How might we rethink the policies & politics of the British welfare state once we acknowledge that much of the wealth that enabled its establishment came from the labour & taxes of its colonial – not national - subjects?
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onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/14…
Taxation is central to how we understand the welfare state – as Martin, Mehrotra, & Prasad argue, “Taxes formalize our obligations to each other. They define the inequalities we accept & those that we collectively seek to redress” 2/n
For those who may not know, Britain's reluctance to admit East African Asians in the 1970s was not a reluctance to take refugees, but to admit British citizens ...
Britain was eventually required to accept them because not to do so would have left them stateless and therefore Britain would have been in breach of international law...
Dec 3, 2020 • 11 tweets • 6 min read
The first panel for #ImperialInequalities today (1.30pm GMT) is on 'Institutional & Fiscal Issues' looking at ways in which imperial states were financed... often thru processes of dispossession & raising mortgages on appropriated land (eg Ireland)... taxjustice.net/events/online-…
Papers: Welfare imperialism in Spanish Empire by @JuliaMcClure_; The great gage in Ireland by David Brown; Financial autonomy in French empire by @madeline_woker; & The composite colonial state in Sierra Leone by Laura Channing
Nov 10, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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 ...
Nov 4, 2020 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
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…
Jul 10, 2020 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
#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
Jun 15, 2020 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
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
Jun 8, 2020 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
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) …
