🇬🇧 THEY TOLD YOU A STORY. 🇬🇧
Colonisers. Slavers. Oppressors. And you were supposed to feel ashamed.
Not for what you done... But for WHO YOU ARE. 🇬🇧
So we tested it. Britain wrote everything down, so we opened the books. 📖
Turns out fewer than 1 man in 10 could vote in the year Britain banned the slave trade. No woman could. Your ancestors could hang for stealing a sheep, get shipped across the world for petty theft, or go down a mine at 8 years old. In Manchester, the average age of death in a labouring family was 17.
They weren't running the slave trade. They were underneath it too.
Which is what makes what happened next worth knowing.
In 1772 an enslaved man named James Somerset walked free from an English court, because English law couldn't hold a slave.
In 1791, 300,000 families just stopped buying slave sugar. No march, no riot, just a decision made at 300,000 kitchen tables.
In 1792, 519 petitions carrying 390,000 names hit Parliament, most signed by people who couldn't vote themselves.
In 1807, Britain banned the trade.
Then the slave owners sent Britain a bill for the 800,000 people they still held. 💷 £20 million. About 40% of the entire government budget at the time.
The Treasury says it wasn't paid off until 2015. So if your family paid British tax before then, they helped buy 800,000 people their freedom.
From 1808 the Royal Navy spent 60 years hunting slave ships at sea: 1,600 stopped, 150,000 people freed, and 1,600 British sailors dead, mostly of disease, buried thousands of miles from home. ⚓
In 1816 they ended two centuries of Barbary corsairs enslaving Europeans.
In 1896 a war that lasted 38 minutes ended slavery in Zanzibar. 🇹🇿
Almost every country on Earth outlaws slavery today.
That fight was paid for largely at British expense, by British hands.🇬🇧
So why haven't you heard any of this?
Because within living memory, someone rewrote the story. You got taught the crime. Not the cure.
The powerful exploited the world. They exploited their own people first. It was those people who ended slavery. 🇬🇧
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
History got rewritten once, in living memory, by no one who was ever named or held to account.
We are ordinary people doing what ordinary people have always done. Opening the books. Refusing to look away.
This is how we fight back. Fact by fact. Story by story. Name by name.
We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it.
If you can afford to support what we do: https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf
Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
@Naseemsawag@vicderbyshire You are commentiing on a post from a high profile lady within a media outlet, linking to a report in a media outlet. What do you not see?
@peterelliott28@martincnwoch In order to make money he would have to create some value. And the only way to do that is to create some success. I’d take that.
One of the most thought provoking speeches I've seen in a while.
@Miss_Snuffy on how raising a generation to see the world through oppressors and the oppressed is changing the West.
If you don't have time, bookmark it. It's worth every second.
WATCH:
On the spiteful nature of Labour’s education policy, let’s revisit the single decision Bridget Philipson made that has been most revealing, as well as frustrating.
Eton and Star Academies wanted to open a great new free school in Middlesbrough to help more talented young people access the best universities - a noble endeavour backed by funding from Eton as well as a commitment to share their passion and expertise.
The last Conservative government said yes in 2023 under @GillianKeegan, in a victory for local children and parents and for a great campaign led by independent Mayor Andy Preston @centre_right_ and Conservative Councillor @MiekaSmiles.
But astonishingly, Labour locally campaigned against it. Andy McDonald MP raged against Eton as a "hallmark of stifling elitism”.
What did Bridget Philipson do when she became Education Secretary? She killed the project. Prejudice trumped social mobility.
https://t.co/LeOO3olBgH
Note to all the pearl-clutching Tories out in force today…
You don’t HAVE to send your kids to private school. We have universal education provision in this country.
If you *choose* to do so, the rest of us shouldn’t pay for you to have a tax break for the privilege.
Oh for fuck’s sake give it a rest…
Brexit was FACTUALLY a de minimis footnote (I voted remain in 2016 so don’t even start…) when compared with a raft of the worst policy decisions imaginable since the end of WW2 across virtually all policy areas, by fuckwit politicians…
To name some of the biggest offenders:
- Most expensive energy in the developed world fuelling inflation across every good and service going - and net zero cultish insanity crippling our economy; we now make virgin steel only via emergency nationalisation in all but name - mainly because windmills and solar don’t produce the joules to produce concrete or steel, to build stuff
- Shuttering North Sea oil whilst buying the same stuff from the Norwegians who banked the oil: two trillion in the tank, three hundred grand a head, a quarter of the budget paid forever
- PFI. Blair and Brown fancied hospitals that didn’t trouble the books, so they put them on tick with loan sharks. £60b of buildings, £300b out the door, NHS still paying through the nose for a car park and a leaky roof.
- Tories borrowed the best part of £400bn at 0%, the cheapest money in three hundred years, and what have we got for it? Furlough, a fortune in PPE that didn’t work, and ~£20b handed to chancers with fake ltd co’s. Nothing built. Nothing that pays you back. The lot, gone. And here’s the one nobody says out loud… Money was free. Risk free. Rates at zero for the best part of a fucking decade. If a govt or their perm secs had any sense that was the moment to issue a 30y infra bond and build the grid, the reactors, the track, the housing, lock the cost in at basically nothing and let it pay for itself for two generations. Norway would’ve had it done by lunch. We didn’t issue a penny of it. Now the long end’s at 5.5 and the door’s now bolted shut. We had the cheapest money in history and spaffed it all.
- Capital markets that don’t work since Blair and Brown’s various legislative and regulatory changes, making pension fund allocations lower going into British companies, and making it harder and more costly to raise capital to grow and keep businesses here paying taxes and employing people - the collective cost of this to British households is conservatively estimated to be around £20trillion (per @andyroocraig’s figures) and countries that were literally communist within living memory are on track to overtake us this decade, on the IMF’s own numbers. Oh, and Mississippi HAS already overtaken us on GDP per capita basis (they are the butt of all poverty jokes in the US)
- Brown flogged 395 tonnes of gold, over half the national reserve, in 17 auctions between 1999 and 2002, at about $275 an ounce, near a twenty-year structural low. They call it “Brown’s Bottom” for a reason. Pocketed $3.5b but I t’d be worth around $52b today. So that socialist genius cleared the lot at the bottom of the market and torched the thick end of £40b in one decision (because he like many politicians since the 90s is a retard with no real world understanding)
- P90/P10 wage compression under social democracy is demonstrably worse than even the Soviets managed under Gosplan ffs
- Selling off and sweating various other national assets to fund our absurd debt borrowing pile that has mostly been spaffed up the wall on zero return or loss making initiatives / welfare socialism etc
- Series of the worst trade deals imaginable (pre and post Brexit)
- Too much of people’s money tied up in the resi property Ponzi scheme doing nothing (other than now: losing value in realtime)
- Planning laws that stop anyone building infrastructure on housing
I could go on…
Plus we have rising long yields now, which are (TL;DR) the price of having destroyed your own structural buyer base and then issuing into the gap while the central bank sells on top. Brexit doesn’t appear anywhere in that mechanism either.
So, this creepy obsession you have with Brexit is weird, lame and entirely worn out.
Bin.
🚮
Chief Executive of a Data Centre firm calmly tells Parliament that she won’t be building centres here because they cost £250M more A YEAR in power to run here than in the Nordics. And planning and connectivity takes too long.