Keep saying it until it sinks in: slavery was hugely controversial at the time. Eventually, that was what got rid of it. Whatever your view of the statues, or of some of the people who are campaigning against them, this is not about punishing the past for its failure to be the present. Plenty of people always could see what was wrong with the slave trade.
Look at the clowns who are now guarding statues of George Eliot, about whom they certainly know nothing whatever, against no threat of any kind. These are the people whom Keir Starmer, when he is not trying to steal Marcus Rashford's credit, is trying to appease by endorsing a ridiculous campaign against the removal of the statue of Winston Churchill from Parliament Square, a removal that absolutely nobody has ever proposed.
These, and the Glasgow Loyalist Defence League. I mean, seriously? The Glasgow Loyalist Defence League was ever remotely amenable to suggestion of voting Labour? Come on. And be in no doubt that internment is on its way, even under Boris Johnson and Priti Patel.
From the Glasgow Loyalist Defence League to the Middlemarchers, these are not people who stopped voting Labour under Jeremy Corbyn. These are not people who would ever have voted Labour, under any circumstance. Yet the entire anti-Corbyn project was, and astonishingly still is, predicated on the assumption that these were the voters that Labour had "lost" and needed to "win back".
Would Nigel Farage want them instead, these Nazi-saluting Churchill enthusiasts who urinated at the plaque that commemorated PC Keith Palmer, and who called themselves "Britian First"? That would be up to him, since their votes were now up for grabs. But Farage does have an admirable record of distancing himself from that sort. Under silly assumed names, their alternative leaders crashed and burned at last year's European Elections, which the Brexit Party won.
Farage is still big box office, so the editorially independent weekly magazine by half-owning which The Centre will partly fund itself would more than welcome, among its 20 or so weekly columnists, him and one of his supporters in each of the Red Wall areas of the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber, the North West, North Wales, the West Midlands, and the East Midlands. The same goes for George Galloway.
Initially, the money would be less than Farage or Galloway was used to. But although all columnists will always be paid the same, that rate for the job would go up as the paper became more successful commercially. And plenty of people would gladly pay one pound per week to read either or both of Nigel Farage and George Galloway. They know how to contact me on davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.
Farage is still big box office, so the editorially independent weekly magazine by half-owning which The Centre will partly fund itself would more than welcome, among its 20 or so weekly columnists, him and one of his supporters in each of the Red Wall areas of the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber, the North West, North Wales, the West Midlands, and the East Midlands. The same goes for George Galloway.
Initially, the money would be less than Farage or Galloway was used to. But although all columnists will always be paid the same, that rate for the job would go up as the paper became more successful commercially. And plenty of people would gladly pay one pound per week to read either or both of Nigel Farage and George Galloway. They know how to contact me on davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.
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