#British Values

[vox-anglosphere]

A village lane in the Cotswolds embodies so many British values.

[eaglesnick]

“A generation which ignores history has no past -- and no future.”  

The National Centre for Social Research Centre's Social Attitude survey, finding that there has been a sharp decline in British national pride in the last decade has driven the pundits and politicians on the right into displays of righteous indignation. 

Peoples pride in being British has fallen from 83% in 1995 to 64% in 2023. Only 53% think democracy works well in this country, down from 60% in 1995, and only 49% would rather be a British citizen than any other country, a decline of 20% since 1995. What has particularly agitated those on the right is the finding that pride in British history has dropped from 86% in 2013, to 64% in 2023.

Nigel Forage, never one to miss an opportunity for self-promotion, went on a “blistering rant" concerning the decline of national pride in British history, claiming he has been “railing against" an education establishment that is constantly  "talking down Britain’s past”.

What’s happened claims Forage is there has been a “Marxist take-over, of people that hate the country, hate what it stands for, and they have done their job” Primary school teachers, secondary school teachers and university lectures all “rejoice” in putting Britain down.

Who would have thought it? That seemingly lovely Mrs Jones, who does so much for the infants in her care, a revolutionary Marxist. The dusty secondary school history teacher Mr Smith, also a Marxist, just waiting to advance the communist revolution on the streets of Britain. Unbelievable! And as for all of those university academics…just don’t get me started.

What a load of utter piffle Mr Farage. But he knows that. What he is doing is dog whistling as usual.

Taking the teaching of slavery as an example , Forage condemns the educational establishment for teaching that Britain was “the only country in the history of mankind that had ever conducted slavery.” What’s more says Forage, Britain  "far from being the one nation, actually, that ended it,..lost a lot of money and a lot of lives driving it out."

Lets examine these claims.

First, no one has ever said that Britain was the only slave-trading nation. Portugal, France, Spain, Netherlands, USA and Denmark ALL profited from slaves.

Second, Forage was right in asserting that  Britain was one of the first major European powers to officially abolish slavery. The Abolition of Slavery Act was passed inn 1833 but not all British owned slaves were covered by this act as it specifically excluded many slave colonies owned by the East India Company and British slaves on the islands of Ceylon and St Helena.

Third, British sailors did die fighting the slave trade but nowhere near as many as has been claimed on social media. Fullfact.org, state that the figure of between 17,000 and 20,00 Royal Navy sailors dying fighting illegal slave traders is untrue, the figure being much nearer 2000.

Forth, did driving out slavery cost a lot of money? Yes it did, but none of the money went to the slaves themselves, only to the slave owners as compensation for their losses.

Despite the repugnant and morally corrupt practice of slave ownership that the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act represented, a mere four years after this law came into being another piece of slavery legislation was enacted: the Slave Compensation Act 1887.

This is something Forage and those other millionaires and billionaires on the right of British politics often neglect to tell us. Despite the repugnant and utterly immoral practice of slave ownership implicit in the Abolition of Slavery Act 1833, this new act ordered the Commissioners for the Reduction of the National Debt to compensate slave owners in the British colonies to the tune of £20 million pound – around £17billion pounds today. This payout was a massive 40% of total government budget.

What else Forage neglects to say is that the last compensation payment for loss of slaves paid for by the British government was in 2015.

In short, we the British taxpayer, have been paying compensation to slave owners and their dependents for "loss of their property” for the past 182 years!

I only wish we did teach these things in our schools but we don’t. In fact, the Conservative government, in its Education Act of 1996 made the promoting of partisan views by teachers illegal.

So much for Marxist conspiracy theories!

[possil]

HOW TO UNDERMINE A CULTURE

The French writer Julien Benda coined the phrase la trahison des clercs, meaning ‘the treason of the intellectuals’.  By this he meant that the intelligentsia had abdicated the proper standards of intellectual enquiry and argument in favour of political advocacy. He launched his attack on the intellectual corruption of the age in 1924. Today the West is faced by another treason: that of the…

[imspardagus]

The Democratic Kingdom of West Korea

(Formerly known as Great Britain)

I read in the papers that the Government has drawn up legislation to outlaw “anyone who “undermines” the country’s institutions and its values.” Yes, our government, that collection of corrupt lying scumbags who are paid by us to run the country’s services as public servants.

The irony in this is of almost unimaginable proportions. One of the great British values, as claimed, is tolerance; another is freedom of expression; yet another is individual liberty. Don’t take my word for it, check with the Government. Yet here they are, using our money and our resources to frame laws that are intolerant, that will stifle opinion and that will curtail the individual liberty of anyone who dares to say so.

George Orwell would recognise the language and appreciate the plot. All we need now is to force King Charles to abdicate in favour of Kim Jong Un and get a fleet of tugs to drag us round the Cape to the Pacific and the Tories‘ ambition of making us an Asian autocracy will be complete. War is peace, hate is love, lies are truth.

One of the marks of extremism, according to these crooks (and crooks’ henchmen), is “the promotion or advancement of any ideology which aims to overturn or undermine the UK’s system of parliamentary democracy”. That would be the “system” which ensures that the Tories can claim an 80 seat majority on the back of a minority of the votes cast across the country, that ensures that most of the country is not represented by the party it voted for, that demands that elected MPs must put their party before their judgment or conscience or the national interest, that allows MPs to absent themselves for protracted periods while drawing full pay and expenses from the State, that enables a handful of MPs from one party to determine who will lead the government and then empowers that un-mandated individual to hand out jobs, contracts and honours to his or her cronies. That system. Well, no surprise that they would want to protect that from critical analysis and change.

Another mark of extremism, apparently, is “undermining” Britain’s institutions. Now that comes as a bit more of a surprise from a gaggle of hoorays who have expended most of their efforts in the past few years undermining the courts, the NHS, the schools and universities, the BBC and the immigration systems in this country, not to mention its water supplies, its fishing industry, its manufacturing capacity, its markets, its housing stock, its public transport networks, its local administration and its roads…

But I suppose I should be personally grateful. All my life I have chided myself for being too “middle of the road”, too “safe”, too reasonable. Now, if these unelected ne’erdowells have their way, without moving an inch I will overnight achieve the notoriety of being an extremist. Because, like many people in this country, I believe that widespread reform, particularly of Parliament, is essential – essential precisely in order to prevent these bandits, these traitorous, self-serving parasites, from ever being able to threaten this fine country again. I have always assumed that I was upholding what it means to be British. Apparently however, that makes me an enemy of the people.

So be it. Or should that be Soviet?

[kurtmustdie]

I think these two would be friends probably

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

do you ever imagine what it would be like if instead of just dubbing and losing all the britishness in translation, what had happened with doctor who was national adaptations like they do with game shows like masterchef or whatever or uh skam thats a better comparison, and every country had their own series of doctors, all at different numbers like if the dutch show spinned off when the english was at 4 or smth but we just started with our own dutch doctor number 1

and maybe they'd like start off just sort of copying stories and localising them but then as time goes on these national spin offs would you know start building on their own lore and seasonal arcs that would get removed further and further from the british original until it's like 2024 and you've got 15 national doctor whos running somewhat simultaneously all in different seasons and all preoccupied with INCREDIBLY different stories

it'd be like 'whos your favourite doctor' and you'd be like uh the polish 3rd or the brazilian 12th it's a toss up. what if some countries go through doctors way faster and theyre like on doctor 44 and youre like WHAT are they DOING to them

and can you imagne the fucking CNAONS can yuo IMAGINE can you IMAGINE the FANDOM when SOMEone decided to make looms canon and all the losers come out of the woodwork to say well thats not REALLY canon bc it's not the british version. imagine the localisations, the reinforcements of every countrys national history. what would countries who have more history being colonised than colonising do with gallifrey. how would every Important PartTM of the show be transformed by the perspective of another team. what even are identified as the Important PartsTM of the show. maybe one country decides the tardis should change appearance every week. maybe one country is like we're just gonna put all the edas on television. the amount of OPINIONS can you imagine

[rotteneldritchhorror]

btw it will always be funny to me that one of the "british values" that we're taught in school is Democracy... ya know... britain... where we have multiple layers of government that are based purely on being born into the position? yeah... Democracy is one of our Great British Values [tm]

[estebunny]

esteban ocon greeting with alpine team members around garage before fp3

via f1tv f1 live stream

[eaglesnick]

“The game is rigged to work for those who already have money and power.”  Elizabeth Warren

A few months ago, before the election, I wrote:

“A vote for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is essentially a vote for business and the rich.” (13/06/24)

I pointed out that under Reform UK, the biggest tax breaks would go to big corporations and the already very wealthy.

Richard Tice, former leader of Reform UK is a multi-millionaire. Hedge-fund billionaire Paul Marshal and the Dubai based investment company Legrartum, founded by New Zealand billionaire Christopher Chandler who made his fortune in Russian gas, bankroll right-wing GB News, where Farage and Tice have their own shows.

Multi-millionaire Jeremy Hosking gave £2,578,000 to Reform UK coffers.  Another major donor to Reform is the ex-Bullingdon Club member George Farmer. An “ardent supporter of Donald Trump”, Farmer was CEO of the far-right platform Parler, and is married to Candice Owens, a woman who “promotes far-right ideologies”. In 2023 he joined the board of GB News.

According to Electoral Commission records Chris Harborne handed over £10 million to Brexit/Reform. He gained notoriety when his name appeared multiple times in the Panama Papers. These documents revealed:

 “…off-shore holdings of world political leaders, links to global scandals, and details of  hidden financial dealings of fraudsters, drug traffickers, billionaires, celebrities, sports stars and more”. (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: 03/03/2016)

Reform UK is essentially funded by the rich.  They see Nigel Farage’s party as a means of furthering their own already substantial wealth. Only an idiot would believe these individuals are spending millions of their own money because they want to improve the lives of ordinary working people or because they want to “protect British values".

Farage makes great play with “protecting British values”:

“Nigel Farage signalled a return to right-wing shock tactics for his Reform UK party, as he used his first election interview to attack Muslims in the UK for “not sharing British values”. (Independent 26/05/24)

Strange then that Farage was willing to take money from a rich Muslim donor during the election campaign.

“Muslim millionaire gives major donation to Reform UK…The precise amount Zia Yusef has given to the party has not been disclosed but  Reform UK claims it is the biggest donation to their election campaign so far”  (BBC News: 19/06/24)

Stranger still for a man who promised “a much more muscular defence of our Christian heritage and our Christian Constitution”,  to appoint Yusef as Reform UK Party Chairman only a few days AFTER the election results.

What Reform UK is really about is protecting the wealthy. Talk of defending British values is just a smoke screen to garner votes, playing on peoples concerns about immigration to get into power. It should therefore come as no surprise that it has been revealed that Nigel Farage is the best paid politician at Westminster.

 We learned this week that Farage is earning ££98,000 a month, working for the right-wing GB News. In addition, Farage has received a £30,000 donation to pay for his trip to support Donald Trump during the US election campaign.

The total number of hours worked b Mr Farage for paid employment outside of Parliament is officially 32hrs a week. Clearly, he is more interested in lining his own pockets than in attending to his duties as an elected MP and looking after the interests of his constituents in Clacton.

If you really want to understand what Reform UK is really about then you cant beat the old adage, "follow the money".

[bitter69uk]

BOTD: much-loved British comedic actress Mollie Sugden (née Mary Isobel Sugden, 21 July 1922 – 1 July 2009) – best remembered, of course, as pastel-haired Mrs Slocombe in the sitcom Are You Being Served? Insert your own pussy joke!

[paralleljulieverse]

From the Archives: Julie Andrews on the set of Relative Values Photographs by Greg Williams July/August 1999, Isle of Man

[imspardagus]

Everyday kindness 2: British values

I woke up in the middle of the night remembering Auntie Kay. Well, not so much her as her father.

Auntie Kay wasn’t our real Auntie. She was a friend, perhaps the only friend, our Mum had when she came to live in Ilford after the Second World War. I never knew, never asked, where she had come from. She was just one of those women who had enormous resilience, which they needed to cope with their weak husbands’ implicit right to dominate their environment. Women who got things done: the housework, the shopping, the cooking, the bringing up of the children. It was all that they had left after their abilities had been carelessly cast aside when the boys came home from war and needed their jobs back.

Auntie Kay’s husband was an electrician at the local electricity board. A little shrivelled weed of a man, he had a kind heart but a fierce, visceral hatred of all things Japanese (which you could afford to have back in the 1950s because our accountants hadn’t yet sold out our industries to Asia to cut the cost of making things at home), having been a guest in one of their prisoner of war camps for several years. Yes I know it is starting to read like a phoney cliché. The trouble with cliches is that a lot of the time they are true.

Auntie Kay and Uncle Frank both smoked cheap cigarettes constantly (see, I avoided saying “Like it was going out of fashion” or “like chimneys”. I’m trying.). It killed them both eventually but it gave Auntie Kay a deep gravelly voice that matched her East End ways – straight, plain speaking, loud in her dislike of unfairness and lies but not averse to stealing an edge if it was offered. It was that dislike of lies that led her to pursue the truth about her son Andrew’s death*. She was, I recall, a bit frightening and not at all genteel, which made her all the more surprising as Mum’s friend. But she was always there for us children and in the summer we would play around the swing in her garden or the massively overbuilt pond that Uncle Frank had constructed, more like a tank trap than a garden feature.

Anyway that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.

Auntie Kay’s father had been a teacher before the war. I never met him. He died before I could, in the early fifties. He had some degenerative neurological condition that gradually destroyed him. And that’s what I woke up recalling.

One of the stories Auntie Kay told Mum was of her father’s latter years, when his balance was shot to pieces. Apparently, he had been walking over Hainault Bridge from Ley Street into the High Road when his legs collapsed under him, sending him sprawling on the pavement, from which prone position he could not get up.

A man who was passing offered no help but took the opportunity to berate him loudly for being a drunk and a disgrace, this being only early afternoon. Then, duty done, the man went on his way, and it wasn’t until a woman came along and helped him to his feet with care and concern that he was able to teeter onwards.

Auntie Kay told this story with a fury for the man’s assumption that her Dad was drunk in the middle of the day. Her father was a respectable man and was ill and deserved better than to be condemned by a loud-mouthed scoundrel. And I thought so too. It didn’t matter to me that the man could not have known of her dad’s condition. I was incensed on her behalf because a person in need of help had instead been made the victim of prejudice to satisfy another’s self-righteous anger.

These days of course it would not happen like that. These days, there would be half a dozen people standing around using their mobile phones not to call for assistance but to capture the moment to upload to Facebook or TicToK. But almost certainly there would have been some gammon-faced clown taking the opportunity to shout the odds in the fallen man’s face about his degeneracy and what was the world coming too. Just as well he wasn’t obviously an immigrant. But then again someone, probably, it has to be said, a woman, would have come to his assistance, helped him to his feet, dusted him down, maybe even offered him a coffee in the local coffee shop, made sure he was okay.

And I started to think about these “British values” that disreputable, grifting politicians lift their snouts from the trough to bang on about. They want us to “return” to them, like we are all prodigal sons who have turned our backs on our fathers’ generosity and gone swanning off on some self-indulgent woke frolic of self-destruction. But they can’t, or won’t, say what these “values” are or why they were so much better.

It’s not the world that I, a 71 year old, recall. And in any event it misses the point.

What is the point, then? The point is that “values”, like so much else that matters, are living things. They are not things to be harked back to in a fit on misty nostalgia. They should define and determine how we live now. Yes, it is good to have an eye to the past, to learn its lessons and sometimes to remind ourselves that it is our job to do better, not worse. But we can’t, and shouldn’t be trying to, live there. The past only exists in our heads (and by extension now, in books and films and hard drives and memory sticks and the Cloud). It is a country for old men’s nightmares, like Uncle Frank’s prison camp. We do not expect the Germans to hark fondly back to their Nazi aberrations. We do not expect the Japanese to want back to Pearl Harbour. We hope that they have learned from their culturally imposed misery and inhumanity to do better. And, to be fair, they have.

And so it is with us. I mean, most proximately, us English but I am embracing you, over there, you evangelising, paranoid, mammon-worshipping Yanks. If there is an expectation, it is that we will do better, that we see the sins of the past not as something to emulate but to deprecate and resolve never again to make those appalling errors of judgment.

We can be kind, we can be tolerant, we can allow ourselves to assume the best of people until they prove us wrong, we can stand up for the weak and the displaced. It is strength, not weakness to do so. We can afford to be good and decent. It is not a sin to be “woke” if being woke makes us see the needs of others for kindness and an occasional helping hand. It is the essence of being human. It draws on values that long pre-date our murky and often vicious, but also mercifully short in historical span, recent history (a history of great technological advancement but often at the expense of pain and depredation and exploitation carelessly inflicted on others). The sin is to pretend for selfish reasons that caring and kindness are luxuries and that those who have fallen by the wayside are the parasitic authors of their own misfortune. If they are doing their best to survive then we must do our best to help them. 

Jesus did not say “Blessed are the privileged for they shall have more”. He said   Treat others as you would have yourself treated, even if they are your enemy. He taught us, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, that kindness knows no national or racial boundaries.

Values are what you aspire to. They are not campaign medals to hang proudly on your chest in the vain expectation that others will respect you. Quality, integrity and decency are not slogans, buzzwords, they are measures for how we live, day to day, day on day. And our British values cannot be defined by a shouty, smug, gammon-faced man who is grateful each day that he is not as other men are. They must, for our own sakes as much as for the sake of others, respect the humanity of all people and drive us to be better, kinder, more understanding people, more willing to be the Samaritan without needing to be prompted.

Here endeth the lesson.



*Andrew died on the HMS Sheffield, a victim not so much of the Exocet missile, which failed to explode on impact, but of cyanide poisoning when the fire that started aboard the ship melted the cheap plastic coating on the miles of wiring, filling the ship with toxic fumes. A victim of friendly fire in its truest sense perhaps. Heroically, he had died trying to locate and save a friend. Values, eh?

[mauvefiles]

[stealfocus]

ARTIST: Banksy

[museeeuuuum]

Oh god, the historical costumer who I had a falling out with a few years ago is back to posting on YouTube

[diaryofaphilosopher]

For the people of ancient Colombia, gold had no monetary value, but rather spiritual and transformative powers. It was not only offered to the gods, but – together with the use of music, hallucinogens and dancing – also helped those who wore it to engage with the spirit world. With the use of bodily adornment and animal iconography, spiritual leaders believed they could take on the characteristics of a range creatures, including bats, jaguars and crocodiles, all thought to have the ability to cross liminal boundaries. 

— Emily Spicer, "Beyond El Dorado: Power and Gold in Ancient Colombia."

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