking anti-White racism than some of the other, similar organisations. For example, I also wrote to about this issue to Stand Up To Racism, and didn’t receive a reply. And I don’t expect to get one either. Yes, I know Hope Not Hate has connections to the wretched Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the smear factory accusing decent anti-racists of anti-Semitism because they support Corbyn and the Palestinians. And yes, I’m very aware that Hope Not Hate pushed the anti-Semitism smears against the Labour leader. But sometimes you have to use the materials present, as there’s little alternative. So I sent them this email.
”Dear Sir,
I have always been impressed by the great work Hope Not Hate has done and is doing in uniting people of all races and creeds in this country against the threat of racism and Fascism on the one hand, and Islamist religious extremism on the other. I have read with great interest and pleasure about your organisation’s attempts to combat Tommy Robinson and his very real islamophobia. But I am writing to you in this instance to express my grave concerns that the liberal left’s response to his rally and film, ‘The Rape of Telford’, has been so poor and catastrophically mismanaged that by contrast Robinson and his supporters seemed good.
As you are aware Robinson has been exploiting the very understandable and entirely reasonable public fears about the grooming gangs as part of his wider campaign to sow hate against British Muslims as a whole. A couple of weeks ago he turned up in Birmingham to show his film about the grooming gangs, The Rape of Telford, which included testimony from the abused girls. He was met with a counterdemonstration from Unite the union and Stand Up To Racism. And this is where the problems lie.
The counterdemonstrators seemed not to understand that victims of racism in this instance were White and to tackle this issue while at the same time expressing their disgust at Robinson. Instead they shouted the usual slogans like ‘Fascist scum off our streets’ and ‘Refugees welcome’. These are fine and suitable against the usual anti-immigration and racist demonstrations. But here they miss the point. They give the impression that the established anti-racist organisations are so fixated on anti-Black and Asian racism, that they find the very concept of anti-White racism literally unthinkable and have no response to it. This is not the impression they should give, and I’m sure it’s unintentional. One of the members of the right-wing Lotus Eaters YouTube channel actually asked them if they supported the grooming gangs. They replied that they certainly didn’t, but did not reply to his next question about why they weren’t over there with Robinson protesting against the grooming gangs.
They shouldn’t, of course, but this doesn’t mean that they should stay silent when it comes to anti-White racism and abuse. The real issue behind the grooming gangs is that they were allowed to get away with it for so long by the police, social services and local authorities because the victims were White and the authorities were afraid of being accused of racism. There are concerns about how the inquiry has been managed,, with some of the witnesses complaining that they have been instructed to limit their testimony and some of the evidence being redacted. There is speculation that some very prominent people, going as high as Blair’s government, are being protected.
It wasn’t always the case that anti-White racism was ignored. In the 1990s the CRE published a report, written by Independent and i journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown about Black and Asian anti-White racism as it was found that 60 per cent of the victims of a racist incidents were White. In the first decade of this century Sunny Hidak in the Guardian wrote a piece stating that anti-racism must now include poor Whites and attack religious extremist organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir. But this inclusive message seems to have been forgotten or discarded in the age of Black Lives Matter.
I strongly believe that the way to fight Robinson is to take this issue out of his hands. People should be marching against the Muslim grooming gangs, just as they should and do march against White fascists and racists. Indeed, a few years ago when the Islamic preachers of hate were emerging with the Satanic Verses controversy in Bradford, liberal Muslims organised marches and demonstrations against them. But they complained they were given no support from mainstream society. Blacks, Asians, Muslims, Christians, atheists, Hindus and other faiths need to unite and march together against anti-White racism. I believe this is possible and non-Whites would be willing to join such marches and protests if it were organised by genuine anti-racist organisations. You can protest against anti-White racism without supporting fascists and islamophobes like Robinson or the BNP.
But this is what the established anti-racist organisations are failing to do. And I’m afraid their refusal to engage with this is handing Robinson a terrible weapon. If you watch the video he produced with Voice of Wales and Free Man Media on the ‘Rape of Telford’, one of his supporters is a young Black or mixed race man with the sweatshirt bearing the slogan ‘Black and White unite’. This is what the real anti-racists should be doing, but aren’t.
I would like to see it changed, but I’m afraid it seems that you may be the only organisation that will take this on board. I wrote a similar email to Stand Up to Racism a few weeks ago and have not received a reply. I would be very interested to receive your views about this subject, which I intend to place on my blog. You can contact me wit the email below: ————-
Yours with very best wishes,
David -‘
To be fair, I did get a reply from Hope Not Hate’s head honcho, Nick Lowles, telling me I’d get a reply before the end of the week. But all I got was an invitation to join the Zoom webinar about the current State of Hate, which seems to be entirely about White fascists. It’s good work, but not an answer to my inquiry.
Clearly anti-White racism isn’t an issue mainstream anti-racist organisations want to touch. And so they leave it to be exploited by the real islamophobes and Nazis like Robinson.
Robin Ramsay, the head honcho of conspiracy magazine Lobster, has added a few more pieces in his ‘View from the Bridge’ column in its most recent issue, 83. Among the interesting snippets is a piece about a talk by Mark Curtis, the editor of Declassified UK about the propaganda and pro-establishment stance of the Groaniad. The piece points out that the newspaper supported Britain’s imperialistic wars in the middle east and elsewhere, ran puff-pieces in support of GCHQ and MI5 and along with the Absurder promoted the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn. Not least because Corbyn posed a serious threat to stopping conflicts like the Saudi war in Yemen. The article runs
‘Mark Curtis on the Guardian
The historian Mark Curtis is editor of Declassified UK. He spoke at a conference on the Guardian newspaper. Curtis has not posted his talk but here is an account of it:
‘According to Curtis, the Guardian plays a key role in misinforming the British public about foreign affairs and upholding the establishment. It promotes a benign myth of Britain as “the good guys” championing a rules-based international order, while failing to really cover Britain’s role in World affairs. Indeed, it had been co-opting liberal-minded people into thinking they are being told the truth. With its wars in Iraq, Libya etc. and its role in supporting countries with bad human-rights records such as Israel and Egypt, Britain had been failing to uphold the rulings and values of the UN and could be reasonably considered “a rogue state”. Curtis also found that the Guardian had unreasonably exempted Britain from responsibility for events in Syria, failing to investigate covert support for jihadist groups in the early part of its civil war. While agreeing with the Guardian’s denunciation of the Trump period and acknowledging the hostile actions of countries like Russia, he thought that the Guardian had been excessively enthusiastic about Anglo-American cooperation under Obama and Biden presidencies. While the Guardian sometimes exposes how the establishment behaves, it largely acts in support of it, and in recent years it has shredded its capacity to do more independent reporting. Much of this can be explained by what happened since the Snowden revelations, i.e. Britain’s security state took a proactive posture so as to neutralise the independence of the Guardian’s coverage of foreign affairs . . . . It was now running “puffpieces” on the security services, notably GCHQ and MI6, and was often acting as an amplifier and conduit for the state’s media operations of unsubstantiated claims by British intelligence agencies about threats faced by foreign powers. When in 2015, Britain gained a political leader who might have transformed Britain’s policy towards Saudi Arabia, the Yemen War and elsewhere, the Guardian and the Observer dedicated a huge effort to undermining the prospect of a Corbyn-led Government. The Guardian’s posture was overtly hostile and it all but accused him of being antisemitic, while demonising the Labour leadership for failing to address antisemitism in the Party. In the four years up to the General Election of 2019, it had published about 1,380 articles on antisemitism and the Labour Party or Jeremy Corbyn.’
None of this remotely surprises. The accepted view is that the Groan is a Labour party and far-left, but it actually isn’t. There have been numerous times since the 70s where it’s urged its reader to go out and vote Liberal or Lib Dem. In the 1980s one of its journos was promoting the SDP as ‘the sensible party’, as opposed to Labour ‘the loony party’ and the Tories, ‘the patriotic party’. It looks more left-wing than it actually is because of the strong feminist and anti-racist, pro-minority content. And I think Lobster at the time commented on how one of the Groan’s journos backed the Iraq invasion using pretty much the same arguments as the Neo-Cons.
We really don’t have a left-wing press in this country. The Mirror is Blairite, the I is non-aligned, but was very strongly against Corbyn and again, did its level best to push the anti-Semitism smears. The only left-wing newspaper is the Communist Morning Star. Hence the very narrow range of permitted political discussion in this country, in which anything that might smack of renationalising the utilities and the NHS and ditching four decades of Thatcherism is definitely proscribed.
I’ve put up a number of videos from Simon Webb’s History Debunked channel on YouTube. Webb’s an author of a string of history books and a Torygraph-reading right-winger. He specialises in tackling the gross historical distortions and myths that are now being promoted as trustworthy Black history. He’s also, you won’t be surprised to read, an opponent of immigration and affirmative action. I think his videos criticising Black history are largely accurate, though as with anything else on the net you should also check it, and your well advised to take some of his other views with more than a little scepticism. But in the video below he seems to make a good point regarding the over-emphasis on promoting Black film and talent at the expense of other ethnic minorities. It’s shown in the forthcoming Beeb adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days.
Webb argues that Blacks are actually overrepresented in the media compared to their numbers as a percentage of the British population. The total BAME population of Britain is 15 per cent, with Blacks accounting for 3 per cent. But if you look on television or film, you find a much larger proportion of Black actors, performers and presenters and relatively fewer Asian faces. It seems that when it comes to ‘diversity’ and the promotion of non-White talent, in practice this means Blacks. This is shown in the way the Beeb has swapped the races of the leading characters in their version of Jules Verne’s classic yarn. Phileas Fogg remains White, but his servant, Passepartout has been made Black. The love interest is a White woman. But in the book she’s Indian, as apparently having two non-White lead characters would be too much.
It’s a very long time since I read the book, and I can’t remember very much about it, though I’ve got the film version on DVD. Assuming that what he says is right, and the leading lady in the book is Indian, I would have thought that made the story diverse enough without messing around with the other characters. Not so, apparently. Webb speculates that this emphasis on Black talent possibly comes from the TV companies’ need to sell to America, where Blacks constitute a much higher proportion of the population at 13 per cent. I think he has a point. A few months ago a Black actor or director appeared in the I calling for more parts for Black actors otherwise they would leave Britain and go to America. And it certainly seems to me that there are more opportunities for Black actors over the pond. It might also come from Blacks being rather more integrated into the western entertainment business. In America, people were listening to Black music, like Scott Joplin’s Rags since before the Jazz age. Over here, I think the pioneers were the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Americans who made a tour of Britain before the Second World War. And White Brits also listened to Caribbean calypsos before the emergence of Rock and Roll and such great performers as Little Richard, James Brown, Motown and so on. Despite the claims of racism in the music industry, which led to the establishment of the MOBOs as a set of separate music awards for Black artists, it really isn’t at all remarkable to see Black singers and musicians in the charts. In fact, I’d say it would be more remarkable if there weren’t any.
The same with drama. There are a number of Black Shakespearian thesps – Josette Simon, who played Dayna in the classic SF series Blake’s 7, had that theatrical background. I think a year or so ago Lenny Henry, who is very active promoted Black talent, appeared on stage as Hamlet. And this is apart from other plays from the classical repertoire, including those from Ancient Greece. There have also been a number of contemporary plays examining the position of Blacks in western society. I also wonder if part of the relative underrepresentation of Asians – and I am very well aware that there are Asian actors and presenters, like Anita Rani, Meera Syal, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Adil Ray – may come from that community’s general preference to choose careers other than the entertainment industry. Or at least, not the western canon. I am aware of the casting of an Asian actor, whose name I’ve forgotten, as the Master in last season’s Dr. Who, and others in Armando Iannucci’s film version of one of Dicken’s classics. But I wonder if the Asian community generally prefers to look to its own cultural traditions, like Bollywood movies and traditional Indian arts and theatre, rather than mainstream film, TV and music. There have been Asian artists and bands in the charts – Apache Indian, Corner Shop and Kula Shaker, and I remember Jaz Mann’s brief hit with Babylon Zoo in the ’90s. But there seems to be far fewer of them than Black performers.
Clearly in a White majority society, there are limited roles for Black and Asian performers, hence the demand for ‘colour blind’ casting, as actors from ethnic minorities are given the roles of White characters. I also wonder if some of the casting of Black performers for reasons of diversity isn’t part of an attempt to create work for them. I heard from academics years ago that there’s actually only work for a 1/4 of the drama students who graduate everywhere. I think if this was not tackled, it would be particularly acute for Black performers. And so to avoid another furore about racism and for the other reasons discussed, the entertainment industry is deliberately casting Black performers in greater proportion than they are as part of the general British population.
This forced diversity is unpopular with White right-wingers like Webb and Belfield, but it is a problem when it serves to discriminate against Asians. And that needs to be tackled, like any other form of racism.
I’ve posted a number of videos about Simon Webb and History Debunked. Webb’s channel specialises in attacking what he considers to be myths and falsehoods published as authentic Black history. He’s a Telegraph-reading Tory, and so, like everything else on the net, his claims need to be checked. Sometimes they’re true and at other times they’re much less so. As I’ve also pointed out. But this short video, of just over two minutes, is interesting.
In it, he contrasts the massive reporting of the felling of the statue to Edward Colston in Bristol last summer by a mainly White crowd of Black Lives Matter demonstrators with the felling of a statue to the late Ethiopian emperor, Hailie Selassie three weeks later. This received hardly any coverage. The Beeb briefly mentioned it, but did not report that its attackers were Black. The statue had been attacked as part of a dispute between the Oromos and Amharas, two Ethiopian tribes. It didn’t receive the same coverage as the attack on Colston’s statue as it didn’t fit the narrative the media were trying to push at the time of the BLM protests.
I can see how this would be so. Colston’s statue was torn down as part of the Black Lives Matter movement’s anger at the racism they perceived in British society and the continuing legacy and celebration of colonialism and slavery.
The problem is, so could the attack on Selassie’s statue.
My guess is that the attack on the statue wasn’t covered because it was seen as a dispute between the citizens of a foreign country which didn’t have any relevance to British racial politics. But this is not the case. Ethiopia has rightly been admired by Black radicals because it is the single African country that was not conquered by Europeans. But it was, like many other African nations, a slaving culture. In the 19th century the British and Egyptian authorities were concerned about Abyssinian slave raiding in the Sudan to the point were a punitive expedition was launched. In the early part of the 20th, the British authorities in central Africa were concerned about Abyssinian raids into Uganda to capture slaves there. One British officer, Major Darnley, was so outraged at the Britain’s refusal to stop these raids that he went undercover into Abyssinia itself to write a book, Slaves and Ivory, to describe his adventure. Darnley wrote that the dominant tribe, the Amharas, were enslaving the other Abyssinian peoples and as a result, whole provinces were being depopulated. His book was written with the intention of provoking an outraged British public into demanding an invasion to stop these atrocities. In fact, so great was the problem of Ethiopian slaving that Dame Kathleen Simon, a fervent opponent of it, supported the Italian Fascist invasion in the belief that it would finally put an end to it. The entry on her on Wikipedia states “Lady Simon embarrassed the supporters of Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, on the eve of the Second Italo–Ethiopian War by uncovering his slave-owning wealth.[2] She claimed that Benito Mussolini had convinced her that he would try to eradicate slavery in Ethiopia.[5]“
It’s clear that this is a problem for Black Lives Matter and their attacks on historical slavery as there really does seem a determination to play down indigenous African slavery and involvement in the global slave trade. Slave markets have reopened in the continent in Libya and Uganda. However, there is silence about this from western Black activists. Barbara Barnaby, the head of British Black Lives Matter, mentioned the slave markets in Libya in a speech at the Arise Festival of left-wing ideas, Why Socialists Oppose Imperialism. But did she did so only as the result of European and American imperialism in the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafy. She didn’t mention Uganda at all. The I’s columnist, Kate Maltby, has said this refusal to involve questions about Black slaving is because the question is a diversion to stop the struggle of western Blacks against racism. She has a point, but there is still a racial double standard being exercised. Whites are being criticised for historic crimes, but the same outrage is not directed at African peoples and nations that were equally culpable. How many Brits, for example, are aware that there are streets named after and statues to Efronye Tinobue, a 19th century female African slaver, in her native Nigeria? I doubt many of the mob that demolished the statue to Colston were aware of the African involvement in the slave trade, and would probably be upset if they were told.
But if monuments to Whites withconnections to slavery are to be torn down and renamed, so should those to Africans with the same connections, like Hailie Selassie. And the African and Islamic involvement in the slave trade should be far better known.
Here’s another landmark on the march of militant populism across Europe and the ominous threat of the return of real Fascism. Mahyar Tousi is a right-wing, pro-Brexit YouTube, who regularly denounces the left. Normally I wouldn’t watch his videos, but last night he posted a grim one which reported that a group of twenty former French generals had signed a letter, published in the right-wing news magazine, Valeurs Actuelles, calling for a military coup if President Macron failed to stop the disintegration of France by Islamists. The first signature was that of Christian Piquemal, a former head of the French foreign legion. Macron’s government condemned the wretched letter and compared it to the failed military coup which tried to topple President de Gaulle during the Algerian war of independence sixty years ago.
The letter declared that France ‘is in danger. Several mortal perils threaten her. Even in retirement we remain soldiers of France and cannot in the present circumstances remain indifferent to the fate of our beautiful country.’ According to its signatories, the country was disintegrating with the Islamists of the hordes of suburbs – banlieus – who were detaching large parts of the nation and turning them into territory subject to dogmas contrary to the constitution’. They accused the government of sparking hatred because of the brutal police treatment of the Yellow Vest protesters two years ago. They warned that if nothing was done, there would be an explosion and then intervention by our comrades on active service in the dangerous mission of protecting our civilised values and the safety of our compatriots.’
Marine le Pen, the head of the National Rally party, has come out in support of a coup. Tousi calls this ‘a bit crazy, because France is still a democracy at this point’, and he doesn’t know why people are getting so emotional. His video also show a graph of the various parties’ support according to the opinion polls. These show Macron and Le Pen neck and neck at 26 per cent, Xavier Bertrand, an Independent centre-right candidate at 15 per cent, Jean Melenchon of the Far Left at 11 per cent, and Anne Hidalgo of the centre left at 6 per cent. The report on which Tousi draws for his coverage of the issue states that the generals’ letter has especial resonance following the murder a few days ago of a woman working in a Limousin police station by a Tunisian Islamist.
There are several remarks to be made here. There’s been much anti-Arab racism in France for sometime now, just as there’s racism here across the pond. About twenty or so years ago the Independent’s and I’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown complained about the racism her family experienced when on holiday in south of France. However, she subsequently wrote an article several years later about how the situation had changed for the better when her family went back there on holiday. And a few years ago there was a series of mass protests under a slogan that translates into English as ‘Don’t Touch My Mate’ of White French young people attacking this racism in solidarity with their Arab friends.
I think the racial situation on the other side of the Channel has got worse due to recent Islamist atrocities, such as the attack in Marseilles a few years ago and the mass murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. The spectre of this attack returned a few weeks ago when a French schoolteacher, Thomas Paty, was murdered by an enraged Muslim for showing a classroom of children one of the blasphemous cartoons from Hebdo which provoked the attack. Paty was teaching a lesson about freedom of speech, and had warned his Muslim students that he was going to show the cartoon. If they were going to be offended, then they were allowed to leave the room. Some of them stayed, told their parents, and someone at the local mosque then put Paty’s details up on the Net. This prompted a raft of legislation against Islamist terrorism, and I’ve seen videos on YouTube claiming that, to show his defiance of the Islamists, Macron not only gave Paty a state funeral, but he had the cartoon displayed on public buildings. According to Sargon of Gasbag, the man who broke UKIP, and his mates over at the Lotus Eaters YouTube panel, the legislation provides for the deportation of the foreign-born parents of any child who protests over cartoons. If this is correct, then the French government is coming down very hard, and because of this there have been counterdemonstrations against the new laws by Muslims.
Many of the Islamist terrorists came from the banlieus. Muslims are generally underprivileged across Europe, and from what I was taught in geography while I was at school, the banlieus are grim places of tower blocks, unemployment, despair and nothing else. They don’t, or at least didn’t, have any basic services because their planners believed they weren’t necessary. Their residents could simply travel into the centre of town for whatever they needed.
The rhetoric about parts of France being detached and governed by dogmas against the constitution clearly mirrors the concern here in Britain and the rhetoric about the growth of parallel societies and Muslim ‘no-go areas’ governed by sharia law. Laicisme – secularism – is the official stance of the French state towards religion. It’s why the authorities there tried to ban the wearing of the hijab in school by Muslim schoolgirls. There are real issues about the rejection of French secular values in Arab and Muslim areas. A little while ago French television screened a documentary about the very strong pressure in these areas against women appearing in public and going to cafes. This disapproval even extended to western women living in those areas. The documentary followed the efforts of a group of female protesters to assert their right to go about in public and visit the cafes.
As for Marine le Pen coming out in favour of a dictatorship, she has just shown her true colours. the National Rally was originally the Front National, an avowed Fascist organisation, and her father, le Pen senior, made his living selling Nazi memorabilia. Marine Le Pen managed to win massive support for her party by dropping some of the Fascist symbolism and giving a more moderate, centre-right image. It was still anti-immigration, but a Black female rapper performed at one of their rallies on the grounds that she was still a patriotic French woman. And like UKIP and the former Brexit party over here, now Reform, it’s very much against the EU. It’s picked up much of its support from the elements of the French White working class, who’ve been left behind by neoliberalism and ‘centrist’ welfare cuts, and who also feel threatened by immigration and the European Union. The poor performance of the centre left in the polls also appears to bear out what I’ve heard and read elsewhere about the collapse of the centre left across Europe due to their embrace of neoliberalism. This could very well happen in Britain if Starmer and the Blairites keep their grip on the Labour party. The extreme right – the BNP, National Front and similar organisations – have all collapsed in Britain, or been banned as terrorist groups like National Action, although tiny little Fascist grouplets still remain. Nevertheless, the rise of National Rally in France does indicate that there could be space for a similar populist right-wing party over here.
Tousi in his video says that the generals’ letter is strange and wonders if Marine le Pen will lose or gain support by backing it. It’s a good question. Tousi says that Macron’s government has come under criticism from both the left and the right, and the generals’ complaint is that while Macron talks tough, and he hasn’t followed this up with action. As for supporting any kind of Fascist dictatorship, the village of Oradour-Sur-Glane in the Haute Vienne department of the Limousin provides a very stark, grim reminder of why no-one should. This was a village where all but 18 of its 660 inhabitants were butchered by the Waffen SS in June 1944 as a reprisals for kidnappings, attacks and sabotage by the resistance. It’s been preserved as a memorial. It’s a graphic reminder of the utterly horrific nature of Fascism – torture, mass murder and butchery on an industrial scale. Given the atrocities committed by the Nazis across Europe, and particularly in France and Poland, it astonishes me that any self-respecting French person or Pole could ever vote for or support such a party.
Hopefully no-one will take this call for a coup seriously and France will remain a democracy. But it does indicate that democracy is very fragile. And we have absolutely no reason to feel complacent over this side of the Channel. In the mid-1970s groups of politicians and industrialists, including the editors of the Times and the Mirror, wanted to overthrow Harold Wilson’s government and replace it with an emergency government or military dictatorship, to save Britain from the left and the trade unions.
We have to fight Fascism wherever we find it. And we need to take seriously the fact that it always presents itself as defending society from the absolute forces of evil.
If it rises again in France, how long before the sound of jackboots marching will be heard in Britain.
Oradour-Sur-Glane as it is today following the Nazi Massacre of its people. From Richard Harper, Abandoned Places – 60 Stories of Places Where Time Has Stopped ( Glasgow: Collins 2014) 68-71.
I’m not going to link to Tousi’s video, as he is a man of the right, but if you want to see it on YouTube, it’s title is ‘Retired Generals Call For Military Takeover In France’
Okay, I’ve blogged about it before when Bristol City council first passed the motion all those weeks ago. These were a couple of pieces about the motion, brought by Green councillor Cleo Lake, and seconded by Labour’s deputy mayor and head of equalities Asher Green, calling for the payment of reparations for slavery to all of Britain’s ‘Afrikan’ community. I criticised this because this motion effectively means the payment of reparations to the African peoples responsible for the raiding and enslavement, and their sale to outsiders. It wasn’t just European, who purchased and enslaved the continent’s peoples, but also Muslims, Arabs and Indians. The motion falsifies history by reducing a complex situation to simple Black and White – White Europeans versus Black Africans. I believe Lake and Craig are playing racial politics here by trying to create a unified Black British community by presenting all British Blacks as the victims of White, European, British slavery when this was not historically the case.
The motion also raises other issues by setting the precedent for formerly enslaved peoples to sue their former captors. Thus Black Africans could also demand reparations from Morocco, Algeria, Turkey and the successors to the great Arab caliphates of the Middle Ages – perhaps Saudi Arabia? – Oman and other states for their enslavement. As could Europeans. 2.5 million White Europeans were carried off into slavery by the Barbary pirates from Morocco and Algiers. Would the councillors, who supported and passed Lake’s and Craig’s slavery reparations motion also support similar motions for the payment of reparations to these people from their former masters?
I wrote to Lake and Craig raising these issues, and so far have received no reply. Perhaps they’re too busy. Craig has received 6,000 racially abusive messages, which I condemn, so perhaps she hasn’t looked at it because it’s been lost in all the other mail she’s received about it.
I tried to get the press interested in this issue, and so submitted an article about it. I first sent it to the Guardian, and then to a number of right-wing newspapers when I heard nothing from the Groan. I thought the right-wing press would be perhaps be more likely to publish it, and it contradicts some of the attitudes and assumptions of the pro-Black activists that newspapers like the I, Independent and Observer share and promote. Along with the article itself, I sent the following cover message.
Dear Sir,
I would be very grateful if you would consider the attached article laying out some of the problems with the motion passed a few weeks ago in Bristol calling for the payment of reparations for slavery to the Black community. There are a number of difficult and complex issues raised by this, which I do not believe have been adequately discussed in the press. One of these is that the motion calls for both Africans and Afro-Caribbean people to be granted reparations. While I’ve no doubt that Black African people are as disadvantaged as people of West Indian heritage, there is a problem here as historically it was African peoples who did the dirty business of slaving, selling them not just to Europeans, but also to Muslim, Arab and Indian slavers. It would therefore be unjust for people the British enslave or who actively collaborated in slaving to receive compensation for slavery.
Other problems with the motion are that it sets a precedent for other peoples to demand reparations for their enslavement. White Europeans would, following this logic, also be justified in demanding reparations for the enslavement of 2 1/2 million Europeans by the Barbary pirates. And Black Africans would also be entitled to ask Muslim and Arab nations for reparations for their enslavement of them.
I also consider the motion to be racially divisive, as it seeks to create a unified Black community, who are represented as equal victims, against Whites, who are considered slavers, thus simplifying a complex historical issue.
I hope you will consider the article suitable, and look forward to your reply.
Yours,
And here’s the article itself.
Slavery Reparations: Not All Blacks Were the Victims, Some Were the Slavers
A few weeks ago Bristol Council passed a motion calling for the payment of reparations to the Black British community for their enslavement. The motion was introduced by Cleo Lake, a former mayor and the Green Councillor for Cotham in the city, and seconded by Asher Craig, the city’s deputy mayor and head of equality. The reparations were to be both financial and cultural. It was moved that they should take the form of proper funding for projects to improve conditions for the Black community and raise them to the same, sustainable level of equality with the rest of British society. These projects were to be led and guided by Black organisations themselves. And the reparations should include all ‘Afrikans’, by which eccentric spelling Councillor Lake meant both Afro-Caribbean people and Black Africans. The motion was passed 47 to 11. It was supported by the Greens, Labour and the Lib Dems. Only the Tories opposed it. They said that while it came from ‘a good place’, the motion was ‘divisive’. In fact, there are a number of reasons why it should be opposed. The most important of these is that Black Africans were hardly innocent of slaving themselves.
Slavery existed in Africa long before the European invasion, and Britain wasn’t the only country that traded in enslaved Africans. So did the Arabs, Ottoman Turks, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch. The first Black slaves in Europe were enslaved by Arabs and taken to al-Andalus, Muslim Spain. In addition to the transatlantic slave trade, there was also an Islamic slave trade to north Africa and Muslim nations in Asia. Although there were exceptions, Europeans did not directly enslave their African victims. Before the 19th century ‘Scramble for Africa’, powerful African states prevented Europeans from penetrating inland and seizing African territory. The European slave merchants were largely confined to specific quarters, rather like European ghettos, in these state’s main towns, from whom they purchased their human cargo. By the 19th century powerful African slaving nations, such as Dahomey, Whydah and Badagry had emerged in West Africa. In East Africa, the Yao, Marganja and Swahili peoples enslaved the people of other nations to sell to the Arabs. Some were purchased by the Imaum of Muscat, now Oman, for labour on his immensely profitable clove plantations in Zanzibar. It was to prevent Indian merchants from importing enslaved Africans into British India that the British government opened negotiations with the Imaum to halt the east African slave trade.
Part of the rationale for British imperialism was to stamp out the slave trade and slavery at its point of supply, and this was one of the causes of African resistance to British expansionism. The Mahdi’s rebellion in the Sudan, for example, was caused by the British attempting to abolish the Arab enslavement of Black Sudanese. It was to halt slaving by Dahomey that Britain fought a war against its king, Guezo. In some parts of Africa, slavery continued up to the 20th century because these countries had not been conquered by Europeans. The slave trade to Morocco continued to 1910 because the European powers had blocked the European invasion of that country. Slavery also persisted in Ethiopia, whose armies also preyed on the peoples of the surrounding African states, prompting a British punitive expedition in the 1880s.
This obviously presents problems for the payment of reparations to all sections of the Black British community, because some African nations weren’t the victims of White enslavement. They were the slavers. Someone once remarked on this situation that if reparations were to be paid, it should be by Africans compensating the Black peoples of the Caribbean and Americas.
And there are other problems with slavery reparations. If reparations were paid to Blacks for the enslavement of their ancestors, it would set a precedent for similar demands by other ethnicities. For example, up until the conquest of Algeria by France in the 19th century, White Europeans were captured and enslaved by Muslim pirates from Morocco and Algiers. About 2 ½ million people, including those from Bristol and the West Country, were carried off. The demand for reparations for the Black victims of slavery means that, by the same logic, White Europeans would also be justified in demanding reparations for the enslavement of their ancestors from those countries. At the same time, Black Africans would also be entirely justified in claiming reparations from the Muslim nations that enslaved them, such as perhaps Turkey or Saudi Arabia. But there have been no such demands, at least to my knowledge.
I don’t doubt that Black Africans in Bristol or elsewhere in the UK suffer the same problems of marginalisation, poverty, unemployment and discrimination as the rest of the Black population, nor that there should be official programmes to tackle these problems. And it is only fair and proper that they should be guided and informed by the Black community itself. But reparations cannot justly be paid to the Black community as a whole because of the deep involvement of some African peoples in slavery and the slave trade.
Furthermore, there’s a nasty, anti-White dimension to Lake’s motion. By claiming that all Blacks, both West Indian and African, were equally victims of the slave trade, she and her supporters seem to be trying to create a unified Black community by presenting all of them as the victims of White predation, simplifying a complex historical situation along racial lines.
I’ve written to councillors Lake and Craig about these issues, but so far have not received an answer. In Councillor Craig’s case, it may well be that my message to her got lost amongst the 6,000 abusive emails she is reported to have received. It is, of course, disgusting that she should suffer such abuse, and she has my sympathies in this. But this does not alter the fact that reparations for Black slavery raise a number of difficult issues which make it unsuitable as a means of improving conditions for Black Britons.
Well, I haven’t heard anything from any of the newspapers I submitted it to, not even an acknowledgement. It seems the news cycle has moved on and they’re not interested. But this doesn’t mean that the arguments against the motion are any less valid, and I thought people would like to read these arguments again for themselves, as well as about my efforts to raise them in the press.
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