Ann Easter

There was an interesting article in the Recorder recently. Cllr Easter suggested that the current obsession with deleting history (or names) that we no longer like, might not be a wholly commendable idea.

Having given the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol a good soaking, some of the SJWs in Newham want to have his name eradicated from the streets of Forest Gate. More virtue signalling from the comrades?

We reported earlier on the demands to change the name of Maryland, because it supposedly was linked to the slave trade. In doing so we fell into a linguistic trap. We referred to ‘The’ slave trade as if this was the only one or the only one that mattered. It wasn’t and it isn’t.

Conveniently, our modern social justice warriors ignore slavery in Africa, which predated the trans-Atlantic slave trade and continued long after; the specifically East African slave trade; the trans Saharan Slave Trade to the Ottoman Empire and Arab states; The Barbary slave trade which laid waste to coastal Europe over several centuries. Slavery in the Roman Empire or the Viking slave trade; the ravages of the Ottoman slave trade in Eastern Europe (slave comes from the noun, Slav) in which 20% of the population were slaves. Nor slavery in India or China. You get the idea.

They also ignore that the Royal Navy had a fleet permanently stationed in the Atlantic charged with preventing the transportation of slaves across the Atlantic for the greater part of the nineteenth century. The only occasion in history when this was done.

The aim of our contemporary SJWs is to paint a picture that is Black and White (the pun was unavoidable), in which Whites are the oppressors of the Blacks; “it happened in the past, it is happening again”. 

You will have noticed that while we once lived in a white-majority country,  we now live in a “White supremacist” country, defined by the permanent redefinition of words to fit to current narrative. 

Likewise, racism is now defined, not by your intention, nor by your deliberate action, but by someone’s perception of something that you did, or didn’t do, irrespective of any intention you had. 

Also, we are now told that to be White is to be racist. White’s can’t help it, they are just born that way.

The parasitic attachment of the so-called progressives to the trans-Atlantic slave trade not only ignores those facts of history that fail to support the contemporary narrative, but is used in such a way as to paint Black people permanently as victims and as the cannon fodder of their social revolution. 

Once upon a time we believed that the Labour Party was intent on building a society in which people lived alongside one another and building bridges was key to this. That ambition seems to have disappeared and been replaced by creating a politics of division, distrust and antipathy based on race.