Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[garbon]

In general, I'd prefer more action less words.

That Heirs of Slavery group rubs me the wrong way for that reason.

[Sheilbh]

SO I've many times had to explain to victims (and yes often sexual assault victims) that "not guilty" doesn't mean the judge or jury didn't believe you.  Indeed when you listen to most decisions (only from a judge, juries don't give decisions) it's rare for a judge to exonerate an Accused and say they didn't do it - usually it's just that it wasn't proven sufficiently.  So in that was a "not proven" verdict kind of appeals to me.  But yes I can also see how it might be confusing to a lay jury.

Yeah the joke here is that "not proven" means "not guilty - and don't do it again"

Especially as it is the third option with guilty and not guilty, and it's never really been described. It was, basically, an accident from my understanding but one that stuck in Scotland's legal system in part because of public support.

Juries of 15 rather than 12 - whatever.  But it does surprise me greatly that a simple majority is enough in Scotland.

It doesn't surprise me but I believe there is evidence that larger jury plus simple majority = more guilty verdicts. I can see them going hand-in-hand. I feel like a simple majority is easier to justify if there is a larger group. So I think the reform there sounds sensible to me.

I'm all in favour of anything that reduces the number of jury trials.  I've run jury trials (but not many) and there is something awesome (in the older meaning of the word) about being judged by 12 of your peers.  Juries (in my experience) take their duties very seriously.

But the system here at least is just choking on the volume, and a jury trial takes vastly more time than a judge alone trial.  If you value a right to a speedy trial then limiting jury trials is an important step.

That's something I've heard from criminal lawyers here - that jurors (as far as they can see) take the responsibility very seriously. I'm assuming given your experience with a few jury trials means you've a similar summary v indictable distinction on cases?

Do you think it's suitable for sexual assault/rape cases particularly? I'm not sure - I can see both sides on it.

I think there's a very strong case for moving white collar/serious fraud to judge only trials because there's a real problem where they collapse in this country because they just go on for so long because a lot of the evidence is really complex. There was one case where the trial lasted for something like 21 months and I think due to personal reasons over the course of two years so many jurors had to be excused that there couldn't be a fair trial. They're trials that are about issues that, in civil cases, have a specialist bench but for crimes we still expect 12 members of the public to get on top of derivatives or whatever.

The Irish population has certainly had a hard time historically (though slave taking, raiding, reaping, and  was - I think - pretty universal and not just the province of the "big name" groups - Irish pirates and slavers were a thing too) - but I think that by pretty much any measure the process of addressing past wrongs committed against the Irish is further along than addressing the wrongs of the Black slave trade or colonization of American First Nations.

Well I think the crucial reason for that is that Ireland's independent. The Irish people have a state. The British state certainly isn't doing any apologising for the famine, or atrocities in the war of independence - official Britain tends to talk of a "painful" or "complicated" past. Land reform started under the British, but in general I think a big reason Ireland is further along is simply that there's a state and the Irish are able to address the past by first setting their own national story and also deciding their own future.

Also I take your point on Irish pirates and slavers but I think it does slightly miss the point. If the Atlantic trade was Irish pirates and slavers then it would comparable to Barbary raids or similar. The way big names tradeed in the enslaved - Portugal and England especially - is a big part of why I think it is significantly different. It may have been pretty universal but I think the Atlantic trade was materially different and that was because of the big players.

As for the repercussions of serfdom and the continued generational advantages from the  exploitation done by the upper classes I agree that's almost completely normalized when it probably shouldn't be - but I think that perspective is entirely too "class war" for most of the public in this day and age.

The generational advantage is true but I think that's more a general economic point. Also I'd argue a focus on the upper class slightly misunderstands modern Britain and is a bit of smoke and mirrors - in part because becoming "upper class" (public schools, polo, baubles, property in the country and London, hob-nobbing with the royals etc) has become one of Britain's great export industries. The people with shiny hats and silly robes aren't necessarily the 1% - and in historic or international context I'm not entirely sure, for example, it is really as enduring as, say, the impact of slavery. Two world wars and a social democratic model will destroy wealth like that, for example (from an article by Ben Ansell who's a professor on democracy and inequality - from a series to illustrate how different things look if you add time and comparators ):


Edit: And I don't think it's a coincidence that the performance of the upper class - the robes, the ceremonies, the crowns etc is created in the 19th century which is the exact time that actual political and economic power is shifting from the aristocracy to industrial capital.

On serfdom - it was gone by the 15th century. By the 17th customary rights to land had largely been extinguished and enclosures were well underway. England had an agricultural revolution in the 18th century and we've not had more than 10% of the population working or involved in agriculture for about 150 years. There are localised areas - the Highland Clearances and Ireland - where land and serfdom are absolutely at the forefront of popular history. But I think (to go even more class war ) for most in Britain I think exploitation is capitalist and bourgeois, not feudal - it's miners, dockers, factory workers, Victorian slums, prison hulks, transportation, debtors' prison, the poorhouse with mill owners.

I think there is, whether we intend it or not, basically a statute of limitations which means feudalism is too distant - ultimately the English were dispossessed of their land and moved into a capitalist, rent and production based agricultural system in the 16th and 17th century. Also, as I say, I think the experience of capitalist, industrial exploitation in between slightly obliterates the memory of it. The areas that are disadvantaged where there is a legacy of poverty are not hubs of feudal agriculture, but the centres of industry.

[crazy canuck]

In general, I'd prefer more action less words.

That Heirs of Slavery group rubs me the wrong way for that reason.

Yes.  Absolutely.  Jacob also made the point that this is really a bare minimum.

And yet people still complain about it being self flagellation. 

[Sheilbh]

Yes.  Absolutely.  Jacob also made the point that this is really a bare minimum.

A minimum - but also the first step on the CARICOM Reparations Commission's action plan. It really depends if you interpret or intend it as a start or an end.

Edit: E.g. I think Blair's in 2007 was probably to close the issue in his mind.

[Josquius]

I don't see where apologising for slavery is self flagellation unless you think slavery is cool actually.

[Tamas]

I don't see where apologising for slavery is self flagellation unless you think slavery is cool actually.

  What am I supposed to say to that?

[garbon]

I don't see where apologising for slavery is self flagellation unless you think slavery is cool actually.

That doesn't track.

It is self flagellation if you are performatively apologizing. Like get out of the spotlight every day people who did some family genealogy.

[Josquius]

Fair enough.
We are taking about people of note rather than just randomers who have a plantation owner ancestor here though.
I see no harm in these people apologising for the harm their ancestor caused.
The only possible downside I see is the HR/lawyer  one of potentially opening a can of wormy trouble for yourself.
As far as admitting your ancestor did a bad thing with slavery goes ... Seems pretty common sense to me.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting report here on disparities in employment by generation for minorities:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/outcomes-in-labour-market-for-ethnic-minorities-by-immigrant-generation-status/outcomes-in-labour-market-for-ethnic-minorities-by-immigrant-generation-status

It was produced through a fellowship scheme for getting civil servants and academics together to do research on specific policy issues that sounds really interesting and like something that could cover a lot more areas of Whitehall (it's a pilot at the minute). It seems like a really promising idea:

New fellowship for civil servants launched
MiSoC fellowship for civil servants brings together academics and policy-makers to help answer specific policy questions

From:    Open Innovation Team
Published    21 November 2022

The Open Innovation Team (OIT) is piloting a new fellowship with the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change (MiSoC), hosted at the University of Essex.

The fellowship is aimed at SEO-G6 policy officials and analysts, who will be mentored by experienced academics. It's a part-time programme where officials can access support using quantitative social science data and analysis to answer a specific policy question. Fellows propose a question they would like to research, and they receive guidance and mentorship from world-leading quantitative social scientists.

Proposals need to be focused on one of MiSoc's areas of interest, which include 'education and skills', 'families and well-being', 'ethnicity and migration' and the 'labour market and institutions'.
Our current fellows come from a range of government teams:
Head of Ethnicity Analysis and Briefing, Race Disparity Unit, Cabinet Office
This fellowship will form part of a programme to respond to the policy paper, Inclusive Britain, drafted in response to the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. The research will look at migration patterns to the UK over the past 50 years.

Head of Tax, Department of International Trade
This fellowship aims to understand patterns and trends regarding the backgrounds of non-UK nationals with PhDs, and their value to the economy, to further inform tax policy.

Health Economist, UK Health Security Agency
This fellowship will aim to quantify the impacts of poor mental and physical health arising from the current cost of living crisis, and will consider possible policy responses.

If you're an official interested in taking part in a fellowship, please contact us via [email protected] and we will be in touch with next steps once the pilot has concluded in Spring 2023.

[Jacob]

No quibbles with anything in your post Sheilbh, I generally agree. Just one clarification, as I don't think my point came across in this one instance...

Also I take your point on Irish pirates and slavers but I think it does slightly miss the point. If the Atlantic trade was Irish pirates and slavers then it would comparable to Barbary raids or similar. The way big names tradeed in the enslaved - Portugal and England especially - is a big part of why I think it is significantly different. It may have been pretty universal but I think the Atlantic trade was materially different and that was because of the big players.

I wasn't comparing ancient Irish slave taking (to whatever degree it occured) to the Atlantic slave trade. The comparison was a response to a point I thought to be something like "if we apologize for the Atlantic slave trade, why don't the people who took Irish slaves apologize to them" - to which my response is that there was a lot of slave raiding in history, including by the Irish themselves (St. Patrick being captured by a slave raid according to tradition) so it's kind of a wash, and not really relevant anymore; unlike the Atlantic slave trade, the repercussions of which are still being played out today.

[Sheilbh]

Ah sorry - I'd misunderstood.

[Jacob]

Ah sorry - I'd misunderstood.

... or I expressed myself poorly

[Tamas]

unlike the Atlantic slave trade, the repercussions of which are still being played out today.

See this one I don't get. I mean, I think I understand what you mean - the slave trade resulted in large black populations in the US and in the other British colonies which resulted in large black population in those countries today. A population which endured systematic racism for centuries, and even if not always state-endorsed but still pretty widespread racism today.

But how are today's challenges addressed by the descendants of slave owners or executives of estates/companies built on slave trading wealth apologising for forcing the ancestors of this black population to live (to be slaves) in these countries? What is the message with that? "I wish my great-great-great-great-great grandpa didn't bring yours here so you wouldn't exist and wouldn't live here in my country?"

I think it is very easy to see that racism would exist without the Atlantic slave trade. Most country in the world did not partake in it, does not have significant black population, yet are very racist toward blacks and other minorities, and this applies to countries with non-white majorities as well.

I think focusing the discourse around racism on who has how deep roots in the country and whose ancestors were forced here from the outside is a bad idea. The aim should be to reach an eventual stage where skin colour matters just about as much as hair colour does nowadays, not that we make damned sure we rehearse the fact of just which skin colour owned which skin colour a few hundred years ago.

[Sheilbh]

See this one I don't get. I mean, I think I understand what you mean - the slave trade resulted in large black populations in the US and in the other British colonies which resulted in large black population in those countries today. A population which endured systematic racism for centuries, and even if not always state-endorsed but still pretty widespread racism today.

But how are today's challenges addressed by the descendants of slave owners or executives of estates/companies built on slave trading wealth apologising for forcing the ancestors of this black population to live (to be slaves) in these countries? What is the message with that? "I wish my great-great-great-great-great grandpa didn't bring yours here so you wouldn't exist and wouldn't live here in my country?"

I think the US and the UK are different in this history though.

The UK is like Spain, France, Portugal. Slavery and the trade in people was something that happened from trading posts in Africa to the Caribbean (and in the 17th and 18th century, to North America). That it is physically separate, is reflected in a mental comparmentalisation that's still present - I think empire is possibly a tool to compartmentalise. In the case of Caribbean in particular the process didn't lead to countries with a large black population but eliminated the cultural presence of the existing peoples and populating it instead with people who'd been violently torn from their people and memory and place. And it's the great theme of a lot of Caribbean literature - Derek Walcott's The Swamp or Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco for example.

That also profoundly changed the UK - not because, as in the US, the enslaved were working here but because the capital and goods were. It coincides with and is linked to the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution - and the life in these isles. In terms of Britain itself seeing the repercussions still playing out I think it is our wealth, our position in the world, our tastes where we see it play out because we werre physically separated from what slavery actually meant. As I say I think we still compartmentalise: slavery was the elite, the bad guys, the chinless wonders - just like the rest of empire; that's separate from the ingenuity and energy of early industrial Britain, the rise of the working and middle class etc. In reality they're two sides of the same story and we need to break down the barries between those parts of Britain's story.

In terms of Britain and Europe's experience. For most I think it's not a million miles away from the fact that we all know smart phones have metals probably mined by children in Congo, but all have smart phones in our pocket (or maybe climate - which always bothers my conscience when I take the piss outt of the protesters, not that it stops me). People still took sugar with their tea, or supporte abolitionists while owning a cotton mill - it's relatively few, eccentric abolitionist protesters who joined the dots in how they lived.

But the repercussions really played out elsewhere - in West African societies and in the Caribbean. From a British perspective I'd look at the CARICOM Reparations Commission action plan: a full formal apology; funded repatriation (for those who wish it); a development plan for indigenous peoples in the Caribbean; the funding of cultural institutions and research centres in the Caribbean (as noted - there are international museums of slavery and centres of excellent research into it in Europe - not the Caribbean); funding on public health in the Caribbean; funding to eliminate illiteracy in the Caribbean; support for a building of cultural and social links between the Caribbean and Africa; "psychological rehabilitation" (this one is vaguest for me) but talks about truth and education; technology and science transfer; and cancellation of debt. That is, I think, how I'd start in terms of addressing the repercussions - but an apology is step one.

Edit: It's possibly why I think the Guardian project and discussion in and about Manchester is a bit more interesting. The royals having ancestors engaged in the slave trade is hardly going to be a shocker to anyone - it's a bit like uncovering that Liverpool was involved. I think the Manchester, industrial angle (while Eric Williams wrote about it almost 100 years ago) is still a little bit hiding in plain sight in our national life.

I think it is very easy to see that racism would exist without the Atlantic slave trade. Most country in the world did not partake in it, does not have significant black population, yet are very racist toward blacks and other minorities, and this applies to countries with non-white majorities as well.

In terms of racism, I think Britain has the same sort of racism as most European countries - not least because Britain's experience of relatively large scale migration, like most of Europe, is generally a post-war experience (except for some big port cities). So I don't necessarily think there's a direct connection between slavery and contemporary racism in the way that I think is maybe more the case in the US because slavery for America wasn't a colonial or imperial thing, but domestic. Where I think there is the connection is the extent to which slavery and the creation of forms of racism, particularly scientific racism, run together.

The racism arises to justify the slavery, not the other way round - and across Europe the racism develops to justify empire and imperialism in general. Not just slavery - which could be a pretence for imperial seizures of territory (I think it's why France took Tunisia, or British wars against the Asante) but a general unfit to govern while plundering territories or making them borderline ungovernable.

I think focusing the discourse around racism on who has how deep roots in the country and whose ancestors were forced here from the outside is a bad idea. The aim should be to reach an eventual stage where skin colour matters just about as much as hair colour does nowadays, not that we make damned sure we rehearse the fact of just which skin colour owned which skin colour a few hundred years ago.

But, especially in America, isn't it the opposite. The people with the deepeest roots in the country are descendants of the people who were forced here. As that NYT project pointed out - the first enslaved person arrives in Virginia in 1619 - that's more or less almost immediate from the start of English colonisation. It's similar with the Spanish in the early days of the Caribbean. The contrast you're making doesn't exist because, again, it's two sides of the same story and we shouldn't try to tell when separate from the other - because those are, in many ways, the deepest roots.

[Duque de Bragança]

I think the US and the UK are different in this history though.

The UK is like Spain, France, Portugal. Slavery and the trade in people was something that happened from trading posts in Africa to the Caribbean (and in the 17th and 18th century, to North America). That it is physically separate, is reflected in a mental comparmentalisation that's still present - I think empire is possibly a tool to compartmentalise. In the case of Caribbean in particular the process didn't lead to countries with a large black population but eliminated the cultural presence of the existing peoples and populating it instead with people who'd been violently torn from their people and memory and place. And it's the great theme of a lot of Caribbean literature - Derek Walcott's The Swamp or Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco for example.

Sorry, but what you say might be true for the UK but not for the Iberians.

Spain never really had a strong position in Africa to get slaves directly from Africans (Equatorial Guinea comes way too late in the 18th century to be relevant), so they had to go through intermediaries (Hello Asiento) so  the parallel is not relevant.

As for Portugal, the leading position of its slavers was lost precisely after the Habsburg Union period with the great boom of the Atlantic slave trace, marginal and much less important than the "Oriental" slave trade i.e Arabic, Turkish, Persian etc.. Until the middle 17th century that is, where it surpasses eventually the Oriental slave trade (not just Barbary Pirates perpetual sea jihad/cold war). The Oriental slave would only regain dominance after 1850 when abolitionism started to eliminate the Atlantic slave trade.
Lastly, a reminder, the Oriental slave trade started with the islamic invasion of conquest of North Africa in the late 7th century.

The first Portuguese "colony" in the early 15th century, Madeira did not have many slaves since they could not only be obtained through the Oriental connection. Only started to change after 1445, with the switch from raiding and counter-raiding the Moors i.e North Africans, to trading with Africans (Blacks for the ID politics crowd).
Even then, African gold was more important initially (São João da Mina/Elmina) where slaves from Arguim (Portuguese trade outpost in Mauritania) were traded for gold. Things only changed after the settlement of Brazil and very slowly, fueled after the decline of Portuguese India.