Last year, the Church of England declared that it had invested the equivalent of £440 million today in the slave trade between 1720 and 1740 and thus would be paying out £100 million in a programme of reparations. However, a historian of the period, Professor Richard Dale, has now said that this is based on a mistake: the church did not invest anywhere near such sums in the slave trade and did not profit from it. Charles Moore has written about the debacle in the Telegraph.
But is the history contained in the [Church of England’s] report true? In a recent article in the Church Times, Prof. Richard Dale, a business historian of the famous “South Sea Bubble” of 1720, suggests it is not. I telephoned him to find out more.
This is the fact that, in 1723 – three years after the South Sea Bubble had burst – Parliament passed a statute splitting the South Sea Company in two. One was the trading company. The other was the company which sold what was in effect Government debt, paying interest on annuities.
The Commissioners’ report says that “anyone investing in the Company before 1740 was consciously investing in these [slave-trading] voyages”. Prof. Dale says the opposite was the case. Those buying the annuities were consciously not investing in slavery. The statute’s purpose was to make this possible by what is now called ‘ring-fencing’, preventing any financial or legal relationship between the trading and the annuities. This was done, it seems, because the trading (of which slaves formed a big part, but not the whole) was high-risk. The smash of 1720 had showed how toxic the mixture of Government debt with high risk could be.
After the Act, [the Church of England’s] Queen Anne’s Bounty put all its money into the annuities – just the sort of lower but safer return you would expect a sober ecclesiastical organisation to seek. Once the split had taken place, it bought no shares in anything connected with slavery.
Between 1720 and 1723, it is true, the Bounty did invest £14,000 (about £2.4 million today) in the unsplit company and so, for a time, could have profited from slavery. As it happened, however, it did not. When Parliament divided the South Sea Company in 1723, it split the Bounty’s shares equally, too. The Bounty sold off its trading company shares quite quickly but retained and greatly expanded its annuities.
Will the woke ever get their history right?
Worth reading in full.
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Marianna Spring can be briefly heard on this BBC Radio 4 programme broadcast this morning, ‘AntiSocial – Covid vaccines and misinformation’ – but don’t let Marianna Spring put you off, I said ‘briefly’ and it is in fact an excellent programme, in which Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill is given the opportunity to make his case for free speech, and the presenter, Adam Fleming, makes a genuine attempt to be fair to all sides.
The whole series of ‘AntiSocial’ programmes on BBC Radio 4 are surprisingly fair and excellent, not the usual BBC propaganda, but much more open, and are well worth listening to.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001k837
Wild horses wouldn’t drag me to a BBC programme on misinformation. I wonder how many thousands of Roberts radios (other brands available) have been switched off for good over the last 3 years of unabating BBC propaganda.
Very much in agreement on point one and sadly I’m one of the thousands with a Roberts radio that hasn’t been switched on for the best part of three years.
“The originator of the New World Order conspiracy theory almost certainly believed his.”
Lol. Imagine a world in which powerful people globally talked to each other, shared information and collaborated (when it suited them) in order to further their own wealth and power, and pretended that everything they were doing was for the public good. Only a loony would imagine such goings on.
See Piers Morgan and his pitiful ‘apology’.
Speaking of disinformation, isn’t that all we’ve been bombarded with these past 3 years? So with that in mind, here’s a 13min video illustrating some prime examples of disinformation being spouted by Moderna’s CEO, Walensky, Fauci and more, plus more on the clot shot harms, with a particularly unpleasant clip at the end which is basically child abuse, in my opinion.
https://rumble.com/v2ek51m-who-killed-trista-rand-paul-grills-moderna.html
Misinformation, disinformation and fact checking are weapons used by established, traditional media to suppress competition which has flourished online and in social media.
It’s simple old fashioned gangster tactics used to defend “their turf”.
What’s the point of pretending its anything but that? They aren’t presenting an honest argument so why even pretend they are?
Well put. No one seems to ask the question of how all us middle aged people, who were apparently bombarded with mis and disinformation in the years prior to the internet still have functioning brains.
I was told that Freddie Star had eaten a hamster yet I, and many others, didn’t need a middle class public school educated ‘intellectual’ such as Marianna Spring to allow us to disseminate such information.
The arrogance of these people is simply breathtaking, that they alone are so intellectually superior to everyone else that only they can decide what you and I can and cannot see.
I had a small interaction with this woman on twitter who airily dismissed my question as to why, as a Paramedic, I’d not seen a single serious Covid case. She wasn’t curious but simply explained to me that my observations were incorrect because the doctors HAD seen lots of these patients and as Doctors are far more trustworthy than Paramedics I was simply wrong!
I don’t think it is arrogance. They are just paid gatekeepers used to try to control the public discourse so as to support undemocratic narratives.
Misinformation and disinformation are just two of the most recent words to be subjected to ludicrous redefinition by government, institutions and authoritarians.
It has been done to corrupt the true meaning of the words in order to provide the so called elites an opportunity to weaponise language and bolster their cynical psychological projection onto others.
What it appears to mean is a comfortable little box that people draw around themselves, and within which they can unquestioningly for or against something, without anyone forcing them to think about its consequences or alternatives.
Excellent.
Questions are raised given the sheer amount that we have been able to discover in recent years and the concommitant understanding of how much is hidden. The main focus should be, where is a person now. That system is well and truly dead and not just dead but targeted for destruction. If you want to put as much distance as possible between them and you then you need to align yourself with the forces of goodness and beauty and truth. The bickering over the past leave it to them. Let the dead bury the dead.
Stupid cow.
Frome here on in who knows but it certainly isn;t the BBC. We are talking about months not years left of our culture. I hope you are savouring the last if it because if you have clear vision you can see exactly where it is going. I think the nasty English weather will help us with endurance.
I think everything that is happening is part of a grand project that involves the destruction of European Christian civilisation and the eradication of Europeans.
I was born in 61 and it seems to me it was happening fairly slowly, in second gear, (although decimalisation and metrication were acts of gross local cultural vandalism) until 97, when they went up a couple of gears.
After the election in 2019 they went up another couple of gears.
(I’m not aware of any cars with 7 gears,so my analogy will fail with the election of Labour next time!)
Certainly the destruction of the west is foremost for them. And to be honest they have largely achieved it by surrepititious means. The have moved very far forward since 1945. It is our job to tell them here and no further. We are here to restore a basic simple understanding and we will brook no quarter.
The very use of the terms misinformation and disinformation are offensive in themselves. This is simply pandering to the Orwellian language which is being foisted on us. In reality a twisted way of encouraging people to view the world through the vocabulary of the oppressors. I’m having none of it.
Misinformation is a mix up and disinformation is telling lies. End of.
The issue is the lateness of the hour. We aren’t just naive young bucks learning for the first time that things aren’;t as they seem.We are deeply involved in a war and all of our names are on the missiles.I would just ask for a bit more circumspection because in miltary terms we cannot win and to pretend otherwise is just stupid.
I can’t make anyone feel happier but as long as we gel with our intentions then we’re good to go.I genuinely want to keep this country and this culture alive no matter what.We try our best and see what happens.
All you need to remember is that when your country starts using depleted uranium then all optipns are on the table. Don;t imagine that because you’re an island that you will be safe forever from retaliation.Depleted uranium causes major environmental damage and severe birth defects in civilian populations and civilian injuries generally. This was all listed in a 1990s UN report. This is a very serious matter and you won’t be able to brush it under the carpet for long.
Of course the BBC should not have a misinformation correspondent. It is like they employ their own fact checker. The BBC as arbiters of truth, don’t make me laugh. Pure hubris and an insult to our intelligence.
Check out funding for BBC Media Action…including funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
We need to unplug from the BBC forever
*****
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
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Ditched my BEEB license, 3 years ago and loving it. Have you heard and the latest corruption of Great Expectations with a black Estella. Renamed ” Great Exploitation “. I kid you not. Remind us about the Anne Boleyn fiasco
There is “truth” and there is “Official Truth”.—– There is “Science” and there is “Official Science”. ——-If someone says there is no such thing as an elephant then that would clearly be misinformation as most of us have seen elephants, even if only on TV. ———————–But NO ONE has seen “Climate Change”. You cannot look out of your living room window and say “Oh look at all the climate change”. ——–An individual might think they have seen it. They might feel a hot day and assume that is climate change. They may see a heavy downpour and think that must be climate change. They might hear about some ice melting and assume yep, that is climate change. ———–But those are all assumptions. But when officialdom tells you that those assumptions represent “Truth” then that is misinformation. They are “Official Truth”. ——————Climate Change is therefore “Official Science” in support of Public Policy.