Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Jacob]

But that still leaves the state we're in, asking for apologies from the heirs of one system (slavery owning west) without doing the same for the heirs of another system (slave selling Africa).



*edit* Sorry, not arguing with your overall point. Just reiterating Yi point. 

I think its fair to focus on our own societies. Deal with residential schools etc in Canada, deal with British slave traders in the UK, deal with African slave traders in various African countries etc.

[Sheilbh]

I really, really, really do not like comparing oil companies to the slave trade.

Slave trade was evil.  Full stop.  It needed to be completely eradicated from the world.

Pumping oil out of the ground is not inherently evil.  It has some serious negative externalities and we need to do less of it - but nobody, at any time, has ever pretended we can run modern society without oil.

That's fair.

There's not a comparison in what they're doing and I wouldn't want to make that. I think there are echoes for both protesters and abolitionists - and the silent majority (myself included) who consumed sugar, or oil, or had a smart phone which almost certainly includes metals mined by children. Abolitionism becomes an incredibly powerful force in the last quarter of the 18th century, but prior to that it is incredibly morally and socially burdensome - it really alienated you from the mainstream society. I do find echoes of that in the people who live their values on climate or trying to live ethically in other ways in ways that are really orthogonal to our societies. I do think a lot of that energy comes from a legacy of dissident Protestantism (at least in the Anglo-American world). As I say I have a slight doubt at the back of my head that they'll be right and I'm one of the people laughing behind my hand at them.

Similarly I think "The Interest" attempt to block abolitionism through lobbying and lying is interesting - but more in a "there is nothing new under the sun". The business they were protecting which they knew was, as you say, evil. But again I think there is an echo in tobacco, the Sacklers etc.

[Josquius]

But that still leaves the state we're in, asking for apologies from the heirs of one system (slavery owning west) without doing the same for the heirs of another system (slave selling Africa).



*edit* Sorry, not arguing with your overall point. Just reiterating Yi point. 

I think its fair to focus on our own societies. Deal with residential schools etc in Canada, deal with British slave traders in the UK, deal with African slave traders in various African countries etc.

Yes. It's the sensible thing to do. It's also where the "but the Muslims" argument has no legs.

Imagine we didn't do that and decided to start condemning the descendents of African slavers... How would that look? The former coloniser coming in and telling another country what to think and how to behave... It really would come off as the UK just attempting to shift blame and dilute the wrong doing of Brits.
Really hypocritical and counter productive.

[Admiral Yi]

I think its fair to focus on our own societies. Deal with residential schools etc in Canada, deal with British slave traders in the UK, deal with African slave traders in various African countries etc.

I agree with you to a large extent.  Living morally means examining your own behavior first and foremost, as opposed to throwing stones at others.

However an uncomfortable corollary to this statement is that those who fail to critically examine the behavior of their own ancestors, i.e. descendants of African slave traders, are failing morally.

[Valmy]

Yes. It's the sensible thing to do. It's also where the "but the Muslims" argument has no legs.

What is the "but the Muslims" argument? Because the Arabs did (and do I guess) extensively use slavery it is ok for others to do it? Sure the Arabs created the West African slave trade, but they didn't hold a scimitar to the Western Europeans' heads and make them create slave colonies in the new world.

I guess on reflecting this is probably some kind of "white people are special" argument. Either white people are special good or white people are special bad and since people that aren't considered white people did the same bad thing, white people can't be special bad. That's all really stupid. White people aren't special.,

[Sheilbh]

However an uncomfortable corollary to this statement is that those who fail to critically examine the behavior of their own ancestors, i.e. descendants of African slave traders, are failing morally.

I don't really think it's about individual ancestors or personal past or, as Valmy sys, individuals in general (though that may be of interest to people). It's not about moral failings or state of grace on an individual level.

There is a former BBC journalist who did research and discovered that her family had plantations in Barbados. She then gave money to communities in Barbados and pops up every time there's an article on this sort of thing. I'm not personally massively convinced by that approach.

My point is more institutional: those same institutions still exist. The CofE, the royal family, universities, some companies like the Guardian, the British state. Institutions don't die, even if officeholders do. And, as I say, I think it's about a responsibility to the past which is, I think ata minimum, to face it.

Similarly I think the Guardian pieces have been particularly interesting because as I say I think we silo our national myths a little bit, when they are, in fact, a whole. So looking at the links of industrial revolution Britain with slavery is I think also valuable because it isn't just about stately homes and other National Trust properties.

What is the "but the Muslims" argument? Because the Arabs did (and do I guess) extensively use slavery it is ok for others to do it? Sure the Arabs created the West African slave trade, but they didn't hold a scimitar to the Western Europeans' heads and make them create slave colonies in the new world.

It's pure whataboutery 90% of the time - at least here.

[Admiral Yi]

My point is more institutional: those same institutions still exist. The CofE, the royal family, universities, some companies like the Guardian, the British state. Institutions don't die, even if officeholders do. And, as I say, I think it's about a responsibility to the past which is, I think ata minimum, to face it.

I'm going to need some convincing on this.

The royal family is an institution so they should feel collective guilt, but the Barbados lady is not an institution so she's silly.  Why is that?

Plenty of institutions do not survive.

Then you bring up facing the past, which is a universal surely, meaning it is not only an obligation of institutions.

[Jacob]

I'm going to need some convincing on this.

The royal family is an institution so they should feel collective guilt, but the Barbados lady is not an institution so she's silly.  Why is that?

What's your question? Why the royal family is an institution and the Barbados lady is not, or why institutions matter more than individuals?

[Admiral Yi]

What's your question? Why the royal family is an institution and the Barbados lady is not, or why institutions matter more than individuals?

The latter.

[Sheilbh]

I'm going to need some convincing on this.

The royal family is an institution so they should feel collective guilt, but the Barbados lady is not an institution so she's silly.  Why is that?

No, guilt's nonsense. I think guilt's absolutely irrelevant to this. Why would anyone feel guilty for something they didn't do? Shamefulness may be closer.

They shouldn't feel collective guilt but they are literally in the chairs, offices and palaces of their predecessors. So it is possible for them to apologise, for example, or take other steps on behalf of that still living institution.

Plenty of institutions do not survive.

Then you bring up facing the past, which is a universal surely, meaning it is not only an obligation of institutions.

I'd love everyone to have deep interest in the past and a desire to face it. But I think it's unlikely. But while it may be universal that doesn't mean there's a single answer or truth, or that history is individual. It is shared and it's plural - there are lots of things going on.

There are many ways we socially face or deal with history - through education, historic properties, ceremony and policy. For example, we're about to see Britain coming face-to-face with part of its history and its present on Saturday.

[Sheilbh]

Separately (although another angle of Valmy's systems point) I know I've posted about it before but glad Marina Hyde is on this as it's the most widespread, disgraceful miscarriage of justice in my lifetime. The summary given by Hyde is great.
 
It was presided over by a then nationalised company with senior management who knew they had a faulty IT system from a contractor refusing to acknowledge it might be flawed (which a judge described as the equivalent of "maintaining that the earth is flat"). As noted the then IT Director and later CEO has since received an OBE, as well as becoming CEO of an NHS Trust and a non-exec of the Cabinet Office (as well as various other non-exec directorships). As Hyde says, no doubt the rest of senior management in Fujitsu and the Post Office continued to fail upwards. Meanwhile the lives of individuals (sub-postmasters and postmistresses!) being ruined with private prosecutions, criminal records and massive fines.

Hundreds of lives ruined. Not a single person held to account. And still: silence on the Post Office scandal
Marina Hyde
Horrific detail piles on horrific detail as the inquiry rumbles on, barely noticed by those for whom this injustice is seemingly not sexy enough
Tue 2 May 2023 11.48 BST

I can't help suspecting that former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells might have been more publicly vilified if she'd done a bad tweet, rather than merely presided over a firm during the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history.

Forgive the return to this furrow, but no matter how often they are restated (far from often enough), the details of the Post Office scandal are so incredible as to be almost literally impossible to believe. Put as sparsely as possible, 736 subpostmasters and postmistresses were prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting in their branches, between 2000 and 2014. Yet they had done nothing wrong, The fault was with a new computer system designed by Fujitsu and forced on to them by Post Office management – a system that top brass allegedly knew was faulty.

The individual stories are horrific. People's lives were ruined; at least four took their own lives. Many were imprisoned, including a teenager. Tech was trusted over humans with unblemished records. As things stand, more than a year into the belated inquiry, not a single person has been held to legal account, from Vennells to the managerial class of the Post Office to Fujitsu to the civil servants responsible for oversight. Instead, Vennells got a CBE, and the rest of the anonymous boss class doubtless joined her in failing upwards on the gravy train.

The grim saga rumbles on, with comparatively little coverage given its scale and significance. It was arguably ever thus, with all the big beats of this story broken by the likes of Rebecca Thomson at Computer Weekly, the journalist Nick Wallis, Private Eye and the victims themselves, such as Alan Bates. The Times is currently running an excellent series of articles on where we are now, which has revealed that 59 of the victims have died before the end of the inquiry, while some victims were only allocated £1,000 in legal aid. The Post Office has spent £100m on City lawyers.

But you have to wonder whether the Post Office story is somehow not sexy enough for much of a chatterati who prefer their scandals to unfold over a feverish day on Elon Musk's platform, and not in unloved inquiry rooms and the anguished testimonies of the likes of Seema Misra, locked up on her son's 10th birthday in a "horrendous" jail, where among many other horrors she discovered a prisoner who had taken their own life. She was pregnant, and gave birth to her second child wearing an electronic tag. And she's just one of hundreds of victim stories so mindboggling and frequently tragic that you cannot believe they happened to those most quietly emblematic of local public servants, the British subpostmaster and postmistress.


Seema Misra, a former post office operator, with her husband, Davinder, outside the Royal Courts of Justice, London, where her conviction for theft was overturned in 2021. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

Alas, the Post Office scandal has never truly seemed to stir the souls of those who regard a day spent online dragging this or that user as activism well spent. This feels symptomatic of a wider issue with what we classify as a campaigning victory these days. The key stages of the Post Office scandal have had far less coverage and garnered far fewer social media clicks than various comments by, say, Jeremy Clarkson or Gary Lineker. I appreciate it is far, far more difficult to "cancel" the iniquitous systems that led to the Post Office horror than it is to "cancel" someone in public life who you think has said something unacceptable – but it does very much need doing. The fault of systems is far, far more important than the fault of individuals, however much easier to yank down a single person it might be.

Getting caught up in endless cycles of "calling out" might work to punish individuals for their individual infractions, but it doesn't change the bigger, more significant problems, and anyone who thinks it does is kidding themselves. Or allowing themselves to be kidded by people who have a vested interest in them not changing things. I know some politicians and some pundits bang on disparagingly about the "woke mind virus" or whatever, but I often think they must be secretly thrilled with the virtue games of recent times. It really couldn't suit them more. How much better to have people sidelined into endless 24- or 48-hour online meltdowns, in which they are either pitted against one another litigating the narcissism of small differences – the dream! – or obsessing about one person's transgressions and leaving iniquitous and dysfunctional systems free to sail on regardless.

Some of this is thought to be generational, and I have nothing but sympathy for the generations that come after mine, who have been shut out of so much of what they are entitled to and which most of those who criticise them simply took for granted. My theory is that if you give people absolutely no economic power, they will use what little power they have to lash out in one way or another, and it's pretty hard to blame them for that. The disputed thing that some people call "cancel culture" is an example of it, and if capitalism's elders and supposed betters really cared so much about stopping it, perhaps they'd think about giving younger people a stake in capitalism, instead of expecting them to abide by a set of rules of a game in which they are not even allowed to be player characters.

It might be nice to think it is, but I don't believe that getting angry on Twitter particularly helps anyone other than Elon Musk, or that sitting in judgment on every passing infraction is anything other than a hiding to nothing. It is not effecting change – it is the illusion of effecting change. It is exactly the sort of looking-the-wrong-way that allowed the Post Office scandal to happen – and if we keep doing it, the people who really run things will keep on getting away with it.

    Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

[Tonitrus]

When I lived in the UK, it always struck me as bizarre that the government would privatize the customer-facing part of their postal service.  But then I am a hippie socialist that thinks a postal service (in its entirety) is one of the essential government institutions.

[Admiral Yi]

No, guilt's nonsense. I think guilt's absolutely irrelevant to this. Why would anyone feel guilty for something they didn't do? Shamefulness may be closer.

They shouldn't feel collective guilt but they are literally in the chairs, offices and palaces of their predecessors. So it is possible for them to apologise, for example, or take other steps on behalf of that still living institution.

Shame and guilt are splitting a pretty fine hair.

Break the rest down another level for me.  Why should the head of an institution apologize but a descendant should not?

[Josquius]

When I lived in the UK, it always struck me as bizarre that the government would privatize the customer-facing part of their postal service.  But then I am a hippie socialist that thinks a postal service (in its entirety) is one of the essential government institutions.

It is bizzare. It's stupid in the extreme.
But that's the tories. Penny wise pound foolish.
Can we make a few quid selling high voltage wiring, cost to install many times more, to the scrap man? Let's do it then.

The history of modern British politics is basically one of Labour building and then a international crisis of some form comes up and knocks them out of power, the tories come in and destroy more than labour built, labour come back and start building again not quite coming close to where things were before, only for another crisis to bring the tories back for more destruction.

[The Brain]

How did the courts arrive at convictions for the Post Office cases? Note for messerschmitts: I assume that not everyone prosecuted was convicted, and I know that even with zero convictions it would have been a horrible scandal.