News Round-Up
26 July 2024
Government Has Just Declared War on Free Speech
26 July 2024
by Toby Young
The Church of England has committed to paying £1bn in slavery reparations. But the case for doing so is historical nonsense, say Robert Tombs and Lawrence Goldman. The Church never made any money from the slave trade.
In all the mindless clamour to shame Britain into paying eye-watering 'reparations' for slavery, it is forgotten that Britain had to force Africa to give up its slaving ways. Peter Harris tells the untold story.
Slavery and colonialism did not make Britain rich, and may even have made the nation poorer, a new study from the Institute of Economic Affairs has found.
The Church of England announced £100m in reparations for profiting from the slave trade. But now a historian has shown this is a mistake: the church never profited from slavery. Will the woke ever get their history right?
The historian William Dalrymple pompously suggested Kemi Badenoch should "learn some history" after she denied Britain's economic success was due to white privilege. The historian of empire, Nigel Biggar, begs to differ.
If anything, Britain is owed a debt for its imperial and colonial endeavours, argues Daniel Hannan. "Our species benefited hugely from the industrial revolution, the abolition of the slave trade and the defeat of Nazism."
The constant calls for Britain to apologise for slavery miss one hugely important fact: that Britain was almost single-handedly responsible for abolishing the abhorrent trade, at immense cost to itself.
The billion-pound slavery atonement proposed by the Church of England is slammed by Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph, as yet another instance of British national self-loathing and Americanised symbolic virtue-signalling.
A controversial West End theatre production about race, identity and sexuality in 21st century America will put on two nights for black-only audiences to watch the play "free from the white gaze".
Have black Americans really inherited 'weak genes' from their enslaved ancestors? That might sound like racist pseudoscience, but, bizarrely, it's a central claim in the current clamour for reparations in the U.S.
© Skeptics Ltd.