Delighted to share the new Kibbo Kift Agency website. To see our vision and work presented in one place is a proud moment for us.
https://t.co/UTvyciTPLX 🌍
As a reminder of our work as a responsible PR and Comms agency… ↓ ↓ ↓
Kemi, congratulations on leading a major British party as a Black Woman. It takes real talent to rise to where you are and deceit is what it takes to rise as a Black leader in a western Conservative Party.
It is a pity the climb did not leave room for a history book and since you chose to argue in the language of history, let us do the history. Let’s dissect your verbal diarrhea point by point.
Everyone participated." Slavery existed on every continent. So did war, and nobody calls a village feud the World War. The transatlantic trade ran for 366 years (1501 to 1866) and put about 12.5 million Africans on ships, of whom about 1.8 million died before they saw the Americas, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. It ran through joint-stock companies, chartered monopolies, Lloyd's underwriters and acts of Parliament. It was hereditary, because the law made the child of an enslaved mother property from birth. It was racial, because a whole continent was defined as chattel. No other system in history combined those features at that scale. Dissolving all of it into "people from every continent" is far worse than intellectual dishonesty.
Britain was a market leader, not a participant. British ships carried about 3.2 million Africans, second only to Portugal and Brazil. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave Britain the asiento, a thirty-year monopoly to supply 4,800 enslaved Africans a year to Spanish America. The Royal African Company, chartered in 1672 and headed by the Duke of York, later James II, branded its captives "DY". During Edward Colston's years in its leadership it shipped about 84,000 people, and roughly 19,000 died on the way.
You say British taxpayers should not answer for what happened before they were born. They did. In 1833 Britain borrowed £20 million to compensate slaveholders, and taxpayers serviced that loan until 2015, including the descendants of the enslaved. So the principle you invoke was not applied when the cheque went to slaveholders. It only appears when the cheque changes direction.
"Navel-gazing" is a curious charge from someone whose party spends more energy on the past (Empire nostalgia, culture war crusades) than most of those you accuse. Defend Britain if you must. But do not use your Nigerian name as the permission slip for arguments Nigerians know better than anyone.
Brazilians have reportedly been spending 6.5% more on staple foods since sports betting was banned in the country.
A month ago, Lula signed an order banning fixed-odds sports betting, a move he said was designed to tackle the problem of families falling into debt.
Now the President of the Brazilian Supermarket Association says that since the ban, sales of essential foods such as rice, oil, coffee, and noodles have grown by 6.5%.
I wrote about a guy running a network of secret "ghost creators," paying actors $26 per video to read AI-assisted "anti-Dem" videos on YouTube.
In just a few months, the channels got 45 million views, more than media companies like WaPo, the New Yorker, and, sadly, Semafor.
I remember going to the climate talks all the way back in 2009 and talking with Nepali activists and experts who were doing everything they could to sound the alarm that the “roof of the world” was melting and would start to crack in exactly these ways.
Events like the ones of this week aren’t just tragedies, they’re crimes. We’ve known for decades that the burning of fossil fuels would lead to disasters like this, but the industry and their politicians have continued to block action at every turn.
It’s past time we start making polluters pay for the damage they’ve done.
Long post, sorry. But I swear, one of the disorders of this island is that whenever we do something well, we destroy it to appease an imagined reactionary swing voter in about 20 constituencies.
We do universities well. Genuinely, world-beatingly as a sector.
So naturally we're dismantling them — because "migrants," "foreigners," and "Mickey Mouse degrees."
While ignoring entirely that the sector:
1. Redistributes wealth around the country as students move between regions.
2. Delivers a massive net benefit through R&D
3. Anchors local economies — in half our towns, the university is the economy
3. Is one of our biggest export industries, with international students bringing in billions
5. Trains the doctors, nurses, and teachers as well as producing an educated population, in general.
6. Remains one of the few engines of social mobility we have left
7. Generates the spin-outs and startups every government has claimed it wants more of
8. Is among the last sources of British soft power that still commands global respect
9. And is a GOOD in and of itself, builds lifelong friendships, improves social cohesion, exposes young people to different ways of life and living. The most formative experience in many peoples' lives.
And they're not being destroyed, for the most part, by the sector itself, but by stupid decision after stupid decision by the government around how to run and fund them.
It is a genuine catastrophe, tanking our last stellar industry.
But instead of even reporting on the broader impacts this will all have, the university is just castigated as some fortress in the culture war.
Sky News reports that a 28-year-old Palestinian woman, six months pregnant and suffering severe internal bleeding, was being transported from Qaryout in the occupied West Bank to Rafidia Surgical Hospital in Nablus when Israeli soldiers stopped her ambulance at the Awarta checkpoint.
Video shows Israeli forces detained the ambulance crew for more than 30 minutes, subjected the bleeding, critically ill woman to a physical search, and ordered the driver to turn off the engine, cutting power to the vehicle’s onboard medical equipment.
During the forced delay, a nurse was forced to deliver the fetus stillborn inside the stranded ambulance. The woman was eventually allowed to proceed to the hospital, where doctors performed emergency surgery and saved her life. The baby could not be saved.
Never forget that as early as the 1950s the oil industry knew this was *exactly* the crisis their pollution would create, but instead of warning the public, they funded massive, ongoing disinformation campaigns and lobbied against clean energy.
Climate change isn’t a tragedy, it’s a crime.