Ashley Rindsberg has written a piece for UnHerd about the Guardian’s unfortunate links to the slave trade, and the obvious problems this presents for our nation’s most august bastion of wokeness. Here’s an excerpt:
The Guardian prides itself on being one of the most Left-leaning and anti-racist news outlets in the English-speaking world. So imagine its embarrassment when, last month, a number of black podcast producers researching the paper’s historic ties to slavery abruptly resigned, alleging they had been victims of “institutional racism”, “editorial whiteness”, “microaggressions, colourism, bullying, passive-aggressive and obstructive management styles”. All of this might smack of progressive excess, but, in reality, it merely reflects an institution incuriously at odds with itself.
Questions about the Guardian’s ties to slavery have been circulating since 2020, when, amid the media’s collective spasm of racial conscience following the murder of George Floyd, the Scott Trust announced it would launch an investigation into its history. “We in the U.K. need to begin a national debate on reparations for slavery, a crime which heralded the age of capitalism and provided the basis for racism that continues to endanger black life globally,” journalist Amandla Thomas-Johnson wrote in a June 2020 Guardian opinion piece about the toppling of a statue of 17th Century British slaver Edward Colston. A month later, the Scott Trust committed to determining whether the founder of the paper, John Edward Taylor, had profited from slavery. “We have seen no evidence that Taylor was a slave owner, nor involved in any direct way in the slave trade,” the chairman of the Scott Trust, Alex Graham, told Guardian staff by email at the time. “But were such evidence to exist, we would want to be open about it.” (Notably, Graham, in using the terms “slave owner” and “direct way”, set a very specific and very high bar for what would be considered information worthy of disclosure.)
The problem is that the results of the investigation, conducted by historian Sheryllynne Haggerty, an “expert in the history of the transatlantic slave trade”, have never been made public. When contacted with questions about what happened to the promised report, Haggerty referred all inquiries to The Guardian’s PR, which has remained silent on the matter. (The Guardian was asked for comment and we were given the stock PR response the Guardian gave following the podcaster’s letter.) But what we do know is this: according to Guardian lore, a business tycoon named John Edward Taylor was inspired to agitate for change after witnessing the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, when over a dozen people were killed in Manchester by Government forces as they protested for parliamentary representation. Two years later, Taylor, a young cotton merchant, with the backing of a group of local reformers known at the Little Circle, founded the paper.
The Guardian’s Manchester roots and the links between the slave trade and the Lancashire cotton industry gave the paper an awkward dilemma:
So when the Civil War broke out in 1861, the Manchester Guardian found itself in a strange position. Its very existence was owed to the profits made on the backs of slaves, yet it could not morally support the South. But, because of its business interests, it also found itself unable to champion the North. To explain its at-times stridently anti-Union positions, the paper pointed to a smattering of statements by Abraham Lincoln indicating he would maintain slavery if it meant preserving the Union. The paper would go so far as to characterise Lincoln’s election “as an evil day both for America and the world”.
But there were other forces at work. For all their brotherly love, the Little Circle of Manchester elites believed that the power of democracy, and even of free expression, should be limited to a small elect who were educated and intelligent enough to be entrusted with such power. When it came to the masses, the Circle believed that “because most people had not yet reached the same moral and intellectual standards of the members of the Circle, it was suggested that the bulk of the population should be indefinitely denied access to the public sphere, or at least the right to vote…” To the founders of the Manchester Guardian, America was a lesson in the painful effects of too much democracy. According to its editorial spin, the Union had not gone to war in order to free a downtrodden class but to act upon its expansionist ambitions. This, in one view, was a way for the paper to advance its abolitionist position without putting its weight behind the idea that all people everywhere should be free and fully enfranchised — an idea the paper’s leadership considered dangerous.
The Guardian melded this political conservatism with its stance on free trade, and notably the Corn Laws, which the Manchester elite maintained was an unnecessary tax that hurt the poor. But they were doubtless also sharply aware that, if replicated in other industries (say, cotton production), such tariffs could threaten their businesses. What emerged from the Guardian’s moral contortionism was an argument claiming that the root problem in America was not that Africans were being enslaved by Southerners, but, incredibly, that the South had been enslaved by the North.
Crikey. We’ve come a long way from there to an Owen Jones opinion piece. Rindsberg goes on:
What emerges from this picture of the Manchester Guardian in its formative days is a cultural institution that was able to pull off a kind of moral arbitrage, turning slave profits into an anti-slavery position; espousing high-minded ideals on freedom without supporting the equality that freedom affords; and cannily leveraging the horrors of the Civil War to advance its most pressing economic policy: free trade. Perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that in the two centuries since the paper’s founding, the Guardian has returned to the same issue that lies at the heart of slavery — race. For the past 20 years, the Guardian’s approach to the topic of race has been nothing short of total. Yet, like the current leadership’s 19th Century antecedents, it’s not clear that the paper sits on a foundation sturdy enough to support such an uncompromising approach.
Worth reading in full.
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excellent idea. The basis should be the return of formal debating in which people have to propose motions with which they may disagree and the result judged dispassionately, not by a vote on the floor but by teachers marking the structure of the arguments. Not easy I know but it’s a great challenge.
Teachers marking? I assume you haven’t met many teachers!
Are teachers the ‘professionals’ for whom the Education Secretary is seeking a 9% pay rise? Those lily livered pond life who were happily complicit in denying a proper education to our children, driven by their unions who are now threatening to strike?
They need to have their salaries reduced, not enhanced and their right to strike withdrawn.
Unprincipled bastards
It’s going to be a bit of an effort when you get the full idea of what TEACHERS think the kids should be taught.
Appalling must watch video from an Irish teaching union
https://twitter.com/FatEmperor/status/1542463974117183488
With thanks to Ivor Cummins
I hesitated to click on this because I knew it would infuriate me, but I did. Unbelievable.
When I was 7 or 8 I identified as a boy. I worse boys clothes, had a boys hair cut, climbed trees and skinned my knees and even belonged to the local cub group because it was run by my mother and it was more convenient for her to take me with her. I despised brownies as sissies. Guess what? I was a tomboy, and like most other tomboys I grew out of it at puberty. God knows what would have happened to me these days! Come to think of it, tomboy is a word you don’t hear now either. (Probably deemed offensive or something)
Years ago, before I mistrusted the BBC, the author Val McDermid, (who I dislike due to her stance on Independence, masks, vaccines etc), made this point beautifully……basically, as a girl she was a tomboy, preferring football and traditional “boy” pursuits. She later found herself attracted to her own sex and has always been in lesbian rather than heterosexual relationships.
AT NO POINT EVER felt that those childhood traits or sexual preferences signified she was the “wrong” gender, simply it was appropriate for boys OR girls to participate in those activities and sexual choices.
In other words; if a female can do ANYTHING she wishes to do as a female, and a man can do the same, where is the validity in the argument “I was born the wrong gender”?
It’s too subtle for the Trans brigade, who would simply and wrongly see @the old bat or Val McDermid climbing their respective trees as children and say, “Oh, look at that poor boy born into a girl’s body, better get that sorted out for them”
One of the most egregious things I’ve recently seen is also in this video. That’s the picture of this amorphous creature whose text says
I was born with the body of a boy but the brain of a girl.
Math is hard, let’s go shopping! anyone? If that’s not sexist, I don’t know what is. I’ve been socialised in the 1980s, ie, well before all these all men/ all women cliches were reintroduced (early 2000s in Germany) and shit like this makes my blood boil. By that time, we decidedly didn’t think it was chic to regard the often cited 50% of mankind as of the lower orders because of the sex difference and I refuse to start doing so just because this would be politically convenient for some people.
There’s a great episode of Little House on the Prairie, where the father, Charles Ingolls, wants to take Laura, his middle daughter, on a hunting expedition. His wife objects, saying it isn’t right for girls to do such things. Charles rejects her idea, stating that he’s sure she’ll grow into a wonderful woman. They go, and Laura saves the day when Charles injures himself, miles from anywhere, with his own gun.
Obviously, these episodes were aired before the Woke Brigade got their teeth into everything.
These watermelon-shaped beings are very strange. What planet to they live on?
This is also very scary
wwwDOTyoutubeDOTcom/watch?v=XA07ta2tJpQ
Neither politicians nor large employers are interested in people able to and courageous enough to engage in sceptical thinking.
The whole point of children’s education now is to turn them into semi-skilled obedient sheep who know their place and keep their mouths shut.
“The whole point of children’s education now is to turn them into semi-skilled obedient sheep who know their place and keep their mouths shut.”
Bang on the nail but the people pushing this are the Davos Deviants. The politicians are just under orders.
The DD’s want a wholly compliant and sheep-like populace because they require SLAVES not sentient, questioning human beings.
I fear some people have yet to perceive the depth of evil being planned – depopulation and enslavement for the survivors. Some run of the mill civil servants and politicians might be given a small sincere, a kapo type position while they have a use, but after that they will be off to the knackers yard.
Apologies – bloody predictive- – ‘sincere’ was of course sinecure.
Take ’em out and teach them at home.
Education is now massively politicised
Health the same.
Best avoid schools. And the NHS.
The problem is certainly one of trusting in authority/the state. In 2003, unlike many sensible British people, I swallowed the WMD nonsense just because I did not believe a government would tell such blatant lies – truth was finally turned on its head in with the Hutton report. Obviously Gilligan told the truth and Blair lied over Dr Kelly and Hutton used technical technical arguments to twist the results – the Chairman and Director General resigned and the BBC was captured, and by degrees most of the mainstream have been swallowed up since. I guess by now the lies are so all enveloping and pervasive that it is simply easier to give up. I suppose it is the first circle of the metaverse.
Hallelujah! What a brilliant sensible idea. Some here may well have seen the attached feature extracted from The Light newspaper issue 21 p23. The kids are the future of the human race, god help us all if free / critical thinking gets completely wiped out.
They taught us some complete twaddle at school – things that turned out to just not be true at all.
The biggest whopper I can think of was this notion that we “the people” are governed by consent and that we have inalienable rights (granted to us by “God”).
It turns out we don’t and that these “rights” are granted to us by the government who can take them away from us whenever they feel like it (“for the greater good”) – even for the most stupidest reasons (like because someone decided to rebrand the flu for example)
It also turns out that the government basically owns our kids because we were stupid enough to “register” them with the government.
I’m dreading my daughters going to school. I suppose I’ll have to try and teach them that many of the pointless things they are learning are “just pretend” and that they should “just write the answers the teacher wants regardless of if they are actually true or not”. I’d encourage them to not believe anything school tells them unless they can prove it themselves. BUT they must never let on to the school that they are doing this.