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Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Jan 3

Do you know that the death rate for sailors on the famous Brooks slave ship was higher than the death rate for slaves?

Because that statement is true, but it isn't the whole truth, it shows how deceptive statistics can be when taken out of context.

Here's the story... 🧵

In 1788 the Plymouth chapter of ‘The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ published an engraving of the slave ship Brooks (or Brookes) which graphically illustrated the horrific conditions in which the slaves were packed, shoulder to shoulder, for the infamous ‘Middle Passage’ from Africa to the Americas.

Possibly the first example of a really successful mass advertising campaign, the print marked a turning point in the public perception of the trade, as copies were distributed up and down the land and were hung on walls in homes and inns.

Further stories of slaves being thrown overboard alive from the slave ship Zong to save drinking water for the remainder only added to the public revulsion the Brooks revelations had sparked.

It so happens that crew and slave mortality figures for many of voyages of the Brooks have been recorded. The figures make interesting reading.

The Brooks made the three voyages of the round trip eleven times between 1781 and 1804 when the trade was banned. The first one took almost a year and a half. The voyage from England to Africa lasted three months and eleven days. The vessel then spent almost exactly six months sailing up and down the West African coast picking up slaves. The life chances of those boarded at the beginning of this section would have been far slimmer than those taken on board at the end.

A typical crossing to Jamaica then took one month and 28 days, the ship departing from Jamaica three months and ten days later to make final the two-month voyage home.

This was the 'triangular trade' - Britain to Africa to the Caribbean and back to Britain.

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Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Jan 1

Yesterday I returned to the British Museum for the first time in a number of years.

I reached a number of conclusions, primarily that @britishmuseum appears not only to hate Britain and British history but also, paradoxically, to really rather dislike the museum itself.

The bookshop open shelves face everyone who passes through the central Great Court and this is the message they give the hundreds of British visitors and tourists who pass them every day…

Decolonisation, Dalrymple, and, of course, Edward Said, the founding father of postcolonialism.

From the shelves you’d think David Olusoga was one of Britains preeminent modern historians.

(His endorsement is on the cover of the last book)

Read 14 tweets

Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Dec 30, 2024

Education has always been a target for those seeking to create the utopian Socialist society of their dreams.

Bridget Phillipson's latest plans to 'refresh' and 'decolonise' the national curriculum and force those but the richest of privately educated children back into the clutches of the state and its propaganda are no more than the latest in a line that stretches back to Marx...

...who taunted his readers in the Communist Manifesto as follows:

‘Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. Communists seek to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class’
and, as his first comment makes clear, from the family.

Unlike Phillipson, earlier Socialists have been quite open about their aims...🧵

Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, was quite clear about it, condemning the ‘bourgeois approach to raising children’:

‘Socialist society cannot remain indifferent to the fact that the family shapes the child's attitude, and this will not coincide with [socialist] norms of society’

=> Socialists want to take children away from the influence of their parents.

Socialists want to destroy the strength of the family unit/bond because it is harder to capture the minds of children while they are under the influence of their more worldly-wise parents.

Trotsky, one of Lenin's closest associates had predicted that the ‘socialist organisation of economic life’ would make it possible ‘to fundamentally reconstruct traditional family life’ and early Bolsheviks pursued that reconstruction with extreme vigour: the bourgeois (ie middle class small 'c conservative) family had to be eliminated:

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Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Nov 18, 2024

“Definitely and clearly our purpose is to deprive these people of their way of living"

The early Labour party openly advocated for the expropriation of privately owned land.

Now the man advising them on the farm inheritance tax is doing exactly the same. 🧵

Read this. It’s from an official Labour publication, The Case for Socialism, published in 1933

“Socialism is an attack upon the institution of private property in land and capital. We advocate the expropriation of the landed and capitalist class.”
“Definitely and clearly our purpose is to deprive these people of their way of living"

And then this is Labour’s farm tax adviser today, in 2024.

Advani advocates for “the state taking part-ownership of land and becoming the landlord to tenant farmers.”

Straight back to Stalin (much admired by the Labour Party of the 1930s) and his expropriation of kulak farmers.

order-order.com/2024/11/18/lab…

https://twitter.com/gilesudy/status/1858509710712053802

And this is where it began - Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, which the 1948 Labour Party acknowledged as its inspiration on inheritance tax.

https://twitter.com/gilesudy/status/1858509710712053802

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Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Oct 27, 2024

You can make 'history' say whatever you want it to. Sir Hilary Beckles, who leads the Caribbean #reparations campaign certainly does.

Beckles may be a knighted historian, a vice-Chancellor of the University of West Indies and an enormously respected figure across the Caribbean... but here's how cavalier he is with his facts. 🧵

He writes: "The British imported some 3 million Africans into the Caribbean and upon emancipation in 1833, only about 700,000 had survived. Barbados, where it all began as an economic explosion, received 600,000 people from British ships over 200 years; only 83,000 survived."
He calls this genocide.

Let's address that "the British imported some 3 million Africans into the Caribbean" first...

Remember - he's an 'eminent slavery historian' so he should get his figures right.

Clue - he doesn't.

The Transatlantic slave database states that 2,318,254 slaves were landed in the Caribbean, 2,208,296 on British ships.**

He's out by 800,000, inflating the actual figure by 36%. He could look it up (I did) and he's a historian, so surely he would, wouldn't he? He might also concede that Barbados was a stopping off point for slaves shipped on to other islands, which would reduce the total still further.

But why water down a good campaigning number with detail. These people don't want facts to interfere with their opinions.

What is horrifying about these numbers is that 2,763,411 slaves embarked in Africa. This means that about 445,000 perished before they reached the West Indies. It is a terrible statistic but it bears no relation to the figure Beckles gives.

**All these figures are from slavevoyages.org

So, 3m (actually 2.2m) slaves were shipped to the Caribbean but, he saya, because only 700,000 were alive at 1833, that was 'genocide'. No it wasn't.

Just stop for a moment and ponder this.

First everybody dies in the end. What's he trying to say? Surely not that the Brits killed 2.3m slaves? (When you listen to him saying that in a talk, calling it a 'Black Holocaust', as he trots one accusation after another out you get that impression because you haven't got time to think and say, 'hold on, what are you saying?')

With an assumed life expectancy of 30 (more on that below), the fact is that every slave shipped to the islands by 1803 would be dead anyway. Surely that's obvious?

He used his home island Barbados as an example, stating that of "600,000 slaves shipped, just 83,000 were alive at 1833."

The table below shows the actual figures of slaves landed in Barbados between 1626 and 1825 - some of whom were then transhipped to other islands but let's leave it that for the moment.

According to the Slave Voyages database, the actual total number of slaves landed in Barbados was 457,705 not 600,000. He's out again. Yet more 30% inflation.

And if we take 1801 as the cut off point, with a life expectancy of 30, there could only be 6,369 of the 83,000 slaves landed still alive at 1833. The rest, 76,631, were born on the island. That may (does it?) imply a low birth rate but that's not genocide.

Read 8 tweets

Giles Udy

@GilesUdy

Aug 27, 2024

I have just been re-reading the manifesto of the Communist Party of Britain. It includes:

· "The abolition of charitable status for private schools" - as a prelude to their abolition (🧵)
· "An annual wealth tax on the richest section of the population"
· "Replacing council tax with local income, wealth, land and property taxes"
· "The right to vote at 16"

All these happen to be current or trailed Labour policies.

"The abolition of charitable status for private schools would be the prelude to their incorporation into the public sector"

The Communist Party are at least open about it.
Meanwhile the Labour Party hides behind 'we need it to fund more teachers in the state sector'.

Every measure the CPB proposes in its manifesto is also to finance making Britain a fairer more socialist country.

Not much difference?

At least Labour aren't proposing some of other barking mad CPB policies: (Yet?)

- "Advertising, financial and property services should be limited and their socially useful functions transferred to public bodies." [nationalisation and political control]

- "Landed estates, luxury tourist establishments and ‘second’ homes must be brought under the democratic control of local communities." [in other words, expropriated]

- "replacing key personnel [in] civil and diplomatic services, the judiciary, the police, the secret services and armed forces ... with supporters of the revolutionary process".

- the establishment of a new paramilitary force, a "state’s corps of military reservists" which would be "expanded and linked with large workplaces and local working-class communities." "Over time" the emphasis would "will tilt away from a full-time selective professional army towards popular [ie 'peoples'] military reservists."

- Mass nationalisation but with compensation only "on the basis of need".

Welcome to USSR 2.0...

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