“For every man who stands for Leader and gets to be a Leader, he has pushed a woman into second place behind him,” says Harriet Harman, who is characteristically wrong in fact. Since the move away from election by the MPs alone, second place has gone to Roy Hattersley in 1983, to Tony Benn in 1988, to Bryan Gould in 1992, to John Prescott in 1994, to David Miliband in 2010, to Andy Burnham in 2015, to Owen Smith in 2016, and only then to Rebecca Long-Bailey, whom Harman would not have wanted, in 2020. In 2010, did Harman support Diane Abbott, whose critics would have left the Labour Party if they believed that it had readmitted the person whom they alleged her to be?
Hey ho, that’s Eurocommunists, Pabloists and Shachtmanites for you. But the only thing even funnier than the vanguard elite is the master race. They shriek for a new General Franco to rescue Spain from the Moroccans of whom the old one deployed tens of thousands as his fearsome Regulares, largely recruited from the Rif Mountains where Ceuta and Melilla were also located, such that at least some of the recent tourists to Ceuta must have been descended from those, the men who provided even the Guardia de Su Excelencia el Generalísimo, which was therefore known as the Guardia Mora.
In May 1940,
Winston Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini, whom he had called “the greatest living legislator”. Gibraltar is still under British sovereignty only because Labour won the 1945 Election. After Franco had refused to let Hitler use Spain in order to invade Gibraltar and thus seize control of the Strait, Churchill had promised him Gibraltar once the War was safely won. That would have been just another colonial transfer in those days. But Churchill lost at the ballot box. In the meantime,
over one thousand Spanish Republicans had fought the Second World War in the British Army. What do Churchill’s noisiest partisans think of that? It ranks with last September, when Konstantin Malofeev and Aleksandr Dugin played host to the
Falange Española de las JONS, annual wreath-layers in memory of the Blue Legion.
Franco saw off Hitler’s designs on Gibraltar, on which he did then impose from 1969 a blockade that lasted until seven years after his death, by making unfeasible military and territorial demands in North Africa, thereby again illustrating that the idea of the Strait of Gibraltar as a civilisational frontier was rooted in the most perfect ignorance, as much on the part of those to whom it was self-evident that there should not be parts of Spain on the African mainland, as on the part of those whom it genuinely discombobulated to learn that Britain had had any role in the slave trade except to end it. In fact, our engagement in the slave trade lasted longer than the period since abolition.
Yet at the 2024 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Keir Starmer refused even to apologise for slavery. Not pay reparations. Britain is never going to pay trillions of dollars, and no court is ever going to make even a paper order for it to do so. Starmer did not understand opening negotiations by asking for far more than you would ever get, in order to get anything at all. So much for his legal background. And so much for a party in hock to the trade unions, mention of which raises the questions of reparations to whom and from whom. Are the descendants of the Peasants’ Revolt, of the Levellers, and of those who were massacred at Peterloo, to pay the present rulers of Africa and the Caribbean? Certainly not. The slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle. Moreover, large and growing numbers of us are descended both from these Islands’ immemorial working class and from African slaves.
The continuation of slavery in parts of the Commonwealth even today, including in parts of Africa that did not become independent until the second half of the twentieth century, establishes that the British Empire’s suppression of it was largely a legislative statement of aspiration, while the argument that the white working class could not possibly be held responsible for slavery is an observation of the effects of events in the eleventh century, never mind between the sixteenth and the nineteenth. Keep those and many other things in mind as you read the wise words of the great
Paul Knaggs, which I myself read in the knowledge of my own family background in Fife and the Lothians, meaning that I may well be descended from slaves on both sides.
The loan to compensate the slaveholders was so enormous that every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom was still paying it off until 2015, 182 years after it had been taken out. Yes, not until 1833. Not 1807. It was only 2023 that saw the two hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the British Anti-Slavery Society. The ban on the slave trade in 1807 had done nothing to stamp out slavery itself, and indeed victory over Napoleon had given Britain additional slave colonies such as Demerara and Mauritius. In 1833, it was time to open the Bible again. The claim that Scripture did not condemn slavery as such was made by the defenders of that institution, who generally had a pecuniary interest in it. That included the Church of England, as Dame Sarah Mullally is quite right to point out. William Wilberforce was an outlier. He was not the only one. But he was one. The one religious body that can claim always to have been opposed to slavery in principle, and vigorously in practice, is the Quakers, although even they had their issues with cocoa from São Tomé and Príncipe.
But the idea that everyone thought that slavery was at least not contrary to Scripture for the first 16 centuries of Christianity’s existence, with most people doing so for the first 18, is simply false. Abolitionists were castigated and mocked specifically for taking the Word of God too seriously. By taking it so, they were unable to believe that the different “races” were different species with different origins, as was widely believed by the theological conservative-liberal elitists of the day. The suggestion that until some very late date no one had thought that slavery was unbiblical and un-Christian is bound up with the suggestion that there was no opposition to it in its heyday, but that simultaneously England and then Britain had taken it up purely for the pleasure and honour of stamping it out. In fact, though, we were not even the first country to abolish slavery, since that was Haiti, after the only successful slave revolt in history. We have still not yet been free of it for as long as we practised it. And while it is true that it could never officially exist in the Imperial Motherland because “the air of England was too pure” for it, from where did English Common Law arrive at that conclusion? Out of that thin air itself? Or from Christianity?
As late as the 1860s, Britain had been widely expected to intervene in the American Civil War on the Confederate side, which even had an Episcopalian bishop among its generals, but the proponents of that intervention had reckoned without the Lancashire cotton workers. The beneficiaries of the slave trade remain at the heart of the British elite, since the Atlantic slave trade was the foundation of capitalism, and there is no doubt that the monarchy, the Supreme Governorship of the Church of England, was heavily involved in it for, it bears repetition, longer than the period from its abolition to the present day. Therefore, rather than give the usual answer about Britain’s having stamped out slavery, Starmer had to say that there had never been anything wrong with it, or at least not when Britain had done it. To say otherwise would have been to raise almost endless questions, beginning with why the water of England should be so impure, yet at the same time so expensive. There is a mounting case for the kind of tactics that were employed against the slave trade. What if we all just refused to pay the exorbitant water and fuel bills that went straight out in dividends?
