Slavery

Thursday

Andrew Watts

The starchy, conservative lawyer who freed every slave in England

Americans make movies about slavery and its abolition. In the past two years we’ve seen the Oscar-winning Twelve Years a Slave, based on a 19th-century slave narrative, and Django Unchained, with Christoph Waltz as a bounty-hunter who, uniquely among bounty-hunters of the period, did not make his living from capturing fugitive slaves. Spielberg’s Lincoln was about the Great Emancipator himself, as was the less historically rigorous Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. But the abolition of slavery in England has never received the same attention. Perhaps it is because abolition here came not through blood and glory, but through the common law; or perhaps because emancipation does not frame constitutional debates here

Wednesday

Christian Guy

Forget zombies – the Queen is fighting slavery

Two years ago a well-known MP told me that the Centre for Social Justice was wasting our time chasing political action against slavery, because it wasn’t a ‘doorstep issue’. I’m rather glad I didn’t take that advice because, as Theresa May has said, our 2013 report It Happens Here sparked the vital changes we will hear from the Queen today. Later this morning Elizabeth II will open Parliament for the 61st time. Labour claims she’ll have nothing much to say, with Shadow ministers attacking an impending ‘zombie parliament’. This is unfair. Especially because nestled in Her Majesty’s speech will be a landmark Modern Slavery Bill. The publication of that Bill,

Thursday

Peter Jones

How Plato and Aristotle would have tackled unemployment

Labour is up in arms because many of the new jobs currently being created are among the self-employed. This seems to them to be cheating. Quite the reverse, ancients would have said. Ancient thinkers knew all about the needs of the poor and were worried about their capacity to cause trouble (as they saw it) by revolution. So in a world where everyone lived off the land (the wealthy by renting it out), Plato thought there should be a law that everyone should have a basic minimum of land to live off, and no one should own property more than five times the size of the smallest allotment; any excess

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Slavery continues to this day; and why Russia’s re-emergence as a world power is down to Obama’s apathy

Slavery isn’t over Sir: I was alarmed to read Taki’s piece in this week’s High Life (8 March) which claimed that ‘slavery… has been over since 1865, except in Africa’. The Centre for Social Justice, whose board I chair, last year published its groundbreaking report It Happens Here, exposing the desperate plight of those in modern slavery in the UK. The CSJ’s work revealed exploitation taking place across the country, from young British men enslaved on traveller sites and forced into manual labour, to vulnerable children forced to live as slaves behind closed doors in one of Britain’s thousands of cannabis farms, to young British girls being trafficked into sexual

Thursday

Taki

What 12 Years a Slave gets wrong – and The Book Thief gets right

Damn, damn, damn! It has to be me, and all these years I’ve been thinking it was Hollywood. By the time you read this it will all be over, like the Olympics, but I had someone play 12 Years A Slave on my television set — it’s called Apple TV but I’m incapable of making it work on my own — and could only watch for ten minutes. Then I had the nice woman who assists me change the film. To me it was like watching a cartoon, as one scene jumped to another without continuity, just clips of horrible whites torturing an innocent black man. Needless to say, it

The Spectator

Where to open your brothel: an international comparison

The best places to open a brothel The Commons all-party group on prostitution has called for a Scandinavian-style law where selling sex would not be illegal but buying it would be. How does the world treat prostitution? — In a survey of 100 countries by the educational charity ProCon, 50 were judged to treat prostitution as illegal, 39 as legal, with the remaining 11 making it an offence in some instances. — Among the most liberal were Canada, where laws against brothel ownership and pimping were recently overturned by the supreme court, the Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand and Greece. — The most severe criminal sanctions were found in Iran, where

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Christianity is the foundation of our freedoms

If there is one underlying source from which all our other societal problems stem, it is surely this: we no longer know who we are or how we got here. Worse, we mistakenly believe our situation to be inevitable, presuming that we have arrived in this modern liberal state through something like gravity. At the very opening of Inventing the Individual Larry Siedentop lays this problem out. People who live in the nations once described as Christendom ‘seem to have lost their moral bearings’, he writes: We no longer have a persuasive story to tell ourselves about our origins and development. There is little narrative sweep in our view of

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Give Steve McQueen a Nobel prize not an Oscar

Film critic Armond White has been booted out of the New York Film Critics Circle. Officially it was for heckling Twelve Years A Slave director Steve McQueen at a press conference. But they can’t have liked him telling the truth about the movie. Namely, that it’s crap. We should listen to  hecklers. Especially when they’re as serious as White. That they have to heckle their message is usually a sign that something is up. And something is up.  The consensus surrounding Twelve Years a Slave is getting unhealthy. For many the very act of telling Solomon Northup’s story is enough to immortalise the film. No matter that the acting is one-note, the

Thursday

Ferdinand Mount

Ferdinand Mount’s diary: Supermac was guilty!

You have to hand it to Supermac. Fifty years after the event, he is still running rings round them. The esteemed Vernon Bogdanor (The Spectator, 18 January) tells us that Iain Macleod was wrong in claiming that Sir Alec had been foisted on the Conservative party by a magic circle of Old Etonians. On the contrary, the soundings had ‘revealed a strong consensus for Home. So Macmillan was not slipping in a personal recommendation when he advised the Queen to send for him — he was doing precisely what he was supposed to do.’ This is a deliciously selective account. When Macmillan decided to resign in October 1963, not because

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Deborah Ross: 12 Years a Slave harrowed me to within an inch of my life

Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave goes directly to the heart of American slavery without any shilly-shallying — unlike The Butler, say, or even Django Unchained — and is what I call a ‘Brace Yourself’ film, as you must brace yourself for horror after horror, injustice after injustice, shackles, muzzles, whippings, rapes, hangings. You will be harrowed to within an inch of your life, as perhaps is only right, given the subject matter, but you will not wish to flee your seat. You will recoil. You will flinch. You will say to yourself, ‘Oh no, not again.’ But the story will seize you with such a visceral power you will

Friday

David Blackburn

Did slavery never go away?

There is blanket media coverage of ‘London’s shame’ – the news of the escape of three women who had been held as slaves in Lambeth for 30 years. The women were trapped in domestic servitude, which means that there is no sexual dimension to the crime. I suppose we be must thankful for small mercies; but, as everyone is right to say, a slave is a slave is a slave. Indeed, the incarcerators allowed their captives to leave the house from time to time, which implies that the slaves were controlled by psychology rather than shackles. It’s a sickening thought because it’s difficult for charity workers, law enforcement and ordinary members of the public to

Thursday

Deborah Ross

The Butler, about a black domestic in the White House, is too painfully obvious

The Butler tells the story of an African–American butler at the White House who served eight American presidents over three decades and it plays as a ‘greatest hits’ of the civil rights movement, along with whatever else they decided to throw in, like Vietnam, apartheid, and Lyndon B. Johnson on the can. (Actually, Lyndon B. Johnson on the can was rather the highlight.) It is heavy-handed, predictable, bland and so contrived in its sentimentality I sniggered at what should have been the moments of emotional impact. However, all was not lost, as I did have a nice little doze, which, as it was a morning screening, set me up quite

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Carlos Acosta, the great dancer, should be a full-time novelist

Carlos Acosta, the greatest dancer of his generation, grew up in Havana as the youngest of 11 black children. Money was tight, but Carlos won a place at ballet school, and before long he was enthralling audiences at Covent Garden as a half Jagger, half Nureyev figure with a twist of the moon-walking Jackson in the mix. Now Acosta is about to leap into the world of literature with a debut novel, Pig’s Foot, written over a period of four years during rehearsal breaks. For all its manifest debt to Latin American so-called ‘magic realists’ (Marquez, Borges, Vargas Llosa), the novel stands triumphantly on its own. In pages of salty-sweetprose,

Thursday

Lucy Maule

A historic opportunity for Britain to put an end to modern-day slavery

Last year I met Ben, a British man who’d been made homeless and had been living on the streets. Collecting food at a soup kitchen one evening, he was approached and offered a job by a man and woman. Having nobody to call and nothing to pack, Ben got in the car. What followed was months of abuse as Ben was forced to work paving driveways, paid little and kept in squalor. He was threatened, intimidated and forbidden to leave. Working alongside others, some of whom were so totally broken that they called their boss ‘Daddy’, Ben endured horrendous abuse at the hands of men who saw him as a

Friday

Fraser Nelson

It’s time to end slavery in Britain – again

Today is the United Nations day for he Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition – and the school packs have been readied to tell pupils about Britain’s part in this great evil. But the way we tend to remember (and, occasionally, apologise for) slavery has two main problems.  Yes, British traders played a full and shameful part in the slave trade. But what marks Britain out is out objection to it. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years – yet nowhere in the world was slavery controversial until the 1780s when some Brits started kicking up a fuss about it. White

Monday

Christian Guy

Modern slavery: it happens here

Slowly but surely, British court cases are revealing a once great nation of abolitionists to be a shadow of its former self.  We often celebrate the nineteenth century anti-slavery movement and its precious victory.  We hail their achievement and honour our Parliament’s noblest hour. But like weeds in a neglected garden, slavery has returned.  Its roots remained intact – inherent in humanity’s darkest weaknesses.  Today, it is aggressive and hidden.  It lives in the shadows of Britain’s cities, towns and villages.  And as this morning’s Centre for Social Justice report reveals, too often it thrives uncontested. In the hands of international bureaucrats the problem has become better known as ‘human

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Dirty, ugly things

Sometimes fiction can be more accurate than published facts. Ten years ago a film, Dirty Pretty Things, told about the plight of illegal immigrants into Britain and the least-explored scandals of all: the black market trade in human organs. It was an aspect of Britain’s secret country, the black market occupied by a million-plus souls that produces a tenth of our economic output. Most of these people work illegally, perhaps in criminal endeavour or perhaps honestly, but in fear of immigration police. It is, by definition, an unregulated environment in which all manner of evil can be incubated. It is becoming clear now that one of these evils is the

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Witness for the prosecution

This is a humdinger of a tale. You might have thought that journeys into the heart of the Dark Continent with David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley and the likes of Richard Burton had already inspired so vast and breathless a literature that there were few surprises left to report. But that’s the miracle of this story. Alastair Hazell’s genius has been to plough through the huge and well-documented archive, follow his nose, and tell a tale from an entirely new perspective: the life of Dr John Kirk, an early companion to Dr Livingstone, and afterwards a humble Scottish medical officer and Acting British Consul in Zanzibar. In doing so he

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The Strange Case of Woodrow Wilson

Contra Jill Lepore in the New York Times, you don’t need to watch Glenn Beck to dislike Woodrow Wilson. Nor do you need think there’s any connection between one “professor-President” and the chap currently occupying the Oval Office. Radley Balko lays out the standard libertarian case against Wilson here and, frankly, it makes a pretty convincing argument that, even by the lofty standards of the field, Wilson was one of the most unpleasant men ever to hold the Presidency. And that’s before you consider Jim Crow and his penchant for launching extra-constitutional wars… Lepore is correct that some of these libertarian objections are actually points of similarity between Wilson and

Sunday

Alex Massie

Apart from the Slavery, the Peasantry was Free, You Know…

More on this essay on American exceptionalism in due course, but first Conor Friedersdorf: In a post on President Obama and American exceptionalism, Victor Davis Hanson explains why he thinks our nation is different from all the others: Perhaps it would be better, when speaking of an early rural society, to talk of an absence of peasantry: We had no concept of a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs; instead, yeomen agrarians were the Jeffersonian ideal, a nation of independent farmers rather than peasants. Odd that a historian should forget about American slavery! Quite.