UK Politics: Black Lives Matter Here Too

[Which Tyler]

57 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

The statue thing is great because the kind of people getting outraged by the icon of a slaver being pulled down are exactly the types of people who deserve to be outraged and so can fuck off.

Just to warn you - I'm stealing this

[Derfel Cadarn]

57 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Andrew Adonis wants it replaced with a statute of Tony Blair.  I'd prefer Margaret Thatcher.

Statues of Thatcher are being eyed up, a common suggestion being to chuck then down an old mine shaft

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Statues of Thatcher are being eyed up, a common suggestion being to chuck then down an old mine shaft

The thing is, the old mining areas vote Conservative now.  That's something I never expected to see in my lifetime (and you can see the reverse in some well-heeled urban seats that were safely Conservative thirty years ago).

[Zorral]

Not random members of the public, but direct descendants of those brutalized and murdered, whose homes, families, tribes were literally destroyed so these white guys could get filthy rich off their sexual and other kinds of labor.  What's so hard to understand that people get sick and tired of living the shadow of glorifications of such figures who are founding fathers of the relentless, continuing assaults on their dignity as human beings, their opportunities for equal shots at opportunity as human beings.

Just like bathering 'we need to preserve the historical knowledge so shouldn't remove the statues" -- well there are many many many REALLY MORE EFFECTIVE WAYS of teaching and preserving historical knowledge and information, and maybe the best is what we call books.  How many people have learned a goddamned thing about the history of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery from these statues, when, compared, particularly, with how many have learned from reading books, from listening to people of color speak? -- and even, o my ghosh, reading the books that poc wrote of their own experience of being enslaved and immiserated?

 

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, SeanF said:

The thing is, the old mining areas vote Conservative now.  That's something I never expected to see in my lifetime (and you can see the reverse in some well-heeled urban seats that were safely Conservative thirty years ago).

That's what we see in the US too.  I still can't comprehend hearing those generational families of Appalachia coal miners in Pennyslvania literally spit when speaking of the mines' owners, the company and all the rest, and how their great-grandfathers, grandfathers, fathers and they themselves are treated by them, and then howl with even greater heat that Hillary Clinton and should be chucked down a mine shaft. This was right before the Dem Nom Con.

[SeanF]

12 minutes ago, Zorral said:

That's what we see in the US too.  I still can't comprehend hearing those generational families of Appalachia coal miners in Pennyslvania literally spit when speaking of the mines' owners, the company and all the rest, and how their great-grandfathers, grandfathers, fathers and they themselves are treated by them, and then howl with even greater heat that Hillary Clinton and should be chucked down a mine shaft. This was right before the Dem Nom Con.

In this country, such voters feel that they no longer have anything in common with the Labour Party.  Increasingly, Labour is a party of core cities, Merseyside, and university constituencies. 

[dog-days]

17 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Not random members of the public, but direct descendants of those brutalized and murdered, whose homes, families, tribes were literally destroyed so these white guys could get filthy rich off their sexual and other kinds of labor.  What's so hard to understand that people get sick and tired of living the shadow of glorifications of such figures who are founding fathers of the relentless, continuing assaults on their dignity as human beings, their opportunities for equal shots at opportunity as human beings.

Just like bathering 'we need to preserve the historical knowledge so shouldn't remove the statues" -- well there are many many many REALLY MORE EFFECTIVE WAYS of teaching and preserving historical knowledge and information, and maybe the best is what we call books.  How many people have learned a goddamned thing about the history of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery from these statues, when, compared, particularly, with how many have learned from reading books, from listening to people of color speak? -- and even, o my ghosh, reading the books that poc wrote of their own experience of being enslaved and immiserated?

 

Speaking of statues in general, and not Colson in particular: it's not the historical knowledge, it's the historical physical culture. Statues are rarely created to memorialize the nice. They have always been about power.  We could also do well to wonder whether statues we put up today may be pulled down by our descendants for sins we have not yet acknowledged, articulated or faced up to. The future is another country - they will do things differently there. 

Quite a lot of the people involved in pulling down the Colson statue may well have been descended from both the enslaved and the slave owners. Here I'm not talking about the sexual exploitation of African slaves by European slave owners, though of course that happened as well. I mean that in the almost two hundred years since abolition, there has been a lot of intermarriage. 

One thing I will say is that if you live in modern Britain today, whoever you are, you have benefited from the proceeds of slavery. It helped fund the industrial revolution, it helped develop infrastructure, it funded some of the universities, it funded a heck of a lot of the architecture that tourists used to flood in to see pre-Covid. You're suffering from the shadow of slavery as well, if you're Black British, and not getting the same economic benefit that white citizens get. You're getting a heck of a lot less. But we're all part of the same horrendous economic web by which suffering is transformed into money and passed on in an uneven and unjust distasteful legacy. 

 

[Derfel Cadarn]

Yeah many universities including Glasgow University benefited from slavery. 

Hell, our museums are filled with all the shit our ancestors stole from across the world.

[SeanF]

14 minutes ago, dog-days said:

Speaking of statues in general, and not Colson in particular: it's not the historical knowledge, it's the historical physical culture. Statues are rarely created to memorialize the nice. They have always been about power.  We could also do well to wonder whether statues we put up today may be pulled down by our descendants for sins we have not yet acknowledged, articulated or faced up to. The future is another country - they will do things differently there. 

Quite a lot of the people involved in pulling down the Colson statue may well have been descended from both the enslaved and the slave owners. Here I'm not talking about the sexual exploitation of African slaves by European slave owners, though of course that happened as well. I mean that in the almost two hundred years since abolition, there has been a lot of intermarriage. 

One thing I will say is that if you live in modern Britain today, whoever you are, you have benefited from the proceeds of slavery. It helped fund the industrial revolution, it helped develop infrastructure, it funded some of the universities, it funded a heck of a lot of the architecture that tourists used to flood in to see pre-Covid. You're suffering from the shadow of slavery as well, if you're Black British, and not getting the same economic benefit that white citizens get. You're getting a heck of a lot less. But we're all part of the same horrendous economic web by which suffering is transformed into money and passed on in an uneven and unjust distasteful legacy. 

 

Most of the great men (and some women) of history range from the pretty ruthless to the completely sociopathic butchers. And, our current prosperity is built upon the actions they took.  

And it's hard to know what the future will hold.  They may view our eating meat with horror.  Or the idea of permitting religious toleration.

[mormont]

3 hours ago, SeanF said:

The thing is, the old mining areas vote Conservative now. 

I grew up in a former mining area, lived in another for four years. The Conservatives have never finished better than third in either. Hemsworth? Merthyr Tydfil? Wansbeck? East Fife? Voting Conservative now? No, they're not.

The Tories took quite a few in the last election, but it remains to be seen if this was a sustainable sea change or a one-off collapse by Labour. The fact that the Tories failed to make major inroads in Scottish and Welsh former mining areas suggests the latter.

3 hours ago, Leap said:

It belongs in a museum. 

 

[Stannis Eats No Peaches]

4 hours ago, Leap said:

Seems pretty obvious that Bristol shouldn't have a statue of a slave trader in the city centre. I'd even go so far as to say that no city should. And no amount of plaque-attaching is going to make it not a glorification of that person, whether the Colstonites agree to it or not. It belongs in a museum. 

That said, I am really torn on this. In principle, peaceful and democratic means of change are obviously preferable. More on that below. In practice, I don't think that this is going to lead to a slew of statue-felling, and it's fairly low-key as an expression of justifiable anger and frustration. And on the issue of the statue, the city is much better off not having it.

I also think that conflating the people who want this statue up with people who criticise how it was torn down is exactly the sort of ideologial purity test that should make people wary of countenancing crimes when it's ethical.

I really disagree with this, for example. The least worst option we have as a country is to let a thin majority decide our future, and that is never a guarantee that it will be smart, ethical or "OK" (see: Brexit). Extending that moral pass to extrajudicial action is lunacy in my eyes. As I said, I doubt this will lead to mass statue-felling, but there's absolutely no doubt that it violates the the principle of rule of law. We're fortunate to have a pretty stable country that can withstand the odd slave-trader-statue-habour-rendevouz, but that doesn't mean it's wrong to point it out, minor as it is. Bristol is better off not having a statue of a racist slave trader, it is not better off for having the law not apply some of the time.

So we mustn’t accept anyone breaking the law, no matter the circumstances? Are you worried about it setting a dangerous precedent? My belief (hope?) is that on this one exceptional occasion we can agree that some very rare things are worth breaking the law over. People protesting against systemic racism disposing of a statue of a slaver is something I’m quite comfortable with.

 

Yes I’m sure we’d have all loved to have seen a democratic process where the residents of Bristol voted on whether to keep the statue, but given that systemic racism still being a thing is the reason why we’ve seen these demonstrations, I don’t blame the protesters for not holding their breath.

 

I get that the objection to this approach is that you can’t really quantify public opinion, so how do we know when an exception can be made? The simple answer is that we can’t, so we won’t know until it happens, which is basically the purpose of a jury as someone mentioned earlier. Obviously though, as we are talking about exceptions, we should always assume that breaking the law is wrong, but not rule out the possibility that it wasn’t. Though I think a fairly big clue would be that the only real objection to the act is that it’s against the law.

 

If nothing else, tearing down this statue has got the country talking about the legacy of slavery and how much of our current wealth was built on it, so yes I would say that it was worth violating the rule of law.

[Ser Reptitious]

I wonder if the proper procedures were followed when Saddam Hussein’s statues were pulled down in 2003? 

[Heartofice]

2 minutes ago, Ser Reptitious said:

I wonder if the proper procedures were followed when Saddam Hussein’s statues were pulled down in 2003? 

I wondered how long it would take someone to make this stupid comment. Took longer than I thought...

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

5 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Statues of Thatcher are being eyed up, a common suggestion being to chuck then down an old mine shaft

I know, different country, but for year's I've wondered what we should do here with Founding Fathers statues. I don't have a good answer.

[Hereward]

55 minutes ago, mormont said:

I grew up in a former mining area, lived in another for four years. The Conservatives have never finished better than third in either. Hemsworth? Merthyr Tydfil? Wansbeck? East Fife? Voting Conservative now? No, they're not.

The Tories took quite a few in the last election, but it remains to be seen if this was a sustainable sea change or a one-off collapse by Labour. The fact that the Tories failed to make major inroads in Scottish and Welsh former mining areas suggests the latter.

 

You know as well as I do what the difference is: English nationalism on one hand, and Scottish and Welsh nationalism on the other. And as such, the failure of the Tories to capture Scottish and Welsh former mining seats means precisely nothing concerning their chances of winning English seats next time.

[SeanF]

7 hours ago, mormont said:

I grew up in a former mining area, lived in another for four years. The Conservatives have never finished better than third in either. Hemsworth? Merthyr Tydfil? Wansbeck? East Fife? Voting Conservative now? No, they're not.

The Tories took quite a few in the last election, but it remains to be seen if this was a sustainable sea change or a one-off collapse by Labour. The fact that the Tories failed to make major inroads in Scottish and Welsh former mining areas suggests the latter.

 

English and Scottish politics have diverged.  The fall in the Labour vote in former mining areas is a long-run process.  The Conservatives won seats that were showing Labour vote shares of 65%+, at the start of this century. Even in Hemsworth and Wansbeck, Labour only held on by their fingertips.

[mormont]

8 hours ago, Hereward said:

You know as well as I do what the difference is: English nationalism on one hand, and Scottish and Welsh nationalism on the other.

Except that those Scottish and Welsh seats I mentioned have not all fallen to the SNP or Plaid: Labour retain Merthyr Tydfil, for example, as well as Rhondda, Aberavon and others.

And since the SNP and Plaid differ markedly from the Conservatives and UKIP on almost every political issue, so it would be weird to suggest that there's a common theme here other than a collapse in the Labour vote, or that the success of the SNP, for example, somehow reflects the original claim that former mining areas are now voting Conservative.

 

[Heartofice]

So I guess if we go by our new ‘laws’ of public opinion deciding who gets arrested and who doesn’t, considering only 13% approved of how it was removed and 40% disapproved of how it was removed..

Guess we have to arrest that mob.

[mormont]

2 hours ago, SeanF said:

English and Scottish politics have diverged.  The fall in the Labour vote in former mining areas is a long-run process.  The Conservatives won seats that were showing Labour vote shares of 65%+, at the start of this century. Even in Hemsworth and Wansbeck, Labour only held on by their fingertips.

If you want to make this argument, you need to go back and edit your original post to make clear your claim is limited to only certain former mining areas.

Of course, we're reaching the point where those areas have been former mining areas so long that the salience of that fact may be decreasing, politically.

[SeanF]

23 minutes ago, mormont said:

If you want to make this argument, you need to go back and edit your original post to make clear your claim is limited to only certain former mining areas.

Of course, we're reaching the point where those areas have been former mining areas so long that the salience of that fact may be decreasing, politically.

Fair enough.