Britain is home to people from every inhabited territory in the world, it is ethnically diverse down to every ward, and it has a huge and a rapidly growing mixed-race population. Yet people are reacting with genuine pain to the news that there might be anything worth knowing about Britain's role in the slave trade apart from "We ended it". They truly never knew. Even now, they struggle to believe.
Well, Chesterton said that some things were too big to see. Just as no known descendant of slavery on the North American continent has ever been either main party's nominee for President or Vice President, so no known descendant of the transatlantic slave trade that built the British Empire has ever been a Cabinet Minister in the British House of Commons. Think on.
We didn’t just end it here but the British Empire helped end it worldwide thanks to the Royal Navy’s humanitarian mission to free 100,000 slaves in enforcing the anti slavery treaties.
ReplyDeleteThat is truly all that you know about it. Michael Gove's pub quiz History curriculum, carried over from the public schools.
DeleteThat's true, isn't it? Obama and Harris are allowed, but nobody descended from slavery in the South. Even Cleverley is half-Sierra Leonean, half-white. All the other Cabinet BAMEs are African, South Asian or Kurdish.
ReplyDeleteNo change there. Baroness Amos was International Development Secretary and then Leader of the House of Lords, but before the current crop only two nonwhite elected MPs had ever even attended Cabinet, although not as members. One was Paul Boeteng, who was half-Gahanian and half-white. The other was Sadiq Khan.
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