I don't think slavery created racism, quite the opposite. Blaming racism on slavery is like blaming a puddle for the rain. Racism predated slavery and outlasted it too.
Pre-existing racism allowed slavery to flourish, not the other way around. Racism is an evil in its own right and doesn't require slavery to happen or to be tackled.
And yet, as you point out, it was technological dominance that enabled the slave trade - and did not the racial 'science' of the nineteenth century, which was and is part and parcel of the racism of the modern era, emerge from the societal mindset necessary to maintaining the institutions of plantation slavery in the midst of civilised societies ?
Surely slavery is a result of racism, seeing Blacks and Asians as lesser than European whites allowed the thinking to justify slavery in a moral sense - "it's not wrong because Blacks/Asians aren't people".
It's the same kind of thinking that allows slavery to pervade the Middle East and why slave markets operate across North Africa selling black Africans into slavery into the Middle East.
Historically, not necessarily. The Romans took slaves from all over - and were quite happy to give citizenship to all ethnicities, too.
Sure, racism is often an element of it, but there is something particular about the racism that arose from nineteenth century plantation slavery that is quite distinct. The coexistence of industrialised brutality perpetrated on a particular set of people, alongside societies that were developing liberal democracy and respect for human rights is an odd thing, and required a peculiar mindset.
Britain squared the circle, up to a point, with its abolition of slavery; the US not so much.
The US morally squared the circle by basically treating blacks as not real people. As I said, that's where this form of slavery was driven by racism rather than the other way around.
I don't think slavery created racism, quite the opposite. Blaming racism on slavery is like blaming a puddle for the rain. Racism predated slavery and outlasted it too.
Pre-existing racism allowed slavery to flourish, not the other way around. Racism is an evil in its own right and doesn't require slavery to happen or to be tackled.
And yet, as you point out, it was technological dominance that enabled the slave trade - and did not the racial 'science' of the nineteenth century, which was and is part and parcel of the racism of the modern era, emerge from the societal mindset necessary to maintaining the institutions of plantation slavery in the midst of civilised societies ?
Surely slavery is a result of racism, seeing Blacks and Asians as lesser than European whites allowed the thinking to justify slavery in a moral sense - "it's not wrong because Blacks/Asians aren't people".
It's the same kind of thinking that allows slavery to pervade the Middle East and why slave markets operate across North Africa selling black Africans into slavery into the Middle East.
I'm struggling a bit with the idea that us Brits invented the slave trade.
As I understand it, the term Slav is a corruption of the word 'slave' and reflects the trading enterprise of the Scandinavians who took prisoners for the specific purpose of selling them. Because they were valuable, they tended to look after the product, at least until the had been sold, or otherwise disposed of.
I also understand that the ancient Egyptians were a bit tough on the Nubians. No doubt PBers can offer other examples.
Why do we Brits get the credit for inventing the idea?
Are you not being a little mischievous here?
Walk down Whiteladies Road or Blackboy Hill in Bristol and it may remind you that parts of our country were indeed at the vanguard of African slave trading.
Earlier in the year I was touring the Caribbean on a cruise ship, most of the passengers being American. In Antigua I asked the guide why the notion of slavery was skirted around in her presentation. She explained that her American customers quite often didn't want to hear about the history of Caribbean/American slavery. Several American Tourists over the years had called her out, suggesting slavery was a myth and these people were merely indentured servants.
My own issue, is not with the history, I would prefer it to be recalled accurately rather than conveniently rewritten, I do object to countrymen today wrapping themselves in the flag of empire and claiming those days to be the nadir of British achievement, generally without knowing what they are talking about. We should nonetheless not be expected to apologise on behalf of our forefathers
Mr. Boy, white supremacy and privilege wasn't much in evidence in Rotherham, Telford, Oxford, Newcastle etc when it came to the industrial scale rape of white girls and boys, and the reaction of authorities to the accusations.
I'm sure racism is still all too commonplace, and it should not be tolerated. That includes turning a blind eye to the abuse of children because of their skin colour (and/or class). Terms like white supremacy or white privilege judge people according to their skin colour, propagating rather than opposing overt bigotry.
So we don't think the Empire left a legacy of white privilege that endures to this day then?
No, I think that puts the cart before the horse.
White privilege created Empire not the other way around.
I think the problem with the whole “X privilege” debate is that it is easy to examine these things when you are comfortable. It is easy to “acknowledge your privilege” when you are comfortable.
If you are personally struggling either financially, physically, or socially, it is not exactly a rational response to declare “I AM IN A PRIVILEGED POSITION”, regardless whether your “race” or “gender” is on the whole privileged.
AIUI it is not saying every white person is privileged (although admittedly there is a fringe who think so), the mainstream interpretation and the one I would agree with is on average white people are more privileged.
And yes, it should be discussed and prioritised in conjunction with other factors such as education, class, gender, etc with might make it a top 5 issue in the US but only a top 20 issue in the Uk.
My understanding is different. Privilege in this system is defined relatively. We're not trying to measure an absolute scale of priviliege out of 100, with say Jeff Bezos or the Duke of Westminster in the high 90s, and Rohyngia refugees somewhere below 10. Instead, the point is that if you have two people in the UK or US who are otherwise identical but one is white and the other black, the white person will have a better experience because they will not encounter racism. They may both have problems, maybe even serious problems, but the white person is relatively privileged because they have one less problem than the black person.
This is precisely why it's a tricky conversation, because if you're using an absolute scale and I'm talking in relative terms, pretty soon one of us will say something that sounds insane to the other, and we'll end up assuming that the other is incorrigibly racist/woke (delete as applicable).
Looking at the data it seems Starmer isn't making much of an impression on the British public. That's not surprising, everything he's said so far is fairly negative and rather than offering solutions to a national crisis he's been carping from the sidelines with the benefit of hindsight.
The data indicates a very clear reduction in unfavourable views of Labour. That may be Corbyn going rather than Starmer arriving (I suspect it is), but either way it's good news.
But no increase in favourables, that's the lack of a positive vision. Everything he's said and done is negative so far, lawyerly carping will only get Labour so far.
Oppositions oppose. The Tories are going to have to get used to that after having so many years without facing one. Labour has supported the lockdown and has supported the economic measures that Sunak has taken. It has also criticised some aspects of the government's strategy. This is all quite normal.
I think that's true in normal times, but at this point in time the public expects all political parties to pull together and row in the same direction. Carping from the sidelines about what happened 4 weeks ago and at the same time not proposing a solution 4 weeks ago is playing worse than I expected, even among natural lefties I know.
I also think the lawyerly letters are not going down as well as he thinks.
This is the time for bold visions to be laid out about the future of the country, Labour is still a blank sheet of paper and so is Starmer.
I am not seeing bold visions from anyone right now. I have no idea what the government's one is or how it will be paid for.
Given that Labour's favourability ratings are improving, I am not sure that it is acting in a way that the country finds particularly reprehensible. As for the letters, I am not sure why so many Tories are so fixated on them. They are hepful devices, but I doubt many people have noticed them.
A bold vision needs to be centred on environment and biotech - those are two areas where we can transform not just our lives for the better but gain long lasting global competitive advantages based on our current assets.
Funnily enough, that is precisely the idea set out by the S Korean president for their pandemic economic recovery package.
Looking at the data it seems Starmer isn't making much of an impression on the British public. That's not surprising, everything he's said so far is fairly negative and rather than offering solutions to a national crisis he's been carping from the sidelines with the benefit of hindsight.
The data indicates a very clear reduction in unfavourable views of Labour. That may be Corbyn going rather than Starmer arriving (I suspect it is), but either way it's good news.
But no increase in favourables, that's the lack of a positive vision. Everything he's said and done is negative so far, lawyerly carping will only get Labour so far.
Oppositions oppose. The Tories are going to have to get used to that after having so many years without facing one. Labour has supported the lockdown and has supported the economic measures that Sunak has taken. It has also criticised some aspects of the government's strategy. This is all quite normal.
I think that's true in normal times, but at this point in time the public expects all political parties to pull together and row in the same direction. Carping from the sidelines about what happened 4 weeks ago and at the same time not proposing a solution 4 weeks ago is playing worse than I expected, even among natural lefties I know.
I also think the lawyerly letters are not going down as well as he thinks.
This is the time for bold visions to be laid out about the future of the country, Labour is still a blank sheet of paper and so is Starmer.
I am not seeing bold visions from anyone right now. I have no idea what the government's one is or how it will be paid for.
Given that Labour's favourability ratings are improving, I am not sure that it is acting in a way that the country finds particularly reprehensible. As for the letters, I am not sure why so many Tories are so fixated on them. They are hepful devices, but I doubt many people have noticed them.
A bold vision needs to be centred on environment and biotech - those are two areas where we can transform not just our lives for the better but gain long lasting global competitive advantages based on our current assets.
Funnily enough, that is precisely the idea set out by the S Korean president for their pandemic economic recovery package.
If they get it right, perhaps the next empire will be Korean not Chinese.
I thought the gatherings were meant to be no more than 6 people, not no more than 6 friends?
If I was to invite 5 friends I know and told them to all invite a "plus one" that nobody else in the group knew, then am I allowed to have 12 in my gathering Piers since there's only six friends there?
In a park there are often 1000+ people there. I have never understood why it matters if you know more than 1 or 5 or 6 of them. As long as they are socially distanced it really doesnt matter. If they are not socially distanced, not knowing them doesnt help either.
Which is the point. Gatherings are supposed to be limited to 6 and kept socially distanced. Having thousands together not socially distanced isn't suddenly within the rules just because the thousands are strangers.
If Piers were intellectually honest he should say "yes the COVID rules were broken but for a good cause that was more important" - but of course he's been arguing against the opposite for others for so long he can't be honest and just lies instead.
Or my son decided to attend a protest, that was his decision, he is his own man, but that was breaking the rules and I won't be doing so.
Instead after his hyperbolic reaction to every twist and turn of this crisis, he is now trying to defend his son for breaking the rules, in direct contrast to how he has roasted everybody else who he has set his sights on.
He is simply a massive hypocrite. And if we were going to go all "position of responsibility" ala Big Dom, he has a large platform which he is now using to excuse certain rule breaking, rather than make clear the potential dangers of such large gatherings (especially to BAME individuals, who it appears are more likely to be badly affected by this virus).
Can we just stipulate that Piers Morgan is an arse ?
This ought not to be controversial.
On the one hand something we can all agree on. On the other hand it is annoying that Morgan seems to have made a very lucrative career out of everyone agreeing that he is an arse.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
I
a country.
I'm afraid I disagree with much of this I'm afraid. Windrush was Home Office bureaucratic pedantry over changed immigration law - not evidence of endemic racism. I can't speak for you but slavery was very clearly taught in my school and its lessons were very obvious. I'd be very careful about issue like "compensating the descendents", which has all sorts of vested self-interests in it and is ripe for abuse and creating further division.
Good on you for admitting your past failings and learning from them. It's good of you to share that. But there is no 'white supremacy' now and hasn't been for decades.
We need to move on from upping the ante on battles largely fought and won 30-40 years ago, and address any residual issues proportionately, or we'll fuel further culture wars in the West, you'll get another Trump (or worse) as a reaction to that and China will exploit the divisions and weaknesses as way of establishing its global domination.
Let's move on.
I don't think we can move on until we accept our problems and try to fix them. I don't know any person of colour living in this country who doesn't think we still have a problem of endemic and systematic racism in this country, often manifested in subtle ways and by no means absent in the attitudes of the liberal middle class. Of course most of them would say that things are better now than in the 1970s and 1980s, but how did that happen if not by challenging the attitudes prevalent at the time. Nobody wants a culture war, but the very fact that that is the reaction when these issues is raised is in itself an obvious manifestation of white supremacy and white privilege. In my experience, people who get angry when you bring up racism tend to be racists. (I am not talking about you).
Obviously racism should be stamped on but this "white privilege" stuff is absolute bollox. There are just as many whites discriminated against , redheads , fat people , you name it. Why does no one whine about fixing problems for the "under privileged whites", preferring to try and claim they are more under privileged etc etc. It is a nice easy crutch to pick up to cover ones own failings and undermines fixing real racism.
Interesting to be told those opposed to racism are engaged, as you put it, in a “whine”.
The slogan is “Black Lives Matter” not “Only Black Lives Matter”. Doubtless white people who are poor, fat and red headed have their own share of problems. However, having been all of those things myself (hair faded to a more strawberry blond and grey these days, I certainly can’t plead poverty anymore, and my BMI is only “overweight” now) I can assure you that I have never faced prejudice on the scale that people of colour in this country, and globally, do. For example I have never been targeted by police for being a solo black man walking in a wealthy neighbourhood - as may of my friends have.
We can focus on the prejudices you refer to, such as they are, once we have fixed the ones we are looking at today. Today we are talking about racism.
The issue is most of those involved are only paying it lip service or are the real "white privileged". Focusing only on your chosen hobby horse and ignoring all the other just as valid issues is as bad as racism.
I don't think slavery created racism, quite the opposite. Blaming racism on slavery is like blaming a puddle for the rain. Racism predated slavery and outlasted it too.
Pre-existing racism allowed slavery to flourish, not the other way around. Racism is an evil in its own right and doesn't require slavery to happen or to be tackled.
And yet, as you point out, it was technological dominance that enabled the slave trade - and did not the racial 'science' of the nineteenth century, which was and is part and parcel of the racism of the modern era, emerge from the societal mindset necessary to maintaining the institutions of plantation slavery in the midst of civilised societies ?
Surely slavery is a result of racism, seeing Blacks and Asians as lesser than European whites allowed the thinking to justify slavery in a moral sense - "it's not wrong because Blacks/Asians aren't people".
It's the same kind of thinking that allows slavery to pervade the Middle East and why slave markets operate across North Africa selling black Africans into slavery into the Middle East.
I'm struggling a bit with the idea that us Brits invented the slave trade.
As I understand it, the term Slav is a corruption of the word 'slave' and reflects the trading enterprise of the Scandinavians who took prisoners for the specific purpose of selling them. Because they were valuable, they tended to look after the product, at least until the had been sold, or otherwise disposed of.
I also understand that the ancient Egyptians were a bit tough on the Nubians. No doubt PBers can offer other examples.
Why do we Brits get the credit for inventing the idea?
Are you not being a little mischievous here?
Walk down Whiteladies Road or Blackboy Hill in Bristol and it may remind you that parts of our country were indeed at the vanguard of African slave trading.
Earlier in the year I was touring the Caribbean on a cruise ship, most of the passengers being American. In Antigua I asked the guide why the notion of slavery was skirted around in her presentation. She explained that her American customers quite often didn't want to hear about the history of Caribbean/American slavery. Several American Tourists over the years had called her out, suggesting slavery was a myth and these people were merely indentured servants.
My own issue, is not with the history, I would prefer it to be recalled accurately rather than conveniently rewritten, I do object to countrymen today wrapping themselves in the flag of empire and claiming those days to be the nadir of British achievement, generally without knowing what they are talking about. We should nonetheless not be expected to apologise on behalf of our forefathers
To be pedantic those Bristol names were from pubs IIRC - not slavery. But that doesn't change the basic fact of Bristolian history.
The problem is that white privilege, as a term, itself is guilty of the lack of nuance you rightly cite. Black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Black criminality would rightly be lambasted as castigating a whole race based on a minority. Slapping a privilege label on a whole race, perhaps then used to then try and make them feel a dose of liberal guilt or to diminish their opinion, is simply wrong on both moral and intellectual levels.
As others have already pointed out, poor white boys do the worst in educational terms. The blanket approach of describing whites as privileged whitewashes, ahem, the educational situation.
Judging people based on the colour of their skin is a very unwise path.
Mr. kinabalu, you're aware that most white people didn't own slaves, right? And that many had terrible working conditions? But you want to judge all present day white people based on what a minority of white people did a few centuries ago?
Do you feel that critical about the black slave traders who sold their fellow Africans to the British Empire (prior to the slavery ban, whilst the trade continued to be perpetrated by Africans, Arabs, and others)? Or is it only white people worthy of this condemnation for the sins of a minority of their forefathers?
And how far back does this historical victimhood last? Can I claim it for the Harrowing of the North? The Roman invasion?
Trying to make people who have never had slaves feel guilty towards people who have never been slaves because of things that happened centuries ago and were done by other people that neither the non-slave owners nor the non-slaves have even met is madness.
I don't want you to feel guilty. It's a wholly destructive emotion.
But neither do I want you to be in denial of something so palpably true as that "white privilege" - if the term is understood correctly - is a real and significant thing.
I don't think slavery created racism, quite the opposite. Blaming racism on slavery is like blaming a puddle for the rain. Racism predated slavery and outlasted it too.
Pre-existing racism allowed slavery to flourish, not the other way around. Racism is an evil in its own right and doesn't require slavery to happen or to be tackled.
And yet, as you point out, it was technological dominance that enabled the slave trade - and did not the racial 'science' of the nineteenth century, which was and is part and parcel of the racism of the modern era, emerge from the societal mindset necessary to maintaining the institutions of plantation slavery in the midst of civilised societies ?
Surely slavery is a result of racism, seeing Blacks and Asians as lesser than European whites allowed the thinking to justify slavery in a moral sense - "it's not wrong because Blacks/Asians aren't people".
It's the same kind of thinking that allows slavery to pervade the Middle East and why slave markets operate across North Africa selling black Africans into slavery into the Middle East.
I'm struggling a bit with the idea that us Brits invented the slave trade.
As I understand it, the term Slav is a corruption of the word 'slave' and reflects the trading enterprise of the Scandinavians who took prisoners for the specific purpose of selling them. Because they were valuable, they tended to look after the product, at least until the had been sold, or otherwise disposed of.
I also understand that the ancient Egyptians were a bit tough on the Nubians. No doubt PBers can offer other examples.
Why do we Brits get the credit for inventing the idea?
Are you not being a little mischievous here?
Walk down Whiteladies Road or Blackboy Hill in Bristol and it may remind you that parts of our country were indeed at the vanguard of African slave trading.
Earlier in the year I was touring the Caribbean on a cruise ship, most of the passengers being American. In Antigua I asked the guide why the notion of slavery was skirted around in her presentation. She explained that her American customers quite often didn't want to hear about the history of Caribbean/American slavery. Several American Tourists over the years had called her out, suggesting slavery was a myth and these people were merely indentured servants.
My own issue, is not with the history, I would prefer it to be recalled accurately rather than conveniently rewritten, I do object to countrymen today wrapping themselves in the flag of empire and claiming those days to be the nadir of British achievement, generally without knowing what they are talking about. We should nonetheless not be expected to apologise on behalf of our forefathers
Wasn't really trying to be mischievous, but it does come fairly naturally to me....
Agree we shouldn't be overly apologetic. By the same rote, I do think it helps to understand how things got the way they are. There are many who have no idea how there comes to be so many black people here and in the USA.
As someone who’s family came to the UK as a result of anti-jewish pogroms, and thus has zero “British” blood, the Empire is a complete irrelevance outside pure historical fascination. I am neither proud of it, nor am I ashamed of it. It had nothing to do with me.
Huh? When was this? This morning? You are here, you are British.
Yes Gallowgate, you can't escape your guilt that easy. *
I think the problem with the whole “X privilege” debate is that it is easy to examine these things when you are comfortable. It is easy to “acknowledge your privilege” when you are comfortable.
If you are personally struggling either financially, physically, or socially, it is not exactly a rational response to declare “I AM IN A PRIVILEGED POSITION”, regardless whether your “race” or “gender” is on the whole privileged.
AIUI it is not saying every white person is privileged (although admittedly there is a fringe who think so), the mainstream interpretation and the one I would agree with is on average white people are more privileged.
And yes, it should be discussed and prioritised in conjunction with other factors such as education, class, gender, etc with might make it a top 5 issue in the US but only a top 20 issue in the Uk.
My understanding is different. Privilege in this system is defined relatively. We're not trying to measure an absolute scale of priviliege out of 100, with say Jeff Bezos or the Duke of Westminster in the high 90s, and Rohyngia refugees somewhere below 10. Instead, the point is that if you have two people in the UK or US who are otherwise identical but one is white and the other black, the white person will have a better experience because they will not encounter racism. They may both have problems, maybe even serious problems, but the white person is relatively privileged because they have one less problem than the black person.
This is precisely why it's a tricky conversation, because if you're using an absolute scale and I'm talking in relative terms, pretty soon one of us will say something that sounds insane to the other, and we'll end up assuming that the other is incorrigibly racist/woke (delete as applicable).
I thought the gatherings were meant to be no more than 6 people, not no more than 6 friends?
If I was to invite 5 friends I know and told them to all invite a "plus one" that nobody else in the group knew, then am I allowed to have 12 in my gathering Piers since there's only six friends there?
In a park there are often 1000+ people there. I have never understood why it matters if you know more than 1 or 5 or 6 of them. As long as they are socially distanced it really doesnt matter. If they are not socially distanced, not knowing them doesnt help either.
Which is the point. Gatherings are supposed to be limited to 6 and kept socially distanced. Having thousands together not socially distanced isn't suddenly within the rules just because the thousands are strangers.
If Piers were intellectually honest he should say "yes the COVID rules were broken but for a good cause that was more important" - but of course he's been arguing against the opposite for others for so long he can't be honest and just lies instead.
Or my son decided to attend a protest, that was his decision, he is his own man, but that was breaking the rules and I won't be doing so.
Instead after his hyperbolic reaction to every twist and turn of this crisis, he is now trying to defend his son for breaking the rules, in direct contrast to how he has roasted everybody else who he has set his sights on.
He is simply a massive hypocrite. And if we were going to go all "position of responsibility" ala Big Dom, he has a large platform which he is now using to excuse certain rule breaking, rather than make clear the potential dangers of such large gatherings (especially to BAME individuals, who it appears are more likely to be badly affected by this virus).
Can we just stipulate that Piers Morgan is an arse ?
This ought not to be controversial.
On the one hand something we can all agree on. On the other hand it is annoying that Morgan seems to have made a very lucrative career out of everyone agreeing that he is an arse.
It's a much more general media problem - controversy sells papers, generates clicks and eyeballs, so a bunch of arseholes become the most 'popular' and there's little market for straight-down-the-line reporting.
In a sensible world, something like the BBC would provide the impartial reporting without the constant opinionating, but as we've seen they're just as ratings-driven as everyone else.
Johnson has never had a bike that wasn't utterly shit and rides s-l-o-w-l-y. As a flahute I find it hard to identify with him as a cyclist.
Boris bikes are awful. Heavy, lumbering things, ridden at death-slow speeds by wobbly non-helmet wearers who can barely ride a bike.
That's much better than the boy-racer types (and quite a few girl-racers) riding at 40mph through red lights without bothering about pedestrians.
I walk around London a lot, and this really is becoming a problem. The police seem to do nothing about it at all.
As a matter of interest, has any PBer ever seen or heard of a cyclist being nicked for speeding?
In London, the limit is 20mph in most boroughs and when complying with it I am often overtaken by cyclists. Never seen one done for it.
Speed limits apply to motorised vehicles only.
I nearly wiped out half a dozen mamils the other day turning out into a major road in a 30 mph speed limit. I saw them in the far distance, up a hill, and thought, they are bikes: too far away to worry about, looked the other way and pulled out. It transpired they were coming much much faster than I thought was possible.
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
There's certainly a long way to go. But the economic impact of COVID is being felt now. There's plenty of Tory incompetence and mendacity on display now. It doesn't seem to be shifting the polls much.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
The Tories are polling exactly where they ended up at the 2019 general election. Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
There is a hell of a lot of damage to undo before Labour starts having poll leads. Tory hubris, incompetence and lies will hekp, but there needs to be more. Starmer is going to have to offer a stronger all-round critique of the governmnet once the immediate pandemic crisis has past, while also providing at least the outline of where he is taking Labour. On top of that, the LibDems also need to start picking up in the South and SW. The Tory embrace of animal cruelty to get a trade deal with Trump should help there.
As someone who’s family came to the UK as a result of anti-jewish pogroms, and thus has zero “British” blood, the Empire is a complete irrelevance outside pure historical fascination. I am neither proud of it, nor am I ashamed of it. It had nothing to do with me.
Huh? When was this? This morning? You are here, you are British.
You know what I mean!
There are those, especially on here, who can trace their families back to William the Conqueror. They have family myths and legends of participating in and benefiting from Empire. That doesn’t make it their guilt to bear, but it certainly makes it more “real”.
I can’t trace my family back more than 2 generations. The whole concept of Empire to me is the stuff of history books. Nothing more than a quaint historical story. I only know Britain as it is today.
FPT - (1) a lot of nonsense written last night about the Empire I see, borrowing heavily from the Marxist conflict theory school of historical thought.
@Richard_Nabavi is right. The self-flagellation is becoming extreme.
I
a country.
I'm afraid I disagree with much of this I'm afraid. Windrush was Home Office bureaucratic pedantry over changed immigration law - not evidence of endemic racism. I can't speak for you but slavery was very clearly taught in my school and its lessons were very obvious. I'd be very careful about issue like "compensating the descendents", which has all sorts of vested self-interests in it and is ripe for abuse and creating further division.
Good on you for admitting your past failings and learning from them. It's good of you to share that. But there is no 'white supremacy' now and hasn't been for decades.
We need to move on from upping the ante on battles largely fought and won 30-40 years ago, and address any residual issues proportionately, or we'll fuel further culture wars in the West, you'll get another Trump (or worse) as a reaction to that and China will exploit the divisions and weaknesses as way of establishing its global domination.
Let's move on.
I don't think we can move on until we accept our problems and try to fix them. I don't know any person of colour living in this country who doesn't think we still have a problem of endemic and systematic racism in this country, often manifested in subtle ways and by no means absent in the attitudes of the liberal middle class. Of course most of them would say that things are better now than in the 1970s and 1980s, but how did that happen if not by challenging the attitudes prevalent at the time. Nobody wants a culture war, but the very fact that that is the reaction when these issues is raised is in itself an obvious manifestation of white supremacy and white privilege. In my experience, people who get angry when you bring up racism tend to be racists. (I am not talking about you).
Obviously racism should be stamped on but this "white privilege" stuff is absolute bollox. There are just as many whites discriminated against , redheads , fat people , you name it. Why does no one whine about fixing problems for the "under privileged whites", preferring to try and claim they are more under privileged etc etc. It is a nice easy crutch to pick up to cover ones own failings and undermines fixing real racism.
Interesting to be told those opposed to racism are engaged, as you put it, in a “whine”.
The slogan is “Black Lives Matter” not “Only Black Lives Matter”. Doubtless white people who are poor, fat and red headed have their own share of problems. However, having been all of those things myself (hair faded to a more strawberry blond and grey these days, I certainly can’t plead poverty anymore, and my BMI is only “overweight” now) I can assure you that I have never faced prejudice on the scale that people of colour in this country, and globally, do. For example I have never been targeted by police for being a solo black man walking in a wealthy neighbourhood - as may of my friends have.
We can focus on the prejudices you refer to, such as they are, once we have fixed the ones we are looking at today. Today we are talking about racism.
The issue is most of those involved are only paying it lip service or are the real "white privileged". Focusing only on your chosen hobby horse and ignoring all the other just as valid issues is as bad as racism.
If anyone wants to claim that white people also experience the same discrimination ask yourself this:
How many white people feel forced to warn their kids by the time they are 11 they are at risk of being unfairly targeted by the police, which can result in them being beaten up, wrongly arrested, seriously injured or even killed.
This has happened, and has been going on for decades in this country, although thankfully at a far lesser scale than the evident police brutality in the US.
White people may not feel privileged but on the whole we experienced very little of the systemic discrimination that is pervasive in many black people's experience. It's time to stop being afraid of saying this like it is is. If it helps, think of it as being analogous to rape. Yes, men do get raped, and it is devastating for them, and no one wants to pretend otherwise. However, the scale and risk of rape is much greater for women, and of course the vast majority of rapists are men.
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
There's certainly a long way to go. But the economic impact of COVID is being felt now. There's plenty of Tory incompetence and mendacity on display now. It doesn't seem to be shifting the polls much.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
The Tories are polling exactly where they ended up at the 2019 general election. Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
There is a hell of a lot of damage to undo before Labour starts having poll leads. Tory hubris, incompetence and lies will hekp, but there needs to be more. Starmer is going to have to offer a stronger all-round critique of the governmnet once the immediate pandemic crisis has past, while also providing at least the outline of where he is taking Labour. On top of that, the LibDems also need to start picking up in the South and SW. The Tory embrace of animal cruelty to get a trade deal with Trump should help there.
If this is the basis of :Labour's hopes, Sir Kier Bland is royally fked
Mr. Boy, white supremacy and privilege wasn't much in evidence in Rotherham, Telford, Oxford, Newcastle etc when it came to the industrial scale rape of white girls and boys, and the reaction of authorities to the accusations.
I'm sure racism is still all too commonplace, and it should not be tolerated. That includes turning a blind eye to the abuse of children because of their skin colour (and/or class). Terms like white supremacy or white privilege judge people according to their skin colour, propagating rather than opposing overt bigotry.
So we don't think the Empire left a legacy of white privilege that endures to this day then?
No, I think that puts the cart before the horse.
White privilege created Empire not the other way around.
Both.
Goodness me, talk about sweeping statements and generalisations/
The origins, expansion and fall of the British Empire are surely highly complex matters, involving many factors.
No idea why Australia have managed this crisis better.....
An Australian court has refused permission for a Black Lives Matter protest scheduled to happen in Sydney on Saturday, ruling that it would risk spreading coronavirus.
New South Wales Police went to court seeking an injunction on the demonstration because it would have been a large assembly. Thousands were expected to attend.
Justice Desmond Ferguson said allowing the protest would defy the rulings of government ministers and the public health officers who advised them.
When we look at the British Empire, we have to put it in its broader context, with other periods of pre-eminence, short and long, enjoyed by other countries. Commercial exploitation, the strong enforcing their will over the weak, seem to be the inevitable result of the ability to do so. This certainly didn't begin with Britain, and it has certainly continued under a different name with America, and we'll have to see what it looks like under China. Even on a smaller scale, I would be interested to hear of any country that became more powerful than its near neighbours, and (if it wasn't stopped by a still greater power) did not end up exploiting it. Doing this enables us to assess the character of The British Empire slightly more even-handedly.
Here is one contemporary view quoted by Max Hastings in the DM: 'In 1922, the American philosopher George Santayana enthused: ‘Never since the days of heroic Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, churls and fanatics manage to supplant him.''
I don't really agree with that - I think what probably made the British Empire era more benign than the American Empire era (when taking into account the differences between the 19th and 20th centuries), was the fact that we were constrained in our actions by several other great world powers. We bullied the Chinese (as did the Americans) because we could. We couldn't have done it to the Russians, Germans, French, Americans, etc., so we didn't. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
One factor may have been that our power derived very largely from naval superiority. Can't easily turn the navy into an oppressive land Army.
The British Empire has sometimes been described as an accidental Empire because the intention in most cases was not to seize territory, but to secure trade. It was principally a mercantile empire.
This contrasts with earlier/other empires - such as the Arab caliphate, or the Russian Empire - which were explicitly about extending the territorial domain.
In some respects this makes the British Empire a halfway house between that of these earlier empires and the American Empire which followed, which ruled almost exclusively through a mixture of encouragement and client rulers rather than direct conquest.
I do not expect a Chinese iteration to continue this trajectory.
The problem is that white privilege, as a term, itself is guilty of the lack of nuance you rightly cite. Black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Black criminality would rightly be lambasted as castigating a whole race based on a minority. Slapping a privilege label on a whole race, perhaps then used to then try and make them feel a dose of liberal guilt or to diminish their opinion, is simply wrong on both moral and intellectual levels.
As others have already pointed out, poor white boys do the worst in educational terms. The blanket approach of describing whites as privileged whitewashes, ahem, the educational situation.
Judging people based on the colour of their skin is a very unwise path.
Mr. kinabalu, you're aware that most white people didn't own slaves, right? And that many had terrible working conditions? But you want to judge all present day white people based on what a minority of white people did a few centuries ago?
Do you feel that critical about the black slave traders who sold their fellow Africans to the British Empire (prior to the slavery ban, whilst the trade continued to be perpetrated by Africans, Arabs, and others)? Or is it only white people worthy of this condemnation for the sins of a minority of their forefathers?
And how far back does this historical victimhood last? Can I claim it for the Harrowing of the North? The Roman invasion?
Trying to make people who have never had slaves feel guilty towards people who have never been slaves because of things that happened centuries ago and were done by other people that neither the non-slave owners nor the non-slaves have even met is madness.
I don't want you to feel guilty. It's a wholly destructive emotion.
But neither do I want you to be in denial of something so palpably true as that "white privilege" - if the term is understood correctly - is a real and significant thing.
History tells us that in the long run we are all dead. In the light of history all peoples and cultures have a mixed bag of inheritance. No surprise. But it seems to me that the single unifying belief of most people in our own culture is about maximising equality of opportunity.
Walk down Whiteladies Road or Blackboy Hill in Bristol and it may remind you that parts of our country were indeed at the vanguard of African slave trading.
Mr. Boy, white supremacy and privilege wasn't much in evidence in Rotherham, Telford, Oxford, Newcastle etc when it came to the industrial scale rape of white girls and boys, and the reaction of authorities to the accusations.
I'm sure racism is still all too commonplace, and it should not be tolerated. That includes turning a blind eye to the abuse of children because of their skin colour (and/or class). Terms like white supremacy or white privilege judge people according to their skin colour, propagating rather than opposing overt bigotry.
So we don't think the Empire left a legacy of white privilege that endures to this day then?
No, I think that puts the cart before the horse.
White privilege created Empire not the other way around.
It was guns and armies that created the empire , feck all to do with privilege. It was all down to who had the most and biggest guns.
You don't think having more and bigger guns puts you in a position of privilege?
The Arab world had bigger and better guns well before white Europeans and yet I don't see anyone making a claim for Arab privilege, because of course that would be ridiculous.
Are we really talking about technology somehow giving racial privilege? And people didn't believe me when I said this place has turned into a student union.
You see lots of Arab privilege if you live in Arabia!
I love the acronym:
English Managed Indian Run Arabs Take Extra Salary
I don’t agree at all with renaming streets. The slave trade was a product of its time. Streets named after elements of it does not “glorify” it. To most people, I doubt it even registers that it has anything to do with it.
There are far more important present day injustices to deal with.
Off topic . Just started watching the documentary on Netflix Filthy Rich. Which is about Jeffrey Epstein. Can understand why the Queen has retired Prince Andrew from public duties. Do we still, have to pay him from the civil list ? Also hard to see Andrew co-operating with the USA authorities or ever visiting the states again.
When we look at the British Empire, we have to put it in its broader context, with other periods of pre-eminence, short and long, enjoyed by other countries. Commercial exploitation, the strong enforcing their will over the weak, seem to be the inevitable result of the ability to do so. This certainly didn't begin with Britain, and it has certainly continued under a different name with America, and we'll have to see what it looks like under China. Even on a smaller scale, I would be interested to hear of any country that became more powerful than its near neighbours, and (if it wasn't stopped by a still greater power) did not end up exploiting it. Doing this enables us to assess the character of The British Empire slightly more even-handedly.
Here is one contemporary view quoted by Max Hastings in the DM: 'In 1922, the American philosopher George Santayana enthused: ‘Never since the days of heroic Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, churls and fanatics manage to supplant him.''
I don't really agree with that - I think what probably made the British Empire era more benign than the American Empire era (when taking into account the differences between the 19th and 20th centuries), was the fact that we were constrained in our actions by several other great world powers. We bullied the Chinese (as did the Americans) because we could. We couldn't have done it to the Russians, Germans, French, Americans, etc., so we didn't. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
One factor may have been that our power derived very largely from naval superiority. Can't easily turn the navy into an oppressive land Army.
The British Empire has sometimes been described as an accidental Empire because the intention in most cases was not to seize territory, but to secure trade. It was principally a mercantile empire.
This contrasts with earlier/other empires - such as the Arab caliphate, or the Russian Empire - which were explicitly about extending the territorial domain.
In some respects this makes the British Empire a halfway house between that of these earlier empires and the American Empire which followed, which ruled almost exclusively through a mixture of encouragement and client rulers rather than direct conquest.
I do not expect a Chinese iteration to continue this trajectory.
Again that is rather simplistic is it not.?
The manifestation of the Empire in Australia or Canada would be very different to its manifestation in say, Kenya, Malaya or Pakistan.
The Empire wore many different faces, depending on where it was doing the ruling.
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
There's certainly a long way to go. But the economic impact of COVID is being felt now. There's plenty of Tory incompetence and mendacity on display now. It doesn't seem to be shifting the polls much.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
The Tories are polling exactly where they ended up at the 2019 general election. Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
There is a hell of a lot of damage to undo before Labour starts having poll leads. Tory hubris, incompetence and lies will hekp, but there needs to be more. Starmer is going to have to offer a stronger all-round critique of the governmnet once the immediate pandemic crisis has past, while also providing at least the outline of where he is taking Labour. On top of that, the LibDems also need to start picking up in the South and SW. The Tory embrace of animal cruelty to get a trade deal with Trump should help there.
If this is the basis of :Labour's hopes, Sir Kier Bland is royally fked
The bigger personality always wins, and Boris leads 64-30.
Off topic . Just started watching the documentary on Netflix Filthy Rich. Which is about Jeffrey Epstein. Can understand why the Queen has retired Prince Andrew from public duties. Do we still, have to pay him from the civil list ? Also hard to see Andrew co-operating with the USA authorities or ever visiting the states again.
That documentary felt like a missed opportunity. A bit more digging and who knows where it had gone. Follow the money...they started, talked about the dodgy pyramid scheme he made a load from, the fashion brand CEO he ripped off, but there was clearly more.
Mr. Boy, white supremacy and privilege wasn't much in evidence in Rotherham, Telford, Oxford, Newcastle etc when it came to the industrial scale rape of white girls and boys, and the reaction of authorities to the accusations.
I'm sure racism is still all too commonplace, and it should not be tolerated. That includes turning a blind eye to the abuse of children because of their skin colour (and/or class). Terms like white supremacy or white privilege judge people according to their skin colour, propagating rather than opposing overt bigotry.
So we don't think the Empire left a legacy of white privilege that endures to this day then?
No, I think that puts the cart before the horse.
White privilege created Empire not the other way around.
It was guns and armies that created the empire , feck all to do with privilege. It was all down to who had the most and biggest guns.
You don't think having more and bigger guns puts you in a position of privilege?
The Arab world had bigger and better guns well before white Europeans and yet I don't see anyone making a claim for Arab privilege, because of course that would be ridiculous.
Are we really talking about technology somehow giving racial privilege? And people didn't believe me when I said this place has turned into a student union.
You see lots of Arab privilege if you live in Arabia!
I love the acronym:
English Managed Indian Run Arabs Take Extra Salary
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
There's certainly a long way to go. But the economic impact of COVID is being felt now. There's plenty of Tory incompetence and mendacity on display now. It doesn't seem to be shifting the polls much.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
The Tories are polling exactly where they ended up at the 2019 general election. Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
There is a hell of a lot of damage to undo before Labour starts having poll leads. Tory hubris, incompetence and lies will hekp, but there needs to be more. Starmer is going to have to offer a stronger all-round critique of the governmnet once the immediate pandemic crisis has past, while also providing at least the outline of where he is taking Labour. On top of that, the LibDems also need to start picking up in the South and SW. The Tory embrace of animal cruelty to get a trade deal with Trump should help there.
If this is the basis of :Labour's hopes, Sir Kier Bland is royally fked
The bigger personality always wins, and Boris leads 64-30.
Some might say he leads by over 200%!!!
Starmer is a sort of John Major without the interesting underpants
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
There's certainly a long way to go. But the economic impact of COVID is being felt now. There's plenty of Tory incompetence and mendacity on display now. It doesn't seem to be shifting the polls much.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
The Tories are polling exactly where they ended up at the 2019 general election. Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
There is a hell of a lot of damage to undo before Labour starts having poll leads. Tory hubris, incompetence and lies will hekp, but there needs to be more. Starmer is going to have to offer a stronger all-round critique of the governmnet once the immediate pandemic crisis has past, while also providing at least the outline of where he is taking Labour. On top of that, the LibDems also need to start picking up in the South and SW. The Tory embrace of animal cruelty to get a trade deal with Trump should help there.
If this is the basis of :Labour's hopes, Sir Kier Bland is royally fked
The bigger personality always wins, and Boris leads 64-30.
Some might say he leads by over 200%!!!
Starmer is a sort of John Major without the interesting underpants
Without getting caught up in the debate over empire/privilege, or minimising the awful events in the US (which I think we all agree has a serious systemic racism problem) - I find it hard to understand the noise being made here in the UK over the issue.
The US is a different country (admittedly one with some shared history and culture), but clearly with different issues. The holding of street protests in the middle of a 1-in 100 year global pandemic (where we are still supposed to be socially distancing) just seems nuts, given the lack of influence any authorities here of the US situation. That along with the general hand-wringing, public statements of support. Everyone who's been paying attention knows this type of thing has gone on in the US (and to a lesser extent, the UK) for years.
Not to minimise racism and police brutality, which is a serious, sensitive issue, but are we collectively loosing it a little bit?
The problem is that white privilege, as a term, itself is guilty of the lack of nuance you rightly cite. Black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Black criminality would rightly be lambasted as castigating a whole race based on a minority. Slapping a privilege label on a whole race, perhaps then used to then try and make them feel a dose of liberal guilt or to diminish their opinion, is simply wrong on both moral and intellectual levels.
As others have already pointed out, poor white boys do the worst in educational terms. The blanket approach of describing whites as privileged whitewashes, ahem, the educational situation.
Judging people based on the colour of their skin is a very unwise path.
Mr. kinabalu, you're aware that most white people didn't own slaves, right? And that many had terrible working conditions? But you want to judge all present day white people based on what a minority of white people did a few centuries ago?
Do you feel that critical about the black slave traders who sold their fellow Africans to the British Empire (prior to the slavery ban, whilst the trade continued to be perpetrated by Africans, Arabs, and others)? Or is it only white people worthy of this condemnation for the sins of a minority of their forefathers?
And how far back does this historical victimhood last? Can I claim it for the Harrowing of the North? The Roman invasion?
Trying to make people who have never had slaves feel guilty towards people who have never been slaves because of things that happened centuries ago and were done by other people that neither the non-slave owners nor the non-slaves have even met is madness.
I don't want you to feel guilty. It's a wholly destructive emotion.
But neither do I want you to be in denial of something so palpably true as that "white privilege" - if the term is understood correctly - is a real and significant thing.
Well said. White people need to end our silence about the extent of racism, and therefore our relative privilege. if we are silent we are complicit, which we no longer do in relation to rape or child abuse.
We just need not to be frightened of acknowledging it, there's no need.
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
There's certainly a long way to go. But the economic impact of COVID is being felt now. There's plenty of Tory incompetence and mendacity on display now. It doesn't seem to be shifting the polls much.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
The Tories are polling exactly where they ended up at the 2019 general election. Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
There is a hell of a lot of damage to undo before Labour starts having poll leads. Tory hubris, incompetence and lies will hekp, but there needs to be more. Starmer is going to have to offer a stronger all-round critique of the governmnet once the immediate pandemic crisis has past, while also providing at least the outline of where he is taking Labour. On top of that, the LibDems also need to start picking up in the South and SW. The Tory embrace of animal cruelty to get a trade deal with Trump should help there.
If this is the basis of :Labour's hopes, Sir Kier Bland is royally fked
The bigger personality always wins, and Boris leads 64-30.
Some might say he leads by over 200%!!!
Starmer is a sort of John Major without the interesting underpants
Johnson has never had a bike that wasn't utterly shit and rides s-l-o-w-l-y. As a flahute I find it hard to identify with him as a cyclist.
Boris bikes are awful. Heavy, lumbering things, ridden at death-slow speeds by wobbly non-helmet wearers who can barely ride a bike.
That's much better than the boy-racer types (and quite a few girl-racers) riding at 40mph through red lights without bothering about pedestrians.
I walk around London a lot, and this really is becoming a problem. The police seem to do nothing about it at all.
As a matter of interest, has any PBer ever seen or heard of a cyclist being nicked for speeding?
In London, the limit is 20mph in most boroughs and when complying with it I am often overtaken by cyclists. Never seen one done for it.
It feels much more dangerous driving (from cyclists pov not mine in the case) where the speed limit is 20mph and cyclists are overtaking cars, sometimes simultaneously on the inside and outside, than in 30mph zones. (I might be overweighting the chance of collision and not giving enough weight to the different speed and force when there is a collision).
The numbers for pedestrian collisions are that if the party that causes most damage - you in the car - are doing 20mph, then the pedestrian who is hit has a 50% of surviving. At 30mph it is 20%. (Figures:Brake)
(Don't have the numbers for people on bikes to hand).
That 40MPH at traffic lights might be a bit of an overestimate - 40mph is the speed of a full-chat finishing sprint in a professional cycle race.
40kph is possible, though anyone doing it in London has a possible death wish.
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
There's certainly a long way to go. But the economic impact of COVID is being felt now. There's plenty of Tory incompetence and mendacity on display now. It doesn't seem to be shifting the polls much.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
The Tories are polling exactly where they ended up at the 2019 general election. Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
There is a hell of a lot of damage to undo before Labour starts having poll leads. Tory hubris, incompetence and lies will hekp, but there needs to be more. Starmer is going to have to offer a stronger all-round critique of the governmnet once the immediate pandemic crisis has past, while also providing at least the outline of where he is taking Labour. On top of that, the LibDems also need to start picking up in the South and SW. The Tory embrace of animal cruelty to get a trade deal with Trump should help there.
If this is the basis of :Labour's hopes, Sir Kier Bland is royally fked
The bigger personality always wins, and Boris leads 64-30.
Some might say he leads by over 200%!!!
Starmer is a sort of John Major without the interesting underpants
Have you seen Keir Starmer’s underpants?
He claims he goes commando
Of course he does. Imagine wearing underpants in 2020?
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
There's certainly a long way to go. But the economic impact of COVID is being felt now. There's plenty of Tory incompetence and mendacity on display now. It doesn't seem to be shifting the polls much.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
The Tories are polling exactly where they ended up at the 2019 general election. Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
There is a hell of a lot of damage to undo before Labour starts having poll leads. Tory hubris, incompetence and lies will hekp, but there needs to be more. Starmer is going to have to offer a stronger all-round critique of the governmnet once the immediate pandemic crisis has past, while also providing at least the outline of where he is taking Labour. On top of that, the LibDems also need to start picking up in the South and SW. The Tory embrace of animal cruelty to get a trade deal with Trump should help there.
If this is the basis of :Labour's hopes, Sir Kier Bland is royally fked
You are nothing if not entirely predictable. We shall see how it all plays out. If the Tory response to the covid-19 crisis is any guide to the way the next few years are going to play out we are going to be "enjoying" a bumpy few years.
Johnson has never had a bike that wasn't utterly shit and rides s-l-o-w-l-y. As a flahute I find it hard to identify with him as a cyclist.
Boris bikes are awful. Heavy, lumbering things, ridden at death-slow speeds by wobbly non-helmet wearers who can barely ride a bike.
That's much better than the boy-racer types (and quite a few girl-racers) riding at 40mph through red lights without bothering about pedestrians.
I walk around London a lot, and this really is becoming a problem. The police seem to do nothing about it at all.
As a matter of interest, has any PBer ever seen or heard of a cyclist being nicked for speeding?
In London, the limit is 20mph in most boroughs and when complying with it I am often overtaken by cyclists. Never seen one done for it.
It feels much more dangerous driving (from cyclists pov not mine in the case) where the speed limit is 20mph and cyclists are overtaking cars, sometimes simultaneously on the inside and outside, than in 30mph zones. (I might be overweighting the chance of collision and not giving enough weight to the different speed and force when there is a collision).
The numbers for pedestrian collisions are that if the party that causes most damage - you in the car - are doing 20mph, then the pedestrian who is hit has a 50% of surviving. At 30mph it is 20%. (Figures:Brake)
(Don't have the numbers for people on bikes to hand).
That 40MPH at traffic lights might be a bit of an overestimate - 40mph is the speed of a full-chat finishing sprint in a professional cycle race.
40kph is possible, though anyone doing it in London has a possible death wish.
I understand the difference in speeds and impacts, just "off feel" the change to 20mph, accompanied by more cyclists might make the number of crashes higher so even if the severity is lower at 20mph it is overall more dangerous.
More cycles lanes, even if it means closing some roads to cars completely feels like a better solution to me than 20mp defaults in cities.
No idea why Australia have managed this crisis better.....
An Australian court has refused permission for a Black Lives Matter protest scheduled to happen in Sydney on Saturday, ruling that it would risk spreading coronavirus.
New South Wales Police went to court seeking an injunction on the demonstration because it would have been a large assembly. Thousands were expected to attend.
Justice Desmond Ferguson said allowing the protest would defy the rulings of government ministers and the public health officers who advised them.
The protests have been allowed in New Zealand, which some people think has handled the coronavirus crisis well.
Met's deputy police chief says Black Lives Matters protests are 'UNLAWFUL' as London mayor Sadiq Khan says he won't go because they break social distancing rules
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
There's certainly a long way to go. But the economic impact of COVID is being felt now. There's plenty of Tory incompetence and mendacity on display now. It doesn't seem to be shifting the polls much.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
The Tories are polling exactly where they ended up at the 2019 general election. Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
There is a hell of a lot of damage to undo before Labour starts having poll leads. Tory hubris, incompetence and lies will hekp, but there needs to be more. Starmer is going to have to offer a stronger all-round critique of the governmnet once the immediate pandemic crisis has past, while also providing at least the outline of where he is taking Labour. On top of that, the LibDems also need to start picking up in the South and SW. The Tory embrace of animal cruelty to get a trade deal with Trump should help there.
If this is the basis of :Labour's hopes, Sir Kier Bland is royally fked
You are nothing if not entirely predictable. We shall see how it all plays out. If the Tory response to the covid-19 crisis is any guide to the way the next few years are going to play out we are going to be "enjoying" a bumpy few years.
Without getting caught up in the debate over empire/privilege, or minimising the awful events in the US (which I think we all agree has a serious systemic racism problem) - I find it hard to understand the noise being made here in the UK over the issue.
The US is a different country (admittedly one with some shared history and culture), but clearly with different issues. The holding of street protests in the middle of a 1-in 100 year global pandemic (where we are still supposed to be socially distancing) just seems nuts, given the lack of influence any authorities here of the US situation. That along with the general hand-wringing, public statements of support. Everyone who's been paying attention knows this type of thing has gone on in the US (and to a lesser extent, the UK) for years.
Not to minimise racism and police brutality, which is a serious, sensitive issue, but are we collectively loosing it a little bit?
Agree that we over focus on the US in comparison to the rest of the world, and that the US has very different problems to the UK.
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
There's certainly a long way to go. But the economic impact of COVID is being felt now. There's plenty of Tory incompetence and mendacity on display now. It doesn't seem to be shifting the polls much.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
The Tories are polling exactly where they ended up at the 2019 general election. Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
There is a hell of a lot of damage to undo before Labour starts having poll leads. Tory hubris, incompetence and lies will hekp, but there needs to be more. Starmer is going to have to offer a stronger all-round critique of the governmnet once the immediate pandemic crisis has past, while also providing at least the outline of where he is taking Labour. On top of that, the LibDems also need to start picking up in the South and SW. The Tory embrace of animal cruelty to get a trade deal with Trump should help there.
If this is the basis of :Labour's hopes, Sir Kier Bland is royally fked
Johnson really is the marmite politician. Lots of negatives but surprising positives too. 43% think he's a capable leader. Capable ?!?
Starmer doesn't have any negatives, except being a bit boring. But he needs more positives to beat Johnsons. Hopefully for him, a chunk of the large Don't Knows may break positive.
The problem is that white privilege, as a term, itself is guilty of the lack of nuance you rightly cite. Black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Black criminality would rightly be lambasted as castigating a whole race based on a minority. Slapping a privilege label on a whole race, perhaps then used to then try and make them feel a dose of liberal guilt or to diminish their opinion, is simply wrong on both moral and intellectual levels.
As others have already pointed out, poor white boys do the worst in educational terms. The blanket approach of describing whites as privileged whitewashes, ahem, the educational situation.
Judging people based on the colour of their skin is a very unwise path.
Mr. kinabalu, you're aware that most white people didn't own slaves, right? And that many had terrible working conditions? But you want to judge all present day white people based on what a minority of white people did a few centuries ago?
Do you feel that critical about the black slave traders who sold their fellow Africans to the British Empire (prior to the slavery ban, whilst the trade continued to be perpetrated by Africans, Arabs, and others)? Or is it only white people worthy of this condemnation for the sins of a minority of their forefathers?
And how far back does this historical victimhood last? Can I claim it for the Harrowing of the North? The Roman invasion?
Trying to make people who have never had slaves feel guilty towards people who have never been slaves because of things that happened centuries ago and were done by other people that neither the non-slave owners nor the non-slaves have even met is madness.
I don't want you to feel guilty. It's a wholly destructive emotion.
But neither do I want you to be in denial of something so palpably true as that "white privilege" - if the term is understood correctly - is a real and significant thing.
Well said. White people need to end our silence about the extent of racism, and therefore our relative privilege. if we are silent we are complicit, which we no longer do in relation to rape or child abuse.
We just need not to be frightened of acknowledging it, there's no need.
There's something almost Kafkaesque about you guys.
A court out of nowhere. A case to answer, the details of which are never mentioned. In the end, violence.
Off topic . Just started watching the documentary on Netflix Filthy Rich. Which is about Jeffrey Epstein. Can understand why the Queen has retired Prince Andrew from public duties. Do we still, have to pay him from the civil list ? Also hard to see Andrew co-operating with the USA authorities or ever visiting the states again.
That documentary felt like a missed opportunity. A bit more digging and who knows where it had gone. Follow the money...they started, talked about the dodgy pyramid scheme he made a load from, the fashion brand CEO he ripped off, but there was clearly more.
Yes I agree, just seen episode one. Was curious where he made all his money from.
When we look at the British Empire, we have to put it in its broader context, with other periods of pre-eminence, short and long, enjoyed by other countries. Commercial exploitation, the strong enforcing their will over the weak, seem to be the inevitable result of the ability to do so. This certainly didn't begin with Britain, and it has certainly continued under a different name with America, and we'll have to see what it looks like under China. Even on a smaller scale, I would be interested to hear of any country that became more powerful than its near neighbours, and (if it wasn't stopped by a still greater power) did not end up exploiting it. Doing this enables us to assess the character of The British Empire slightly more even-handedly.
Here is one contemporary view quoted by Max Hastings in the DM: 'In 1922, the American philosopher George Santayana enthused: ‘Never since the days of heroic Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, churls and fanatics manage to supplant him.''
I don't really agree with that - I think what probably made the British Empire era more benign than the American Empire era (when taking into account the differences between the 19th and 20th centuries), was the fact that we were constrained in our actions by several other great world powers. We bullied the Chinese (as did the Americans) because we could. We couldn't have done it to the Russians, Germans, French, Americans, etc., so we didn't. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
One factor may have been that our power derived very largely from naval superiority. Can't easily turn the navy into an oppressive land Army.
The British Empire has sometimes been described as an accidental Empire because the intention in most cases was not to seize territory, but to secure trade. It was principally a mercantile empire.
This contrasts with earlier/other empires - such as the Arab caliphate, or the Russian Empire - which were explicitly about extending the territorial domain.
In some respects this makes the British Empire a halfway house between that of these earlier empires and the American Empire which followed, which ruled almost exclusively through a mixture of encouragement and client rulers rather than direct conquest.
I do not expect a Chinese iteration to continue this trajectory.
Again that is rather simplistic is it not.?
The manifestation of the Empire in Australia or Canada would be very different to its manifestation in say, Kenya, Malaya or Pakistan.
The Empire wore many different faces, depending on where it was doing the ruling.
Not really, Lost Password is correct. And whilst I haven't studied his other examples, I would say it's rare for an Empire to exist simply for its own sake. A sphere of influence is what precedes an Empire, and it's far cheaper and easier to run than an Empire. It's only when other powers rise up and threaten your advantageous trading arrangements that you need to send in soldiers and hoist the flag. Think of it as finally giving in and marrying your girlfriend because you're worried she'll go off with someone else. It's actually a weakening of your position not a strengthening of it. As LP says, America has managed to impose its will with overt colonisation. But when you see the amount of US military bases around the world (many of them in the UK!), you can see it's an Empire in all but name. Now that other power/s are challenging this hegemony, we may see a different approach from the US.
I don't think anyone has posted one; this is what decent quality cycling infrastructure looks like. A 3 minute vid with comments.
The important things are the quality of the path and that the priorities etc set up so there is no need to stop. It changes the average speed from about 14mph in normal UK conditions to about 22mph.
On the beautiful lit and landscaped path through my next-door housing estate I have to get off the bike 8 times in 1.2km due to barriers; so people cycle on the footpath of the A38 instead.
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
There's certainly a long way to go. But the economic impact of COVID is being felt now. There's plenty of Tory incompetence and mendacity on display now. It doesn't seem to be shifting the polls much.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
The Tories are polling exactly where they ended up at the 2019 general election. Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
There is a hell of a lot of damage to undo before Labour starts having poll leads. Tory hubris, incompetence and lies will hekp, but there needs to be more. Starmer is going to have to offer a stronger all-round critique of the governmnet once the immediate pandemic crisis has past, while also providing at least the outline of where he is taking Labour. On top of that, the LibDems also need to start picking up in the South and SW. The Tory embrace of animal cruelty to get a trade deal with Trump should help there.
If this is the basis of :Labour's hopes, Sir Kier Bland is royally fked
The bigger personality always wins, and Boris leads 64-30.
Some might say he leads by over 200%!!!
Starmer is a sort of John Major without the interesting underpants
Or the torrid affair with Edwina Currie (so far as we know).
The Achaemenid King Darius I has a monumental inscription carved into the side of a mountain at Behistun, detailing inter alia the expanse of his empire from the Balkans to the gates of India:
(1) I am Darius [Dâryavuš], the great king, king of kings, the king of Persia [Pârsa], the king of countries, the son of Hystaspes, the grandson of Arsames, the Achaemenid.
(4) King Darius says: Eight of my dynasty were kings before me; I am the ninth. Nine in succession we have been kings.
(6) King Darius says: These are the countries which are subject unto me, and by the grace of Ahuramazda I became king of them: Persia [Pârsa], Elam [Ûvja], Babylonia [Bâbiruš], Assyria [Athurâ], Arabia [Arabâya], Egypt [Mudrâya], the countries by the Sea, Lydia [Sparda], the Greeks [Yauna (Ionia)], Media [Mâda], Armenia [Armina], Cappadocia [Katpatuka], Parthia [Parthava], Drangiana [Zraka], Aria [Haraiva], Chorasmia [Uvârazmîy], Bactria [Bâxtriš], w:Sogdia [Suguda], Gandhara [Gadâra], Scythia [Saka], Sattagydia [Thataguš], Arachosia [Harauvatiš] and Maka [Maka]; twenty-three lands in all.
(7) King Darius says: These are the countries which are subject to me; by the grace of Ahuramazda they became subject to me; they brought tribute unto me. Whatsoever commands have been laid on them by me, by night or by day, have been performed by them.
(8) King Darius says: Within these lands, whosoever was a friend, him have I surely protected; whosoever was hostile, him have I utterly destroyed. By the grace of Ahuramazda these lands have conformed to my decrees; as it was commanded unto them by me, so was it done.
BRITAIN c. 500 BC:
‘You know what would make us look really scary when we go wandering naked around the countryside? Painting ourselves blue. Genius, innit?’
I don't think slavery created racism, quite the opposite. Blaming racism on slavery is like blaming a puddle for the rain. Racism predated slavery and outlasted it too.
Pre-existing racism allowed slavery to flourish, not the other way around. Racism is an evil in its own right and doesn't require slavery to happen or to be tackled.
And yet, as you point out, it was technological dominance that enabled the slave trade - and did not the racial 'science' of the nineteenth century, which was and is part and parcel of the racism of the modern era, emerge from the societal mindset necessary to maintaining the institutions of plantation slavery in the midst of civilised societies ?
Surely slavery is a result of racism, seeing Blacks and Asians as lesser than European whites allowed the thinking to justify slavery in a moral sense - "it's not wrong because Blacks/Asians aren't people".
It's the same kind of thinking that allows slavery to pervade the Middle East and why slave markets operate across North Africa selling black Africans into slavery into the Middle East.
I'm struggling a bit with the idea that us Brits invented the slave trade.
As I understand it, the term Slav is a corruption of the word 'slave' and reflects the trading enterprise of the Scandinavians who took prisoners for the specific purpose of selling them. Because they were valuable, they tended to look after the product, at least until the had been sold, or otherwise disposed of.
I also understand that the ancient Egyptians were a bit tough on the Nubians. No doubt PBers can offer other examples.
Why do we Brits get the credit for inventing the idea?
Are you not being a little mischievous here?
Walk down Whiteladies Road or Blackboy Hill in Bristol and it may remind you that parts of our country were indeed at the vanguard of African slave trading.
Earlier in the year I was touring the Caribbean on a cruise ship, most of the passengers being American. In Antigua I asked the guide why the notion of slavery was skirted around in her presentation. She explained that her American customers quite often didn't want to hear about the history of Caribbean/American slavery. Several American Tourists over the years had called her out, suggesting slavery was a myth and these people were merely indentured servants.
My own issue, is not with the history, I would prefer it to be recalled accurately rather than conveniently rewritten, I do object to countrymen today wrapping themselves in the flag of empire and claiming those days to be the nadir of British achievement, generally without knowing what they are talking about. We should nonetheless not be expected to apologise on behalf of our forefathers
Some while ago I went to a talk, basically about Barbados, by a Barbadian speaker who turned out to be a Anglican vicar. He was happy to talk about his personal history, having traced his ancestry and found, as might be expected of an Afro-Caribbean, several slaves.
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
There's certainly a long way to go. But the economic impact of COVID is being felt now. There's plenty of Tory incompetence and mendacity on display now. It doesn't seem to be shifting the polls much.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
The Tories are polling exactly where they ended up at the 2019 general election. Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
There is a hell of a lot of damage to undo before Labour starts having poll leads. Tory hubris, incompetence and lies will hekp, but there needs to be more. Starmer is going to have to offer a stronger all-round critique of the governmnet once the immediate pandemic crisis has past, while also providing at least the outline of where he is taking Labour. On top of that, the LibDems also need to start picking up in the South and SW. The Tory embrace of animal cruelty to get a trade deal with Trump should help there.
If this is the basis of :Labour's hopes, Sir Kier Bland is royally fked
You are nothing if not entirely predictable. We shall see how it all plays out. If the Tory response to the covid-19 crisis is any guide to the way the next few years are going to play out we are going to be "enjoying" a bumpy few years.
Yes very early days for SKS. However any serious Conservative knows in their heart , he looks PM material. Also out of the Labour Leadership contenders , he was the one they did not want to win.
I thought the gatherings were meant to be no more than 6 people, not no more than 6 friends?
If I was to invite 5 friends I know and told them to all invite a "plus one" that nobody else in the group knew, then am I allowed to have 12 in my gathering Piers since there's only six friends there?
In a park there are often 1000+ people there. I have never understood why it matters if you know more than 1 or 5 or 6 of them. As long as they are socially distanced it really doesnt matter. If they are not socially distanced, not knowing them doesnt help either.
Which is the point. Gatherings are supposed to be limited to 6 and kept socially distanced. Having thousands together not socially distanced isn't suddenly within the rules just because the thousands are strangers.
If Piers were intellectually honest he should say "yes the COVID rules were broken but for a good cause that was more important" - but of course he's been arguing against the opposite for others for so long he can't be honest and just lies instead.
Or my son decided to attend a protest, that was his decision, he is his own man, but that was breaking the rules and I won't be doing so.
Instead after his hyperbolic reaction to every twist and turn of this crisis, he is now trying to defend his son for breaking the rules, in direct contrast to how he has roasted everybody else who he has set his sights on.
He is simply a massive hypocrite. And if we were going to go all "position of responsibility" ala Big Dom, he has a large platform which he is now using to excuse certain rule breaking, rather than make clear the potential dangers of such large gatherings (especially to BAME individuals, who it appears are more likely to be badly affected by this virus).
Can we just stipulate that Piers Morgan is an arse ?
This ought not to be controversial.
On the one hand something we can all agree on. On the other hand it is annoying that Morgan seems to have made a very lucrative career out of everyone agreeing that he is an arse.
He was once, I believe, the Sun's gossip columnist (probably overpromoted). Should have stayed there.
No problem with encouraging cycling but some of the blanket 20mph zones in London now are bloody dangerous. I live in a fairly main road which inexplicably has been made 20mph. It’s a hill so cyclists can free wheel down it at 20mph+ - and they do. Overtaking cars on both sides. It’s actually safer to drive at 30mph so you don’t have to spend more time looking in their mirrors than on the road in front.
Five days before official lockdown was already into unofficial lockdown. I think people are starting to forget that Johnson's decree didn't come as much of a surprise...
No idea why Australia have managed this crisis better.....
An Australian court has refused permission for a Black Lives Matter protest scheduled to happen in Sydney on Saturday, ruling that it would risk spreading coronavirus.
New South Wales Police went to court seeking an injunction on the demonstration because it would have been a large assembly. Thousands were expected to attend.
Justice Desmond Ferguson said allowing the protest would defy the rulings of government ministers and the public health officers who advised them.
The protests have been allowed in New Zealand, which some people think has handled the coronavirus crisis well.
Good on the Aussie police force for seeking and the Aus courts for granting an injunction. NZ has handled the covid crisis well. So well in fact a mass protest probably won't spread the virus very far if at all. That's not the situation here or in the USA.
Off topic - it will soon be six months since the General Election but, so far as I can see, the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament has still not been formed. Does anyone know when this will happen? It happened about four months after each of the previous two elections.
I think the problem with the whole “X privilege” debate is that it is easy to examine these things when you are comfortable. It is easy to “acknowledge your privilege” when you are comfortable.
If you are personally struggling either financially, physically, or socially, it is not exactly a rational response to declare “I AM IN A PRIVILEGED POSITION”, regardless whether your “race” or “gender” is on the whole privileged.
AIUI it is not saying every white person is privileged (although admittedly there is a fringe who think so), the mainstream interpretation and the one I would agree with is on average white people are more privileged.
And yes, it should be discussed and prioritised in conjunction with other factors such as education, class, gender, etc with might make it a top 5 issue in the US but only a top 20 issue in the Uk.
My understanding is different. Privilege in this system is defined relatively. We're not trying to measure an absolute scale of priviliege out of 100, with say Jeff Bezos or the Duke of Westminster in the high 90s, and Rohyngia refugees somewhere below 10. Instead, the point is that if you have two people in the UK or US who are otherwise identical but one is white and the other black, the white person will have a better experience because they will not encounter racism. They may both have problems, maybe even serious problems, but the white person is relatively privileged because they have one less problem than the black person.
This is precisely why it's a tricky conversation, because if you're using an absolute scale and I'm talking in relative terms, pretty soon one of us will say something that sounds insane to the other, and we'll end up assuming that the other is incorrigibly racist/woke (delete as applicable).
I understand the concept, but privilege is the wrong word to use for it, because of the existing understanding of the word.
I think if you were to talk of a "bonus" to being white that would immediately convey the discrete and additive nature of the concept in a better way than privilege. There may even be better words to use. Advantage, bias, benefit ..?
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
There's certainly a long way to go. But the economic impact of COVID is being felt now. There's plenty of Tory incompetence and mendacity on display now. It doesn't seem to be shifting the polls much.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
The Tories are polling exactly where they ended up at the 2019 general election. Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
There is a hell of a lot of damage to undo before Labour starts having poll leads. Tory hubris, incompetence and lies will hekp, but there needs to be more. Starmer is going to have to offer a stronger all-round critique of the governmnet once the immediate pandemic crisis has past, while also providing at least the outline of where he is taking Labour. On top of that, the LibDems also need to start picking up in the South and SW. The Tory embrace of animal cruelty to get a trade deal with Trump should help there.
If this is the basis of :Labour's hopes, Sir Kier Bland is royally fked
The bigger personality always wins, and Boris leads 64-30.
Some might say he leads by over 200%!!!
I do worry about his blandness. Having met him, and been impressed by his intelligence, attention to detail and fluency, I just didn't think he set the room alight. Politics is show business for ugly people after all, and he lacks the showbiz element (although he's not ugly either). I voted for Nandy. Maybe in these serious times his sobriety is what the electorate will want.
Johnson has never had a bike that wasn't utterly shit and rides s-l-o-w-l-y. As a flahute I find it hard to identify with him as a cyclist.
Boris bikes are awful. Heavy, lumbering things, ridden at death-slow speeds by wobbly non-helmet wearers who can barely ride a bike.
That's much better than the boy-racer types (and quite a few girl-racers) riding at 40mph through red lights without bothering about pedestrians.
I walk around London a lot, and this really is becoming a problem. The police seem to do nothing about it at all.
As a matter of interest, has any PBer ever seen or heard of a cyclist being nicked for speeding?
In London, the limit is 20mph in most boroughs and when complying with it I am often overtaken by cyclists. Never seen one done for it.
It feels much more dangerous driving (from cyclists pov not mine in the case) where the speed limit is 20mph and cyclists are overtaking cars, sometimes simultaneously on the inside and outside, than in 30mph zones. (I might be overweighting the chance of collision and not giving enough weight to the different speed and force when there is a collision).
The numbers for pedestrian collisions are that if the party that causes most damage - you in the car - are doing 20mph, then the pedestrian who is hit has a 50% of surviving. At 30mph it is 20%. (Figures:Brake)
(Don't have the numbers for people on bikes to hand).
That 40MPH at traffic lights might be a bit of an overestimate - 40mph is the speed of a full-chat finishing sprint in a professional cycle race.
40kph is possible, though anyone doing it in London has a possible death wish.
I understand the difference in speeds and impacts, just "off feel" the change to 20mph, accompanied by more cyclists might make the number of crashes higher so even if the severity is lower at 20mph it is overall more dangerous.
More cycles lanes, even if it means closing some roads to cars completely feels like a better solution to me than 20mp defaults in cities.
I think 20mph defaults inside residential areas is a good thing, where modes of travel are not segregated. And that we use what is called "filtered permeability" ie through traffic is impossible for motor vehicles - as we have seen in eg certain London suburbs.
Or the row of bollards we have been trying to get into our rat run lane for the last 40 years, despite it having been "Access Only" throughout that time.
On eg roads joining areas of town etc, where modes are properly segregated such that people on bikes have their own space physically separated from motor traffic - eg separated by kerb and 1m of planting or the parked cars on the side of the road, I would argue for 30 mph as appropriate.
I read it and found it depressingly convincing. If 40%+ still support the Tories after this coronavirus response, I'm not sure the competence card is all it's cracked up to be.
It's six months after a general election and it's only two months since Labour replaced Corbyn with Starmer. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We still have the economic impact of the covid-19 crisis to get through, as well as a variety of other issues to navigate. The government bending the knee to Trump's America and embracing animal cruelty to get a trade deal is going to be a very big issue in many parts of the country - especially where the LibDems have the potential to recover. Tory incompetence, hubris and mendacity will be a powerful weapon for all opposition parties over the coming years.
There's certainly a long way to go. But the economic impact of COVID is being felt now. There's plenty of Tory incompetence and mendacity on display now. It doesn't seem to be shifting the polls much.
Starmer seems to be running a more professional operation than Corbyn and is avoiding many of the own goals Corbyn scored. But feels like something more or new is needed.
Compare the Tory lead now to the Tory lead at the end of March.
The Tories are polling exactly where they ended up at the 2019 general election. Labour have improved a fair bit since then. That's good. But we need Labour leads (and probably fairly big ones to counteract the vote being concentrated). Hopefully they are on the way.
There is a hell of a lot of damage to undo before Labour starts having poll leads. Tory hubris, incompetence and lies will hekp, but there needs to be more. Starmer is going to have to offer a stronger all-round critique of the governmnet once the immediate pandemic crisis has past, while also providing at least the outline of where he is taking Labour. On top of that, the LibDems also need to start picking up in the South and SW. The Tory embrace of animal cruelty to get a trade deal with Trump should help there.
If this is the basis of :Labour's hopes, Sir Kier Bland is royally fked
The bigger personality always wins, and Boris leads 64-30.
Some might say he leads by over 200%!!!
Starmer is a sort of John Major without the interesting underpants
Or the torrid affair with Edwina Currie (so far as we know).
Has 'personality' always been polled in leadership comparisons? @TheScreamingEagles
Five days before official lockdown was already into unofficial lockdown. I think people are starting to forget that Johnson's decree didn't come as much of a surprise...
When we look at the British Empire, we have to put it in its broader context, with other periods of pre-eminence, short and long, enjoyed by other countries. Commercial exploitation, the strong enforcing their will over the weak, seem to be the inevitable result of the ability to do so. This certainly didn't begin with Britain, and it has certainly continued under a different name with America, and we'll have to see what it looks like under China. Even on a smaller scale, I would be interested to hear of any country that became more powerful than its near neighbours, and (if it wasn't stopped by a still greater power) did not end up exploiting it. Doing this enables us to assess the character of The British Empire slightly more even-handedly.
Here is one contemporary view quoted by Max Hastings in the DM: 'In 1922, the American philosopher George Santayana enthused: ‘Never since the days of heroic Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, churls and fanatics manage to supplant him.''
I don't really agree with that - I think what probably made the British Empire era more benign than the American Empire era (when taking into account the differences between the 19th and 20th centuries), was the fact that we were constrained in our actions by several other great world powers. We bullied the Chinese (as did the Americans) because we could. We couldn't have done it to the Russians, Germans, French, Americans, etc., so we didn't. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
One factor may have been that our power derived very largely from naval superiority. Can't easily turn the navy into an oppressive land Army.
The British Empire has sometimes been described as an accidental Empire because the intention in most cases was not to seize territory, but to secure trade. It was principally a mercantile empire.
This contrasts with earlier/other empires - such as the Arab caliphate, or the Russian Empire - which were explicitly about extending the territorial domain.
In some respects this makes the British Empire a halfway house between that of these earlier empires and the American Empire which followed, which ruled almost exclusively through a mixture of encouragement and client rulers rather than direct conquest.
I do not expect a Chinese iteration to continue this trajectory.
Again that is rather simplistic is it not.?
The manifestation of the Empire in Australia or Canada would be very different to its manifestation in say, Kenya, Malaya or Pakistan.
The Empire wore many different faces, depending on where it was doing the ruling.
Not really, Lost Password is correct. And whilst I haven't studied his other examples, I would say it's rare for an Empire to exist simply for its own sake. A sphere of influence is what precedes an Empire, and it's far cheaper and easier to run than an Empire. It's only when other powers rise up and threaten your advantageous trading arrangements that you need to send in soldiers and hoist the flag. Think of it as finally giving in and marrying your girlfriend because you're worried she'll go off with someone else. It's actually a weakening of your position not a strengthening of it. As LP says, America has managed to impose its will with overt colonisation. But when you see the amount of US military bases around the world (many of them in the UK!), you can see it's an Empire in all but name. Now that other power/s are challenging this hegemony, we may see a different approach from the US.
Goodness what are you rambling on about?
British rule was manfestly much bloodier in some parts of the British Empire than others. The Indian Mutiny, the Malaya Emergency, The Boer war, Afghanistan, the West Indies, Omdurman. Im sure there are plenty other places where British rule was enforced by sword and gun and not merely by trade.
Places like Australia and Canada were treated rather differently.
As I say these matters are complex and cannot be dealt with by sweeping statements.
Five days before official lockdown was already into unofficial lockdown. I think people are starting to forget that Johnson's decree didn't come as much of a surprise...
Matches the Swedish experience really- measures just short of an official lockdown are sufficient to stop numbers rising and get a gentle fall-off. Do those early enough, so numbers fall from a low peak, and all is well.
There isn't a lockdown =decline, no lockdown = rise binary, but that would be pretty unlikely. But the trend looks clear; the less you limit movement, the slower the decline. Which is what you'd expect from a simple model based in germ theory with not much dark matter needed.
When we look at the British Empire, we have to put it in its broader context, with other periods of pre-eminence, short and long, enjoyed by other countries. Commercial exploitation, the strong enforcing their will over the weak, seem to be the inevitable result of the ability to do so. This certainly didn't begin with Britain, and it has certainly continued under a different name with America, and we'll have to see what it looks like under China. Even on a smaller scale, I would be interested to hear of any country that became more powerful than its near neighbours, and (if it wasn't stopped by a still greater power) did not end up exploiting it. Doing this enables us to assess the character of The British Empire slightly more even-handedly.
Here is one contemporary view quoted by Max Hastings in the DM: 'In 1922, the American philosopher George Santayana enthused: ‘Never since the days of heroic Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, churls and fanatics manage to supplant him.''
I don't really agree with that - I think what probably made the British Empire era more benign than the American Empire era (when taking into account the differences between the 19th and 20th centuries), was the fact that we were constrained in our actions by several other great world powers. We bullied the Chinese (as did the Americans) because we could. We couldn't have done it to the Russians, Germans, French, Americans, etc., so we didn't. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
One factor may have been that our power derived very largely from naval superiority. Can't easily turn the navy into an oppressive land Army.
The British Empire has sometimes been described as an accidental Empire because the intention in most cases was not to seize territory, but to secure trade. It was principally a mercantile empire.
This contrasts with earlier/other empires - such as the Arab caliphate, or the Russian Empire - which were explicitly about extending the territorial domain.
In some respects this makes the British Empire a halfway house between that of these earlier empires and the American Empire which followed, which ruled almost exclusively through a mixture of encouragement and client rulers rather than direct conquest.
I do not expect a Chinese iteration to continue this trajectory.
Again that is rather simplistic is it not.?
The manifestation of the Empire in Australia or Canada would be very different to its manifestation in say, Kenya, Malaya or Pakistan.
The Empire wore many different faces, depending on where it was doing the ruling.
Not really, Lost Password is correct. And whilst I haven't studied his other examples, I would say it's rare for an Empire to exist simply for its own sake. A sphere of influence is what precedes an Empire, and it's far cheaper and easier to run than an Empire. It's only when other powers rise up and threaten your advantageous trading arrangements that you need to send in soldiers and hoist the flag. Think of it as finally giving in and marrying your girlfriend because you're worried she'll go off with someone else. It's actually a weakening of your position not a strengthening of it. As LP says, America has managed to impose its will with overt colonisation. But when you see the amount of US military bases around the world (many of them in the UK!), you can see it's an Empire in all but name. Now that other power/s are challenging this hegemony, we may see a different approach from the US.
Goodness what are you rambling on about?
British rule was manfestly much bloodier in some parts of the British Empire than others. The Indian Mutiny, the Malaya Emergency, The Boer war, Afghanistan, the West Indies, Omdurman. Im sure there are plenty other places where British rule was enforced by sword and gun and not merely by trade.
Places like Australia and Canada were treated rather differently.
As I say these matters are complex and cannot be dealt with by sweeping statements.
Eh? Murders of aboriginals in Australia? The suppression of the Red River Rebellion [sic] of the Metis in Canada?
I think the problem with the whole “X privilege” debate is that it is easy to examine these things when you are comfortable. It is easy to “acknowledge your privilege” when you are comfortable.
If you are personally struggling either financially, physically, or socially, it is not exactly a rational response to declare “I AM IN A PRIVILEGED POSITION”, regardless whether your “race” or “gender” is on the whole privileged.
AIUI it is not saying every white person is privileged (although admittedly there is a fringe who think so), the mainstream interpretation and the one I would agree with is on average white people are more privileged.
And yes, it should be discussed and prioritised in conjunction with other factors such as education, class, gender, etc with might make it a top 5 issue in the US but only a top 20 issue in the Uk.
My understanding is different. Privilege in this system is defined relatively. We're not trying to measure an absolute scale of priviliege out of 100, with say Jeff Bezos or the Duke of Westminster in the high 90s, and Rohyngia refugees somewhere below 10. Instead, the point is that if you have two people in the UK or US who are otherwise identical but one is white and the other black, the white person will have a better experience because they will not encounter racism. They may both have problems, maybe even serious problems, but the white person is relatively privileged because they have one less problem than the black person.
This is precisely why it's a tricky conversation, because if you're using an absolute scale and I'm talking in relative terms, pretty soon one of us will say something that sounds insane to the other, and we'll end up assuming that the other is incorrigibly racist/woke (delete as applicable).
I understand the concept, but privilege is the wrong word to use for it, because of the existing understanding of the word.
I think if you were to talk of a "bonus" to being white that would immediately convey the discrete and additive nature of the concept in a better way than privilege. There may even be better words to use. Advantage, bias, benefit ..?
It seems to me the fact you struggle so badly to describe this shows it is a completely false conceot
The problem is that white privilege, as a term, itself is guilty of the lack of nuance you rightly cite. Black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Black criminality would rightly be lambasted as castigating a whole race based on a minority. Slapping a privilege label on a whole race, perhaps then used to then try and make them feel a dose of liberal guilt or to diminish their opinion, is simply wrong on both moral and intellectual levels.
As others have already pointed out, poor white boys do the worst in educational terms. The blanket approach of describing whites as privileged whitewashes, ahem, the educational situation.
Judging people based on the colour of their skin is a very unwise path.
Mr. kinabalu, you're aware that most white people didn't own slaves, right? And that many had terrible working conditions? But you want to judge all present day white people based on what a minority of white people did a few centuries ago?
Do you feel that critical about the black slave traders who sold their fellow Africans to the British Empire (prior to the slavery ban, whilst the trade continued to be perpetrated by Africans, Arabs, and others)? Or is it only white people worthy of this condemnation for the sins of a minority of their forefathers?
And how far back does this historical victimhood last? Can I claim it for the Harrowing of the North? The Roman invasion?
Trying to make people who have never had slaves feel guilty towards people who have never been slaves because of things that happened centuries ago and were done by other people that neither the non-slave owners nor the non-slaves have even met is madness.
I don't want you to feel guilty. It's a wholly destructive emotion.
But neither do I want you to be in denial of something so palpably true as that "white privilege" - if the term is understood correctly - is a real and significant thing.
Well said. White people need to end our silence about the extent of racism, and therefore our relative privilege. if we are silent we are complicit, which we no longer do in relation to rape or child abuse.
We just need not to be frightened of acknowledging it, there's no need.
Anyone who lives in modern Britain needs to acknowledge the extent of their privilege. We have free medical care, money given to us when we're out of work, a state pension, a beautiful, temperate country to live in, plentiful food and drink, and we grow up speaking the world's language. We can participate in appointing and dismissing our leaders. We can be entertained or informed in seconds via the internet. We are all *ridiculously* privileged compared to our ancestors, of all colours, who lived in comparative discomfort, risk of violence or illness, and in many cases, poverty and unrelentingly hard work with little to show for it at the end. We are not just privileged compared to our ancestors, but our fellow humans living today in less fortunate countries than ours. Complaining about your lack of privilege against that background is pretty decadent.
I don't really disagree with the modeller, but I'm not sure how much that helps the "no lockdown!" argument. The dates are always a bit fuzzy and whenever I've modelled it, the R number drops around the 20th - which is pretty close to this guy's date, to be fair (the time from infection to death isn't a precise date - it's usually between 16 days and 28 days, which gives an inherent fuzziness).
The differences between "lockdown" and where we were by the weekend of the 20th weren't that profound and primarily semantic:
- Everyone possible working from home - Public transport levels had fallen off a cliff
- People encouraged to socially distance - Schools closed - Restaurants closed - Bars closed - Gyms closed - No public sport - Cinemas closed - Nightclubs closed
All of which isn't far from what we've got right now, is it? Except schools are a bit more open than they were. If the argument is that all we need is the above list of restrictions to keep R below 1, then I agree. But I don't think that Hitchens and co would be that comfortable with it - they possibly haven't thought it fully through?
I think the problem with the whole “X privilege” debate is that it is easy to examine these things when you are comfortable. It is easy to “acknowledge your privilege” when you are comfortable.
If you are personally struggling either financially, physically, or socially, it is not exactly a rational response to declare “I AM IN A PRIVILEGED POSITION”, regardless whether your “race” or “gender” is on the whole privileged.
AIUI it is not saying every white person is privileged (although admittedly there is a fringe who think so), the mainstream interpretation and the one I would agree with is on average white people are more privileged.
And yes, it should be discussed and prioritised in conjunction with other factors such as education, class, gender, etc with might make it a top 5 issue in the US but only a top 20 issue in the Uk.
My understanding is different. Privilege in this system is defined relatively. We're not trying to measure an absolute scale of priviliege out of 100, with say Jeff Bezos or the Duke of Westminster in the high 90s, and Rohyngia refugees somewhere below 10. Instead, the point is that if you have two people in the UK or US who are otherwise identical but one is white and the other black, the white person will have a better experience because they will not encounter racism. They may both have problems, maybe even serious problems, but the white person is relatively privileged because they have one less problem than the black person.
This is precisely why it's a tricky conversation, because if you're using an absolute scale and I'm talking in relative terms, pretty soon one of us will say something that sounds insane to the other, and we'll end up assuming that the other is incorrigibly racist/woke (delete as applicable).
I understand the concept, but privilege is the wrong word to use for it, because of the existing understanding of the word.
I think if you were to talk of a "bonus" to being white that would immediately convey the discrete and additive nature of the concept in a better way than privilege. There may even be better words to use. Advantage, bias, benefit ..?
It seems to me the fact you struggle so badly to describe this shows it is a completely false conceot
If they wanted a treaty to include trade and the way forward after we had left, they should have had one. Political declaration was a fudge - and fudges generally unravel.
The problem is that white privilege, as a term, itself is guilty of the lack of nuance you rightly cite. Black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Black criminality would rightly be lambasted as castigating a whole race based on a minority. Slapping a privilege label on a whole race, perhaps then used to then try and make them feel a dose of liberal guilt or to diminish their opinion, is simply wrong on both moral and intellectual levels.
As others have already pointed out, poor white boys do the worst in educational terms. The blanket approach of describing whites as privileged whitewashes, ahem, the educational situation.
Judging people based on the colour of their skin is a very unwise path.
Mr. kinabalu, you're aware that most white people didn't own slaves, right? And that many had terrible working conditions? But you want to judge all present day white people based on what a minority of white people did a few centuries ago?
Do you feel that critical about the black slave traders who sold their fellow Africans to the British Empire (prior to the slavery ban, whilst the trade continued to be perpetrated by Africans, Arabs, and others)? Or is it only white people worthy of this condemnation for the sins of a minority of their forefathers?
And how far back does this historical victimhood last? Can I claim it for the Harrowing of the North? The Roman invasion?
Trying to make people who have never had slaves feel guilty towards people who have never been slaves because of things that happened centuries ago and were done by other people that neither the non-slave owners nor the non-slaves have even met is madness.
I don't want you to feel guilty. It's a wholly destructive emotion.
But neither do I want you to be in denial of something so palpably true as that "white privilege" - if the term is understood correctly - is a real and significant thing.
Well said. White people need to end our silence about the extent of racism, and therefore our relative privilege. if we are silent we are complicit, which we no longer do in relation to rape or child abuse.
We just need not to be frightened of acknowledging it, there's no need.
Anyone who lives in modern Britain needs to acknowledge the extent of their privilege. We have free medical care, money given to us when we're out of work, a state pension, a beautiful, temperate country to live in, plentiful food and drink, and we grow up speaking the world's language. We can participate in appointing and dismissing our leaders. We can be entertained or informed in seconds via the internet. We are all *ridiculously* privileged compared to our ancestors, of all colours, who lived in comparative discomfort, risk of violence or illness, and in many cases, poverty and unrelentingly hard work with little to show for it at the end. We are not just privileged compared to our ancestors, but our fellow humans living today in less fortunate countries than ours. Complaining about your lack of privilege against that background is pretty decadent.
The fact that Britain is like that is not an accident. It is purely down to the conduct of its citizens, past and present, black white and brown
We really can;t help it if you are unable to understand even the basics of cause and effect.
Hardly a surprise. When we get a new lethal pandemic that takes many varied forms and suddenly we see lots more deaths than expected normally, the pandemic is highly likely to be the cause of most of those extra deaths - as a matter of common sense.
As a matter of interest, has any PBer ever seen or heard of a cyclist being nicked for speeding?
It's going to become much more common as battery-assisted bikes become widespread - these are very rapidly improving in weight and performance, so will become quite common in future. They have software limits to the speed assist, but often are quite easy to hack to 40mph+ boost in some cases.
And you seem to be happy for the EU to dictate our tax and state aid laws and inflict all their laws on the UK as if we were still members and not an independent UK
When we look at the British Empire, we have to put it in its broader context, with other periods of pre-eminence, short and long, enjoyed by other countries. Commercial exploitation, the strong enforcing their will over the weak, seem to be the inevitable result of the ability to do so. This certainly didn't begin with Britain, and it has certainly continued under a different name with America, and we'll have to see what it looks like under China. Even on a smaller scale, I would be interested to hear of any country that became more powerful than its near neighbours, and (if it wasn't stopped by a still greater power) did not end up exploiting it. Doing this enables us to assess the character of The British Empire slightly more even-handedly.
Here is one contemporary view quoted by Max Hastings in the DM: 'In 1922, the American philosopher George Santayana enthused: ‘Never since the days of heroic Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, churls and fanatics manage to supplant him.''
I don't really agree with that - I think what probably made the British Empire era more benign than the American Empire era (when taking into account the differences between the 19th and 20th centuries), was the fact that we were constrained in our actions by several other great world powers. We bullied the Chinese (as did the Americans) because we could. We couldn't have done it to the Russians, Germans, French, Americans, etc., so we didn't. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
One factor may have been that our power derived very largely from naval superiority. Can't easily turn the navy into an oppressive land Army.
The British Empire has sometimes been described as an accidental Empire because the intention in most cases was not to seize territory, but to secure trade. It was principally a mercantile empire.
This contrasts with earlier/other empires - such as the Arab caliphate, or the Russian Empire - which were explicitly about extending the territorial domain.
In some respects this makes the British Empire a halfway house between that of these earlier empires and the American Empire which followed, which ruled almost exclusively through a mixture of encouragement and client rulers rather than direct conquest.
I do not expect a Chinese iteration to continue this trajectory.
Again that is rather simplistic is it not.?
The manifestation of the Empire in Australia or Canada would be very different to its manifestation in say, Kenya, Malaya or Pakistan.
The Empire wore many different faces, depending on where it was doing the ruling.
Not really, Lost Password is correct. And whilst I haven't studied his other examples, I would say it's rare for an Empire to exist simply for its own sake. A sphere of influence is what precedes an Empire, and it's far cheaper and easier to run than an Empire. It's only when other powers rise up and threaten your advantageous trading arrangements that you need to send in soldiers and hoist the flag. Think of it as finally giving in and marrying your girlfriend because you're worried she'll go off with someone else. It's actually a weakening of your position not a strengthening of it. As LP says, America has managed to impose its will with overt colonisation. But when you see the amount of US military bases around the world (many of them in the UK!), you can see it's an Empire in all but name. Now that other power/s are challenging this hegemony, we may see a different approach from the US.
Goodness what are you rambling on about?
British rule was manfestly much bloodier in some parts of the British Empire than others. The Indian Mutiny, the Malaya Emergency, The Boer war, Afghanistan, the West Indies, Omdurman. Im sure there are plenty other places where British rule was enforced by sword and gun and not merely by trade.
Places like Australia and Canada were treated rather differently.
As I say these matters are complex and cannot be dealt with by sweeping statements.
You made two statements - I should have been clearer that I was disagreeing with your first one - that LP's original statement was too simplistic. Of course the British Empire was different in different instances. However, the basic principle stands, that you only invade and run up the flag when your interests in the area are threatened. Otherwise you could have everything you want for nothing.
I think the problem with the whole “X privilege” debate is that it is easy to examine these things when you are comfortable. It is easy to “acknowledge your privilege” when you are comfortable.
If you are personally struggling either financially, physically, or socially, it is not exactly a rational response to declare “I AM IN A PRIVILEGED POSITION”, regardless whether your “race” or “gender” is on the whole privileged.
AIUI it is not saying every white person is privileged (although admittedly there is a fringe who think so), the mainstream interpretation and the one I would agree with is on average white people are more privileged.
And yes, it should be discussed and prioritised in conjunction with other factors such as education, class, gender, etc with might make it a top 5 issue in the US but only a top 20 issue in the Uk.
My understanding is different. Privilege in this system is defined relatively. We're not trying to measure an absolute scale of priviliege out of 100, with say Jeff Bezos or the Duke of Westminster in the high 90s, and Rohyngia refugees somewhere below 10. Instead, the point is that if you have two people in the UK or US who are otherwise identical but one is white and the other black, the white person will have a better experience because they will not encounter racism. They may both have problems, maybe even serious problems, but the white person is relatively privileged because they have one less problem than the black person.
This is precisely why it's a tricky conversation, because if you're using an absolute scale and I'm talking in relative terms, pretty soon one of us will say something that sounds insane to the other, and we'll end up assuming that the other is incorrigibly racist/woke (delete as applicable).
I understand the concept, but privilege is the wrong word to use for it, because of the existing understanding of the word.
I think if you were to talk of a "bonus" to being white that would immediately convey the discrete and additive nature of the concept in a better way than privilege. There may even be better words to use. Advantage, bias, benefit ..?
It seems to me the fact you struggle so badly to describe this shows it is a completely false conceot
And you seem to be happy for the EU to dictate our tax and state aid laws and inflict all their laws on the UK as if we were still members and not an independent UK
No, I want my Prime Minister not to be a lying shit, but there we are...
Comments
Walk down Whiteladies Road or Blackboy Hill in Bristol and it may remind you that parts of our country were indeed at the vanguard of African slave trading.
Earlier in the year I was touring the Caribbean on a cruise ship, most of the passengers being American. In Antigua I asked the guide why the notion of slavery was skirted around in her presentation. She explained that her American customers quite often didn't want to hear about the history of Caribbean/American slavery. Several American Tourists over the years had called her out, suggesting slavery was a myth and these people were merely indentured servants.
My own issue, is not with the history, I would prefer it to be recalled accurately rather than conveniently rewritten, I do object to countrymen today wrapping themselves in the flag of empire and claiming those days to be the nadir of British achievement, generally without knowing what they are talking about. We should nonetheless not be expected to apologise on behalf of our forefathers
On the other hand it is annoying that Morgan seems to have made a very lucrative career out of everyone agreeing that he is an arse.
But neither do I want you to be in denial of something so palpably true as that "white privilege" - if the term is understood correctly - is a real and significant thing.
Agree we shouldn't be overly apologetic. By the same rote, I do think it helps to understand how things got the way they are. There are many who have no idea how there comes to be so many black people here and in the USA.
*Sarcasm, obviously.
In a sensible world, something like the BBC would provide the impartial reporting without the constant opinionating, but as we've seen they're just as ratings-driven as everyone else.
I nearly wiped out half a dozen mamils the other day turning out into a major road in a 30 mph speed limit. I saw them in the far distance, up a hill, and thought, they are bikes: too far away to worry about, looked the other way and pulled out. It transpired they were coming much much faster than I thought was possible.
There are those, especially on here, who can trace their families back to William the Conqueror. They have family myths and legends of participating in and benefiting from Empire. That doesn’t make it their guilt to bear, but it certainly makes it more “real”.
I can’t trace my family back more than 2 generations. The whole concept of Empire to me is the stuff of history books. Nothing more than a quaint historical story. I only know Britain as it is today.
How many white people feel forced to warn their kids by the time they are 11 they are at risk of being unfairly targeted by the police, which can result in them being beaten up, wrongly arrested, seriously injured or even killed.
This has happened, and has been going on for decades in this country, although thankfully at a far lesser scale than the evident police brutality in the US.
White people may not feel privileged but on the whole we experienced very little of the systemic discrimination that is pervasive in many black people's experience. It's time to stop being afraid of saying this like it is is. If it helps, think of it as being analogous to rape. Yes, men do get raped, and it is devastating for them, and no one wants to pretend otherwise. However, the scale and risk of rape is much greater for women, and of course the vast majority of rapists are men.
The origins, expansion and fall of the British Empire are surely highly complex matters, involving many factors.
An Australian court has refused permission for a Black Lives Matter protest scheduled to happen in Sydney on Saturday, ruling that it would risk spreading coronavirus.
New South Wales Police went to court seeking an injunction on the demonstration because it would have been a large assembly. Thousands were expected to attend.
Justice Desmond Ferguson said allowing the protest would defy the rulings of government ministers and the public health officers who advised them.
This contrasts with earlier/other empires - such as the Arab caliphate, or the Russian Empire - which were explicitly about extending the territorial domain.
In some respects this makes the British Empire a halfway house between that of these earlier empires and the American Empire which followed, which ruled almost exclusively through a mixture of encouragement and client rulers rather than direct conquest.
I do not expect a Chinese iteration to continue this trajectory.
https://twitter.com/ricjl/status/1268852224689651712
English
Managed
Indian
Run
Arabs
Take
Extra
Salary
https://twitter.com/clarkemicah/status/1268854786436272130?s=21
There are far more important present day injustices to deal with.
Which is about Jeffrey Epstein.
Can understand why the Queen has retired Prince Andrew from public duties.
Do we still, have to pay him from the civil list ?
Also hard to see Andrew co-operating with the USA authorities or ever visiting the states again.
The manifestation of the Empire in Australia or Canada would be very different to its manifestation in say, Kenya, Malaya or Pakistan.
The Empire wore many different faces, depending on where it was doing the ruling.
Some might say he leads by over 200%!!!
The US is a different country (admittedly one with some shared history and culture), but clearly with different issues. The holding of street protests in the middle of a 1-in 100 year global pandemic (where we are still supposed to be socially distancing) just seems nuts, given the lack of influence any authorities here of the US situation. That along with the general hand-wringing, public statements of support. Everyone who's been paying attention knows this type of thing has gone on in the US (and to a lesser extent, the UK) for years.
Not to minimise racism and police brutality, which is a serious, sensitive issue, but are we collectively loosing it a little bit?
We just need not to be frightened of acknowledging it, there's no need.
(Figures:Brake)
(Don't have the numbers for people on bikes to hand).
That 40MPH at traffic lights might be a bit of an overestimate - 40mph is the speed of a full-chat finishing sprint in a professional cycle race.
40kph is possible, though anyone doing it in London has a possible death wish.
More cycles lanes, even if it means closing some roads to cars completely feels like a better solution to me than 20mp defaults in cities.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8391355/Sadiq-Khan-says-wont-Black-Lives-Matter-protests-coronavirus.html
Starmer doesn't have any negatives, except being a bit boring. But he needs more positives to beat Johnsons. Hopefully for him, a chunk of the large Don't Knows may break positive.
A court out of nowhere. A case to answer, the details of which are never mentioned. In the end, violence.
Was curious where he made all his money from.
The important things are the quality of the path and that the priorities etc set up so there is no need to stop. It changes the average speed from about 14mph in normal UK conditions to about 22mph.
On the beautiful lit and landscaped path through my next-door housing estate I have to get off the bike 8 times in 1.2km due to barriers; so people cycle on the footpath of the A38 instead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2L77-R504M
The Achaemenid King Darius I has a monumental inscription carved into the side of a mountain at Behistun, detailing inter alia the expanse of his empire from the Balkans to the gates of India:
(1) I am Darius [Dâryavuš], the great king, king of kings, the king of Persia [Pârsa], the king of countries, the son of Hystaspes, the grandson of Arsames, the Achaemenid.
(4) King Darius says: Eight of my dynasty were kings before me; I am the ninth. Nine in succession we have been kings.
(6) King Darius says: These are the countries which are subject unto me, and by the grace of Ahuramazda I became king of them: Persia [Pârsa], Elam [Ûvja], Babylonia [Bâbiruš], Assyria [Athurâ], Arabia [Arabâya], Egypt [Mudrâya], the countries by the Sea, Lydia [Sparda], the Greeks [Yauna (Ionia)], Media [Mâda], Armenia [Armina], Cappadocia [Katpatuka], Parthia [Parthava], Drangiana [Zraka], Aria [Haraiva], Chorasmia [Uvârazmîy], Bactria [Bâxtriš], w:Sogdia [Suguda], Gandhara [Gadâra], Scythia [Saka], Sattagydia [Thataguš], Arachosia [Harauvatiš] and Maka [Maka]; twenty-three lands in all.
(7) King Darius says: These are the countries which are subject to me; by the grace of Ahuramazda they became subject to me; they brought tribute unto me. Whatsoever commands have been laid on them by me, by night or by day, have been performed by them.
(8) King Darius says: Within these lands, whosoever was a friend, him have I surely protected; whosoever was hostile, him have I utterly destroyed. By the grace of Ahuramazda these lands have conformed to my decrees; as it was commanded unto them by me, so was it done.
BRITAIN c. 500 BC:
‘You know what would make us look really scary when we go wandering naked around the countryside? Painting ourselves blue. Genius, innit?’
No deal coming down the track, or maybe Merkel will see sense as suggested yesteday when she said agreement would happen in September
However any serious Conservative knows in their heart , he looks PM material.
Also out of the Labour Leadership contenders , he was the one they did not want to win.
NZ has handled the covid crisis well. So well in fact a mass protest probably won't spread the virus very far if at all. That's not the situation here or in the USA.
I think if you were to talk of a "bonus" to being white that would immediately convey the discrete and additive nature of the concept in a better way than privilege. There may even be better words to use. Advantage, bias, benefit ..?
Or the row of bollards we have been trying to get into our rat run lane for the last 40 years, despite it having been "Access Only" throughout that time.
On eg roads joining areas of town etc, where modes are properly segregated such that people on bikes have their own space physically separated from motor traffic - eg separated by kerb and 1m of planting or the parked cars on the side of the road, I would argue for 30 mph as appropriate.
Barnier's arrogance and attitude is going to collapse these talks
Goodness what are you rambling on about?
British rule was manfestly much bloodier in some parts of the British Empire than others. The Indian Mutiny, the Malaya Emergency, The Boer war, Afghanistan, the West Indies, Omdurman. Im sure there are plenty other places where British rule was enforced by sword and gun and not merely by trade.
Places like Australia and Canada were treated rather differently.
As I say these matters are complex and cannot be dealt with by sweeping statements.
For example, compare Sweden, UK and Spain on the FT graph making thing;
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=gbr&areas=swe&areas=esp&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usnj&cumulative=0&logScale=1&perMillion=0&values=deaths
There isn't a lockdown =decline, no lockdown = rise binary, but that would be pretty unlikely. But the trend looks clear; the less you limit movement, the slower the decline. Which is what you'd expect from a simple model based in germ theory with not much dark matter needed.
How does walking away from talks that we collapsed help "Global Britain"?
https://twitter.com/adampayne26/status/1268863903347417092
The differences between "lockdown" and where we were by the weekend of the 20th weren't that profound and primarily semantic:
- Everyone possible working from home
- Public transport levels had fallen off a cliff
- People encouraged to socially distance
- Schools closed
- Restaurants closed
- Bars closed
- Gyms closed
- No public sport
- Cinemas closed
- Nightclubs closed
All of which isn't far from what we've got right now, is it? Except schools are a bit more open than they were.
If the argument is that all we need is the above list of restrictions to keep R below 1, then I agree. But I don't think that Hitchens and co would be that comfortable with it - they possibly haven't thought it fully through?
Now wanting to restrict UK state aid
There is no path through this stranglehold Barnier wants to put on UK
We really can;t help it if you are unable to understand even the basics of cause and effect.
And you seem to be happy for the EU to dictate our tax and state aid laws and inflict all their laws on the UK as if we were still members and not an independent UK
https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-what-a-second-wave-might-look-like-138980