Quentin Letts has written a blistering op ed in the Mail, railing against the Welsh Taliban’s Labour Party’s efforts to erase Wales’s links to the British Empire. This is how it begins:
That bibulous rogue Sebastian Dangerfield, hero of J.P. Donleavy’s novel The Ginger Man, declares: “When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs of Dublin.“
Why not? Given the politicised filth currently being thrown at prominent historical figures, there seems little purpose in leaving this mortal life in a more dignified or altruistic manner.
What is the point, certainly, in leaving a fortune to good causes or in having a monument or building erected to your memory if future generations of political non-entities are going to disown you for their own tawdry purposes?
Yesterday brought the latest in a long list of such stunts. Welsh librarians were instructed to distance themselves from ‘racist’ buildings. Buildings can be racist? You learn something new every day.
Under no circumstances, stated the taxpayer-supported Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, should libraries hold staff-training events at venues that ‘represent a racist legacy’. What sort of places did they have in mind? Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, Flintshire, was reportedly one. It is named after William Gladstone, the snowy-haired Victorian prime minister who is generally considered to have been rather a benevolent fellow.
That butters no parsnips with the remorseless, grievance-seeking commissars of today’s Britain. In 1833 Gladstone’s father received compensation for his West Indies business interests after the abolition of slavery. It happened two centuries ago but never mind: cancel the memory of that man’s son!
The Chartered Institute’s campaign against ‘racist’ buildings took forward the work of the Welsh Labour government’s 2022 Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan which itself built on an ‘audit of commemoration’ ordered by the then first minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, who was Cardiff’s answer to Jeremy Corbyn.
You may recall that Brother Drakeford stepped down in March after the (ahem) tremendous success of his 20mph motoring rules. His racist buildings audit, enthusiastically conducted by the Welsh heritage regulator Cadw, appraised 93 buildings for links to ‘the slave trade and the British Empire’. Note the casual linking of those two, as if slavery and imperial power were one.
It was not just buildings that were investigated. The 135-page audit also hunted for racist streets and pointed an accusing finger at hundreds of blameless addresses.
Those denounced included: York Drive in Llantwit Fardre, mid-Glamorgan, one of many thoroughfares and pubs named after the pro-slavery Duke of York who became James II; Stanley Street in Mold, Flintshire, which commemorates arch-colonialist Henry Morton Stanley, the central-African explorer who said ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’; Nelson’s Walk in Tenby which honours – quite rightly, many would say – the victor of Trafalgar, Admiral Horatio Nelson.
Another long-dead admiral came in for a battering a couple of days ago. At Gloucester cathedral there stands an unostentatious memorial to a 19th century naval officer, Henry Christian.
Admiral Christian later became chief constable of Gloucestershire and he must have been a reasonably popular chap because after his death in 1916 the cathedral chapter gave its blessing to the small plaque in his honour. There it stayed, pretty much unnoticed, until the Gloucester Monuments Review was paid (by the then Tory-run Gloucester City Council) to start checking local memorials for any links to the slave trade.
It concluded that Admiral Christian may once have helped the pro-slavery Confederacy in the American Civil War (1861-65) but the claims were so tenuous that the review called them “problematic” and “uncorroborated”. In Justin Welby’s Church of England, however, that was enough.
Despite the review recommending that no action be taken, Gloucester cathedral’s authorities rushed to distance themselves from Admiral Christian. His monument will now carry a QR code linking visitors to a health warning about his possible (but, as we know from the review, unproved) assistance to the losing side in a war that ended 159 years ago.
Madness is at work here. Actually, it is more sinister than that. These things are being stirred up by ministers and officials for political reasons – that is, out of a desire for temporal power every bit as naked and rather less creditable than the empire-building of our forefathers.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Robert Tombs in the Telegraph is equally unimpressed by the Welsh branch of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals’ counselling its members not to hold meetings in ‘racist buildings’.
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Enjoyable and, at the same time, foreboding peice Toby
And you don’t hear Sebastian’s surname very often do you?
Admiral Christian, like Gladstone, might have been rather astonished that modern slavery exists in Britain today. In the time of the British Empire there were no slaves in Britain. Even runaway slaves couldn’t be legally reclaimed by their masters.
Unlike in Anglo-Saxon England when Harold I’s Danish mother had a nice line in business, rounding up pretty Saxon girls and selling them abroad as sex slaves. Evidently this charming woman wasn’t a feminist.
The Welsh, as the original Britons, have never really got over the 5th century, as part of the Welsh 10th century epic poem, The Great Prophesy of Britain, demonstrates. As for Welby, the poor man had better ensure that a QR code is placed on parts of the Apostle Paul’s writings in the Holy Bible, the passages where he describes returning a runaway slave, named ‘Useful’, to his master.
The photo of Vincent Price, who was partly of Welsh descent, as the zealot Puritan in the film, The Witchfinder General, is very appropriate. Now showing west of Offa’s Dyke.
This week I am being bombarded with pop-up adverts preceding social media clips. The slightly too-long un-skippable adverts claim to be from “UK Government” and are selling peace and love. The voiceover is a caricature of a Northern, hardworking, family man’s voice wallowing in the nostalgia of his grandfather’s age when we all lived harmoniously together. There are excellent production values, screenplay, casting, photograph, editing and sound mixing, so I guess it comes from the Nudge Unit or the Cabinet Office rather than Kumbaya Central. Traditionally this messages come from the pulpit, not from the pop-up. Why does the Government spend so much money sending messages to the populace and so little on receiving messages therefrom?
These have been annoying me, too – but only uncertainty as to the government dept has stopped me sending off a complaint to someone. It smells of Nudge unit which I believe is the bastard child of the Cabinet office, and they seem to have the same syrupy tone as the COVID warning ads and vaxx- pushing broadcasts.
I think I complained to Advertising Standards about the latter but it was dismissed because they decided the message was ‘proportionate’.
A complaint about Universal Brotherhood is unlikely to be upheld but it might clog up their system.
White people going through life apologizing for their colour is like Germans apologizing for being German because of the war. How on earth is something which happened many generations ago, way before we were born, if we’re talking about slavery, our responsibility, so much so that we’re expected to go through the rest of our lives guilt-ridden? Stop with this pathetic nonsense! Instead let’s shine a light on the actual racists, the real culprits who keep and treat people as slaves right now as we speak. One doesn’t have to look far to see what’s going on and where, while the sanctimonious hypocrites choose to look the other way;
”The Arab slave trade began earlier and ended later than the European slave trade.
Mauritania was the last country on Earth to officially ban slavery. The Kafala system still allows for modern day slavery in multiple Arab countries.”
https://x.com/NiohBerg/status/1826199188813525129
A full documentary here;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJTh4Gdn_B8
Another Sebastian Dangerfield line that I’ve used on scores of occasions is: “We’ll be alright, so long as there’s drink.”
Wonderful! That really made me laugh…
Muslims will come for that once they gain power
The real purpose behind these little jousts against historic buildings has nothing to do with who or what they commemorate and everything to with erasing our nations’ history. Bit by bit our past is being demolished with the intention that within two generations it will barely exist and after three generations there will be no history left to remember even if there are some still living with vague recollections.
At some point the wannabe new order will direct their attacks not just to our history but to the books which record and explain that history and slowly the vanishings will continue just like Stalin’s USSR; the history books, followed by our greatest writers, I mean look at The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare was clearly an anti-semite, and so it will spread like…oh, I don’t know, a nasty “virus” perhaps.
In order to eradicate nation states and nationhood the people must be dissociared from their past, there must be no collective memory and citizens will be taught to “wander lonely as a cloud.”
In order to build back better first they must destroy.
A phrase that really irritates me is “The slave trade” as though it’s the only one that ever existed.
So by “racist buildings”, they mean some tenuous link to “African Slavery”, which was started by Africans themselves, selling each other to Arabs and later to Europeans, who did not scour the continent rounding up Africans, but merely waited in African ports for the Africans to deliver their fellow Africans of their own free will. It’s all about grifters demanding “reparations”. They should start by demanding reparations from African countries first.
To the Welsh government’s list of racist buildings linked to African Slavery must be added a new category:
“White Slavery”, including every mosque and Islamic Centre in Wales, which will come in very handy when we demand “reparations” ourselves from the Islamic world.
We all thought like that until a few decades ago. I grew up in the early 1980s and my whole worldview was essentially one of belonging to a colonising power. Not necessarily a benevolent one but one that kept the natives in check. I am not saying that this was an enlightened view I am just pointing out how recent this shift has been and so to expect ordinary people to keep up with it within your time-frame is unrealistic. This is just snobbery.
Private companies don’t have time for this garbage – except the multi nationals eho can pee their profits away. Small and medium enterprises have to make money by selling things people want. Librarians should all mostly be sacked because the public no longer really wants their products. Time for public sector to keep their jobs based on public demand. Sack tens of thousands.
When we were young, we used to pass mental asylums and point at them. Then they closed them and the inmates are now running the country. Lord help us!!!
My question is how to stop this 1984 playbook.
Plenty mention of the things being deconstructed, disrupted and dismantled, but where is there identification of those who are engaging in this destruction. Not amorphous blobs like Gloucester City Council or the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals or the Church of England..
Only the singular names such as Welby or Drakeford appear. Where are the interviews of them attempting to get to the nuts and bolts of their worldview that motivated them to engage such action?
“Nelson’s Walk in Tenby which honours – quite rightly, many would say – the victor of Trafalgar, Admiral Horatio Nelson.”
Perhaps it’s a pity he did win as we might not have these vacuous idiots around today wasting our money on their pathetic schemes.
Lundy Island off the Devon coast needs to be added to the list.Although now more famous for puffins it was occupied by the Barbary pirates and used as a base for raiding for white slaves to be sold in the markets of Algiers.