A s the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in this
country approaches, Tony Blair expresses ‘deep sorrow’ for British involvement in the trade. Extraordinary that he should feel the need to adopt such a tone when the act commemorated is something to be proud of. But his words are carefully chosen in order to avoid paying ‘reparations’ to descendants of slaves who think they deserve them. It is worth noting one thing about the reparations campaign. The campaign’s spokesman, Esther Cranford, speaks of the ‘so-called slave trade’. The term she uses is ‘the African Holocaust’, and she and her allies speak of the slave trade as ‘genocide’. Presumably, the campaigners prefer these terms because they wish to find a form of white oppression of blacks which is as bad as bad can be. It is a constant source of rage to some militant black groups, to many Arabs and to many Muslims, that the word ‘Holocaust’ belongs in people’s minds uniquely to the suffering of the Jews. The Muslim Council of Britain refuses to take part in Holocaust Memorial Day because it wants the day to commemorate all genocides, and it pretends that what has happened in Palestine over the years qualifies. If the idea of the African Holocaust could be established, campaigners would at last have achieved their hearts’ desire, which is to make Britain and America morally equivalent to the Nazis.
The BBC’s Radio Four on Monday morning: ‘The ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza appears to be holding even after militants fired rockets into Israeli territory.’ So the BBC definition of a ceasefire that holds is one in which Israel does not fire, but Palestinians do.
Waiting for an appointment in the central lobby of the House of Commons this week, I started to count the number of Christian references, including crosses, in the mosaics and sculpture above me. I got to 17 in about as many seconds (the depictions of the patron saints of the four constituent parts of the United Kingdom contained most of them) before my host came to collect me. If a British Airways approach — no visible religious symbol permitted — were to be applied to our public culture, the purge would have to be extensive. Out would go St Pancras, King’s Cross, Charing Cross, Marylebone and Fenchurch Street; so would Westminster itself. Our coinage would have to be changed; so would the national flag and the Royal Standard; so would some of our public holidays. Most of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges would have to change their names, as well as their statutes; so would thousands of schools. Virtually no coat of arms of any institution would survive. Police symbols would have to be altered, as would regimental banners (which, obviously, would no longer be allowed to hang in churches). The concept of the Christian name would be suspect, so that it might become a criminal offence to be called, say, Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Someone should start a complete inventory of the world we would lose. Last week I addressed the Wynnstay Hunt in the Welsh Borders. Their symbol is cross foxes, after which a local pub is named. Already enduring one persecution, they are now threatened with another.
Although hunts up and down the country seem to be thriving as never before, with large numbers of new recruits, I suspect that the period of police restraint may be coming to an end. Last week the Cheshire Hunt had the absurd experience of being followed by a police helicopter, and I hear from the chairman of a southern hunt that police officers who are not local now turn up at his meets, as if sent by some higher authority. Is there a new, semi-secret level of surveillance, the crowning glory of John Reid’s desire to make the Home Office ‘fit for purpose’?
It has often been said that the socialist argument for equality is based on the fallacy that wealth is a cake, when in fact it is a yeast. If it were a cake, then justice would indeed demand that it be shared more evenly. Conservatives who love planning restrictions should notice that their policies tend to prove socialism right. In a country where the quantity of property is severely restricted, poor people are genuinely ill-treated by the system. The cost of housing is kept beyond their reach; the rich have most of the cake and, unlike with most forms of wealth, the power to prevent the cake’s expansion. This is now a serious problem in the south-east of England, and it is exacerbated by our favourable tax treatment of foreigners resident in this country who are not classified as domiciled. They do not pay tax on capital sums kept offshore and remitted to them. They can therefore live more or less tax-free. They do so, competing to buy London property, thus making it appallingly expensive for everyone else. The rising cost affects the wider region. These tax advantages are not bad things — they contribute greatly to London’s competitiveness and cultural vigour — but unless something is done to allow the supply of housing to try to meet the demand, housing will become a red-hot political issue, and socialists who take up the cause of the poor will have right on their side (though the wrong solutions). I see that Ken Livingstone has already got on to this.
There may be much to be said for a greater concentration on ‘relative’ rather than absolute poverty, as the Tories now propose. But what is certain is that once you admit the relevance of relative poverty, you have literally no chance of ‘making poverty history’, because you define poverty in relation to whatever the level of wealth is at any one time. Is this what Jesus meant when he said, ‘The poor you have always with you’?
Matthew Parris has pointed out that the long ‘a’ is gradually withdrawing from British educated speech. In 50 years, he says, southerners will no longer say ‘laaf’ but ‘laff’, and not ‘laast’ but ‘lasst’. I think he is right, but he does not add that this trend is a reversion. When I was a boy, a lot of old people who considered that they spoke ‘the Queen’s English’ used the short ‘a’ in words like ‘graph’ or ‘Daily Telegraph’. My mother told me that it was would-be genteel to say ‘baastard’ rather than ‘basstard’. When Mr Gladstone declared, ‘All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes’, the ‘classes’ rhymed with our modern pronunciation of ‘masses’. This may have been because Gladstone was born in Liverpool, but it is more likely that he was simply speaking in the prevailing way.
In last week’s column the email for the Rectory Club was given wrongly. The correct email is rectory-club@brownrudnick.com.
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