I look forward to the BBC's new programmes featuring those who upheld family and community values by seeking to secure economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty.
I look forward to the BBC's new programmes featuring those who understood social solidarity as an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility as protected by social solidarity, international solidarity as an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty as protected by international solidarity.
I look forward to the BBC's new programmes featuring those who defined equality and diversity as inclusive of economic equality and class diversity, of regional equality and regional diversity, of the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and of equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law and the presumption of innocence, which in turn requires that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt.
I look forward to the BBC's new programmes featuring those whose Britain was One Nation, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation, reorganising the British economy under State direction, and developing a fully independent British foreign policy, with no use of military force except in self-defence.
And I look forward to the BBC's new programmes featuring those who embodied the leading role of the people and places whose votes decided the outcomes of the 2016 referendum, the 2017 General Election, and the 2019 General Election, such as the rural working class, and the industrial and former industrial communities that were either outside the metropolitan areas or peripheral to them.
These are the voices that need to be heard, among a great many other reasons, in order to bring into the public consciousnesses the glorious struggle against the slave trade 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. But they were the wrong sort of people.
Those who claim that slavery and colonialism are widely taught in British schools need look no further than the fact that statues of slave-traders have until recent days stood in the centres of British towns and cities. If anything like the broad mass of the inhabitants had had any idea whose monuments those were, then they would have come down a very long time ago.
Such monuments are therefore failures in their own terms, and the teaching of History routinely skips from the fall of the Stuarts, or even from the death of Elizabeth I, straight to the First World War. If the slave trade is taught at all, then it is often in the form of the execrable claim that Britain's main or only contribution to it was to end it.
Well, the statues are down now, or they very soon will be. It is time to move on to the harder work. Reforming the curriculum is part of that. As is the implementation of the hundreds of recommendations that have already been made by a series of reviews of racial inequality over the last 30 years.
As is justice, including compensation, for the victims of the Windrush scandal and of the fire at Grenfell Tower. As is the end of deliberately racist policies such as "the hostile environment", "no recourse to public funds", and the whipping up of hallucinations about "health tourism". As is the closure of the detention centres. And as is an independent inquiry into the staggering number of BAME deaths from Covid-19.
Covid-19 has exposed for all to see the racial and class inequalities that have been worsened by the economic order that began in Britain with the Budget of 1976. But the Budget of March 2020 has ended that era. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. It already has plenty going on. And it would be more than happy to make diverse and inclusive programmes with and for the BBC.
Those who claim that slavery and colonialism are widely taught in British schools need look no further than the fact that statues of slave-traders have until recent days stood in the centres of British towns and cities. If anything like the broad mass of the inhabitants had had any idea whose monuments those were, then they would have come down a very long time ago.
Such monuments are therefore failures in their own terms, and the teaching of History routinely skips from the fall of the Stuarts, or even from the death of Elizabeth I, straight to the First World War. If the slave trade is taught at all, then it is often in the form of the execrable claim that Britain's main or only contribution to it was to end it.
Well, the statues are down now, or they very soon will be. It is time to move on to the harder work. Reforming the curriculum is part of that. As is the implementation of the hundreds of recommendations that have already been made by a series of reviews of racial inequality over the last 30 years.
As is justice, including compensation, for the victims of the Windrush scandal and of the fire at Grenfell Tower. As is the end of deliberately racist policies such as "the hostile environment", "no recourse to public funds", and the whipping up of hallucinations about "health tourism". As is the closure of the detention centres. And as is an independent inquiry into the staggering number of BAME deaths from Covid-19.
Covid-19 has exposed for all to see the racial and class inequalities that have been worsened by the economic order that began in Britain with the Budget of 1976. But the Budget of March 2020 has ended that era. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. It already has plenty going on. And it would be more than happy to make diverse and inclusive programmes with and for the BBC.
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