Glasgow Uni to pay £20 million in slave reparations

[builder22]

Reparations is such a good word to say.

In a Glasgow accent?

 

[Efour]

not sure i can even imagine that..

 

[StriderX]

I'm surprised there is no GD thread so far on this story.

Glasgow University to pay £20m in slave trade reparations
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/aug/23/glasgow-university-slave-trade-reparations

Glasgow University's 'bold' move to pay back slave trade profits
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-49435041

So if Glasgow Uni ever starts putting up tuition fees and complaining they don't have enough money, remind them of this episode.

Tuition fees are capped... the government sets the cap which rose to 9250 not too long ago, so this was a vacuous rationale.

Either way, there are ways to make reparations that basically just end up back in your coffers, just offer to give students in the Caribbean or elsewise free tuition, some of them will stay and provide research. So you get to look like you're finally dealing with your organisations past dealings while benefiting from it.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

So if Glasgow Uni ever starts putting up tuition fees and complaining they don't have enough money, remind them of this episode.

The English pay all our tuition fees for us anyway.

 

[Mason-]

This says it better than me:

Restorative justice for the victims of colonialism is an idea whose time has come. A few years ago, the Indian diplomat Shashi Tharoor suggested Britain pay India compensation to atone for centuries of colonial rule. ‘I’d be quite happy if it was one pound a year for the next two hundred years,’ he said.

In April, Cambridge University announced a two-year study into how buildings and wine cellars might have been constructed on the backs of slaves. ‘There is growing public and academic interest in the links between the older British universities and the slave trade, and it is only right that Cambridge should look into its own exposure to the profits of coerced labour during the colonial period,’ said Vice-Chancellor Stephen Toope.

Too right. Glasgow University has already conducted a study into its own links with slavery and concluded that £200 millionworth of its wealth was ill-gotten in this way — though it hasn’t yet decided what form reparations should take. In America, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held a hearing in June to examine ‘the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, its continuing impact on the community and the path to restorative justice’. The campaign has received support from nearly 60 House Democrats and a string of the wokest Democratic presidential candidates, including Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.

To those who suggest we might be better spending our time righting the injustices of today rather than of the distant past I say: shame on you. If these wrongs are not righted through compensation they will live on in our collective shame and the descendants of the victims will continue to suffer. Far from abandoning the principle of restorative justice we should be expanding it and exploring what other injustices might be put right through financial compensation.




One glaring example is the great evil visited on the Anglo-Saxon population by the Norman Conquest of 1066. By any standard, the effect on indigenous English society was enduring devastation. Through war, invasion and genocide, the Anglo-Saxon ruling class was almost entirely replaced, control of the church and state surrendered to foreign adversaries, English replaced by Norman French as the language of government, and England’s entire political, social and cultural orientation shifted from Northern Europe to the continent for the next thousand years.

This matters because, just as the pain of colonialism continues to be endured by its descendants, the Conquest continues to have lasting effects. In his study of surnames and social mobility, economic historian Gregory Clark concluded that Norman surnames continue to be 25 per cent overrepresented at Oxbridge to this day relative to other indigenous English surnames. As Clark put it: ‘The fact that Norman surnames had not been completely average in their social distribution by 1300, by 1600, or even by 1900 implies astonishingly slow rates of social mobility during every epoch of English history.’ Not for nothing did Nonconformists and Whigs loudly oppose ‘the Norman yoke’ during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Cambridge University, which still drips with Norman money and influence, should now consider to what extent it needs to compensate its Anglo-Saxon victims. The Sutton Trust estimates that Oxbridge graduates earn £400,000 more during their lifetimes than graduates from other UK universities. These figures imply that descendants of the rapacious Norman invader class could be earning tens of thousands of pounds more than other graduates — an undeserved lifetime premium that has survived 31 generations. So, reparations must certainly be made. But who shall pay, and who shall receive?

It should be straightforward for a Royal Commission to trace the present-day descendants of Britain’s Norman usurpers through a combination of genealogical and administrative research as well as — inevitably — mandatory genetic testing. A small tax on the Lampards, Vardys and Gascoignes of the world, payable to the Bamfords, Bransons and Ecclestones, would be sufficient to catalyse healing for the open sores of the past.

What are the sums involved? By 1086, the Norman arrivistes had stolen almost a third of the 12.5 million acres of arable land in England, parcelling it into manorial estates. At a conservative estimate, that land is now worth £7,000 per acre — or £25 billion in total that the Normans owe Anglo-Saxons for the Conquest. France’s liability could, of course, be offset against our exit bill from the EU.

There will be inevitable quibbles, such as descendants of Normans claiming that they were not personally responsible. But this is feeble prattle. Countries typically honour treaties dating hundreds of years in the past, despite no one being alive who signed them. We pay debts accumulated by previous generations. Similarly, reparations correctly depend on a notion of collective and inherited responsibility, precisely why the Jews were held accountable for the death of Jesus Christ for most of the Christian era.

We are learning every day just how deep our roots in the past lie. The more we learn, the more necessary it is to see the past in terms of the attitudes of the present, and to rectify regrettable aspects. Eventually these may encompass events as old as the Indo-Aryan invasions of 1500 bc, which produced the Hindu caste system, as well as more unheralded travesties such as the American conquest of the Philippines, which introduced junk food, soap operas and general bad taste. Ultimately, only by demarcating a special class of victims and making grievance inheritable can we address the sins of the past and promote harmony in our own world.

Of course, in Britain one Royal Commission is unlikely to be sufficient. Once the Anglo-Saxon population has been compensated, surviving descendants of the ancient Britons will understandably want to seek redress from the Anglo-Saxons themselves for crimes committed during that earlier settlement. Justice must be served, even if it means even more public money disappearing over the Severn Bridge into Wales. But hopefully it will be made up for by the billions we are owed by present-day Scandinavians in compensation for all that rape and pillage by the Vikings.

By Sahil Mahtani

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/07/anglo-saxons-deserve-reparations-for-the-norman-conquest/

Complete and utter codswallop. Slavery has been in force for longer than it hasn’t. A world without slavery is a new thing. And funnily enough it’s the people that enforced it being illegal worldwide that are being the ones held accountable for all of it.

No good deed goes unpunished.

 

[FoxEye]

Can we have some reparations from the Vikings, the Normans, perhaps the Romans too?

 

[StriderX]

Can we have some reparations from the Vikings, the Normans, perhaps the Romans too?

Are those "things" still represented by an organisation that has existed for that length of time for which there is a direct causal link to benefits accrued?

(the answer is no, btw, no amount of rationale will change this, those people simply dont exist whereas GU does)

Regardless it is always a choice to accept this burden, GU has decided it must, end of story.

 

[Diddums]

Can we have some reparations from the Vikings, the Normans, perhaps the Romans too?

Honestly just a blowie from one of those titan viking chicks would do me just fine, I'm not fussy.


Can we start a petition?

 

[Nasher]

Are those "things" still represented by an organisation that has existed for that length of time for which there is a direct causal link to benefits accrued?

(the answer is no, btw, no amount of rationale will change this, those people simply dont exist whereas GU does)

Regardless it is always a choice to accept this burden, GU has decided it must, end of story.

The Catholic church. The Roman empire didn't die, it became an extremely wealthy religion. I want my compo!

200 or 2000 years, makes no difference. No one alive today has actually benefited from slavery.

 

[RxR]

I like the general goal (a way to make more money) thrust of the article. But it ridiculously cheapens too much and isnt a profitable-enough exercise. Its obviously a first blush, or a foil.

For example, the subsetting of relative merits among european state tribes (eg. normans vs. anglo sax) really only support a smallish brexit discount. A useful expedient, perhaps.

 

[StriderX]

The Catholic church. The Roman empire didn't die, it became an extremely wealthy religion. I want my compo!

200 or 2000 years, makes no difference. No one alive today has actually benefited from slavery.

You must be joking, are you seriously implying that zero estates or families for whom slavery was a major/minor source of income currently still exist?

We literally have this thread because the GU DID benefit from it, plus these families/estates were paid ~£2 billion in compensation because their abhorrent abuse of people was legislated against, money that could have been spent on the public good quite literally squirreled away into the pockets of the establishment.

So not only did they benefit from decades/centuries of brutal enslavement and ripping families apart, the state literally paid them after the fact.

Tell me, if you had/have children and you gave them money, did they benefit from your choices, yes or no?

 

[Hotwired]

You must be joking, are you seriously implying that zero estates or families for whom slavery was a major/minor source of income currently still exist?

We literally have this thread because the GU DID benefit from it, plus these families/estates were paid ~£2 billion in compensation because their abhorrent abuse of people was legislated against, money that could have been spent on the public good quite literally squirreled away into the pockets of the establishment.

So not only did they benefit from decades/centuries of brutal enslavement and ripping families apart, the state literally paid them after the fact.

Tell me, if you had/have children and you gave them money, did they benefit from your choices, yes or no?

Yes very emotive language but it is very much in the past.

If I find out an ancestor of yours was a murderer and robber are you happy to make amends for whatever cost it may be that your ancestor caused to other families?

Retrospective justice applied centuries later to descendants is extremely questionable. As has been said repeatedly in this thread, everyone personally involved and everyone that knew them is long dead.

 

[StriderX]

Yes very emotive language but it is very much in the past.

If I find out an ancestor of yours was a murderer and robber are you happy to make amends for whatever cost it may be that your ancestor caused to other families?

Retrospective justice applied centuries later to descendants is extremely questionable. As has been said repeatedly in this thread, everyone personally involved and everyone that knew them is long dead.

Useless comparison, the GU is not a descendant, it's the same organisation it was 400 years ago and it's success is directly correlated to the funding provided by slavers, a choice that was made knowing full well the breadth of knowledge about which lord or magnate was using it as a tool, it would be seriously strange for an old university to have zero knowledge about people it may very well have educated.

People always try to turn it into a personal argument, well that's just not how it works, not matter how hard you might try as you'll find that everyone has a criminal in the family, so it ends up being pointless, Slavery was very much a 3000 person job (in the UK at least) at the top for people who they thought subhuman, a criminal and morally deficient enterprise that ruined tens of millions of lives.

How about this comparison, lets say hypothetically Hitler had a son, and that after decades of time, it was found that he had the missing gold and used it to benefit himself, should that just be ignored? That's basically what happened many times over for the high-class of this country.

YEAH I GODWIN'D gottem /dab /rekt /seeadoctorfortheburn

 

[RxR]

The implicit apology in GU's actions is based on a fallacy. Farrier, were he alive today, would have rightly ript the notion apart. Newton, no doubt, looks on with dismay ('they have learned nothing.'). But its also a 'clever' trade-off ploy to gain more student customers over the payoff from maintaining and defending cultural integrity. They clearly imagine their reasoning to be sound enough, based on their own narrower ecological niche needs for repute.

 

[Hotwired]

Useless comparison, the GU is not a descendant, it's the same organisation it was 400 years ago.

And it is paying nothing to anyone because this is a stunt label on funding some shared education departments.

However you were happy to use the example of children benefiting from the actions of their parents so when you dismiss my use of descendants I point at your words I was echoing.

Inheriting blame is extremely questionable and even more so if you insist it is valid because an organisation still exists from that time.

Other organisations no longer exist, does the blame evaporate with the organisations name?

Or is it in fact more appropriate to blame the operators of the time, if that even makes sense to retrospectively apply blame for legal activities. But then everyone would have to shut up because those personally involved are long since dead.

We're getting on to 200 years past abolition in the UK and this is some seriously cheesy hand wringing that bad things were acceptable in the past.

 

[RxR]

Let us try to name the proposed economic solution concept, since there may be definite and large enough profits to be made in at least one version of it.

 

[Hagar]

The fact that European seafaring nations Britain, Spain and France established a market for slaves on the African seaboards, they did not start the inter-tribal slave capturing and Arab slave traders supplying the ships. When Europe finally outlawed the passage of slaves, the slave trade did not desist and is probably provable to the present day.

It is important to stop slavery at all levels but this 'mea culpa' advertisement for the past does little to assist, in my view.

 

[Em3bbs]

Unfortunately modern slavery is still very rife in some communities in the UK. But let's not worry about dealing with that, let's worry about the things that were stopped years ago and where nobody involved is still alive.

 

[Nasher]

Useless comparison, the GU is not a descendant, it's the same organisation it was 400 years ago

It's the same building, that's about it. I doubt any part of the business is as it was 200 years ago.

The fact that European seafaring nations Britain, Spain and France established a market for slaves on the African seaboards, they did not start the inter-tribal slave capturing and Arab slave traders supplying the ships. When Europe finally outlawed the passage of slaves, the slave trade did not desist and is probably provable to the present day.

It is important to stop slavery at all levels but this 'mea culpa' advertisement for the past does little to assist, in my view.

Yep they were still selling their own people as slaves long after we outlawed it, and they were doing it long before we got there. If they want compo they should look there.

 

[Sutters]

As a Cornish person directly descended from Celt ancestors I demand repetitions for the genocide of my people by the Anglo Saxon, and also I want some cash from the Muslims up north for the Barbary slave trade which took my people as slaves.

Fortunately I'm Norman on my fathers side so I can pay it straight back to the Anglos.