Stuart Hall, in his account of ‘authoritarian populism’, argued that marketization hollows out civil society by removing services from local participation & determination. This, then, leaves a democratic vacuum that would be filled by populism & scapegoating ...
This is the context in which the Trojan Horse affair, the Windrush scandal, & the Grenfell fire took place. The populist ‘othering’ of minorities is central to processes that seek to replace democratic accountability with markets ...
In this webinar, we examine what we can learn about the state of equality & rights in 21C Britain as reflected through the events highlighted & the connections between them ...
Before the w-w-c narrative gets re-entrenched for a second time... a reminder that, in 2016, data from the Pew Research Centre suggested that it was middle‐class communities that overwhelmingly shifted to Trump & were largely responsible for his victory pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016…
Only one‐third of those who voted for Trump in 2016 came from the lowest income bracket (earning below $50,000) and, as Silver argued, Trump supporters were generally better off than most Americans fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-m…
Trump supporters were generally better off than most Americans. The swing to Trump was carried not so much by the white working‐class vote, but the vote of the white middle class, including college‐educated white people washingtonmonthly.com/2017/01/18/tru…
#HistoryMatters a thread – recent weeks have highlighted issues of how British history is taught, what gets taught as British history & why this matters. How we understand the past has implications for the politics of the present... 1/n
Who is seen to belong in the present is often related to our understanding of who ‘we’ were in the past. If we imagine ourselves historically as a nation, then politics in the present in organised in those categories... 2/n
If we understand that ‘we’ have always been constituted through empire, then those understandings require transformation. How we conceptualise that empire also matters in terms of who is acknowledged as belonging today... 3/n
More on statues and the British empire: 'The sense of self of those objecting to the removal of statues seems to be intimately tied to the idea of Empire having been a force for good in the world. They are profoundly unsettled by arguments to the contrary' ... 1/n
On being confronted by the trade in human beings, the response is usually, 'but we abolished it'. It's correct Britain abolished the trade - after over 200 years of profiting from it - but this is not the only thing that was done ... 2/n
As Catherine Hall & Nicholas Draper have argued, Britain also paid compensation of £20 million – or the equivalent of 40% of GDP – to those people who had lost 'property' (that is, the human beings they owned) in the process ... 3/n ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
The mores were different then ... One of the earliest and largest revolts by enslaved people in Atlantic history took place in the Portuguese sugar colony of Sao Tome in July 1595 (Seibert 2011) … see also: colonialvoyage.com/revolt-slaves-…
In the late 1600s, an Afro-Brazilian man, Lourenço da Silva de Mendonça, travelled to Rome from Brazil to petition the Pope to abolish the institution of perpetual slavery (Gray 1987) …
José Lingna Nafafé argues further that Mendonça brought a criminal case against nations involved in Atlantic slavery for committing a crime against humanity … as such, the legal debate against slavery was begun by Africans, & not Europeans ... mmppf.wordpress.com/2019/03/12/lou…