The shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, says his family history as descendants of enslaved people will inform his work in government, as he seeks to deepen the UK’s relations with the global south and the Commonwealth.
“I will take the responsibility of being the first foreign secretary descended from the slave trade incredibly seriously,”
Given history we’re all descendants of the slave trade – both sides of it.
It’s as with all Europeans being 15th cousins or whatever it is, all humans being 17th etc.
A Labour government full of cunts like Lammy, Abbott , Reeves, Dodds, Streeting (cont p 94).
God helps us…….
“He said he would use his personal past to help solve the problems of today such as war, humanitarian crises and the climate crisis…”
Now look here, Putin, I was deserted by my Dad, served as a boy chorister in Peterborough, and was a Californian attorney….
Someone please make it stop.
Why is every politician these days a fucking moron ?
Who is he trying to impress ?
It’s like that red bearded dwarf who was FS and his ethical foreign policy. He soon came up against cold harsh reality.
Don’t rely on genealogical judgments from someone who thinks Henry VII succeeded Henry VIII.
“Don’t rely on genealogical judgments from someone who thinks Henry VII succeeded Henry VIII.”
Rhoda, are you sure that wasn’t Rachel Reeves? She’s good with numbers…
Anyway, he’d better give up on playing the race card or he’ll be in trouble with that Mississippi boat card sharp gambler of race card playing, Lady Abbott
tl;dr: ” F*ck you whitey!”
Rhoda: didn’t he also confuse Marie Pasteur with Marie Antoinette?
This sort of shit really needs to be taken to task. Someone needs to ask him ‘How? Seriously, How?’
It’s all so tiresome.
“… will inform his work …”
First time for everything.
BiP: ’Someone needs to ask him ‘How? Seriously, How?’
Don’t expect any of our ‘journalists’ to do so…
descended from the slave trade
What a retard.
I’m descended from human beings.
Grist
It was indeed Lammy
TMB
Marie Curie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsR4Nx-ELgc
🙂
Thanks PF – the bit that stuck in my memory was the notion that “Antoinette” might have been a surname.
Not only is he preternaturally thick, but he also lacks the tiniest modicum of self-knowledge that would have prevented him revealing it on television (and YouTube).
Steve @ 10.47.
There’s a very good chance that if his ancestors hadn’t been taken as slaves he either:
a) Wouldn’t exist.
b) Wouldn’t be here in the UK.
“I’m glad my great Grandpappy got on the boat”.
C.M. Clay.
He may have hated the white devil, but at least he was honest unlike all the other black race baiting hustlers.
“but he also lacks the tiniest modicum of self-knowledge that would have prevented him revealing it on television”
Yes, exactly that, more than anything. Most people would be savvy enough to say no to the opportunity, unless they were particularly confident.
Getting into your heritage beyond 3 or maybe 4 generations strikes me as an unserious thing. Bad stuff can still have after-effects, but within 3 generations, it’s pretty much gone.
Like, my father briefly lived through WW2, and how he lived after was affected by that (doing national service, an interest in serving, watching post-war institutions being created like the UN). I was reading Commando magazine as a boy, making Airfix Spitfires, had stories from masters at school who had served. But it feels like it’s all gone. It means as much to kids today as the Napoleonic wars did to me.
Taking this “incredibly seriously” to a country that abolished serfdom back in the 16th century? Like what the actual fuck. Do you want to get involved in regulating the silk stocking and chandlery industries? The safety of muskets?
It’s like that red bearded dwarf who was FS and his ethical foreign policy. He soon came up against cold harsh reality.
So ethical he dumped his wife for a younger model and only when the News of the Screws informed him they’d be publishing the story.
WB
This is something where I always disagreed withn Enoch Powell.
He insisted that “we are the same people who fought Napoleon” ( or something, might have been Trafalgar he was talking about ). Well yes, that is true – but I agree with you that once a generation has passed then that is it.
“Sins of the fathers” and all that. The present generation of Germans or Japanese are not guilty of what the 1933-45 mob did, but they must not forget that it happened. Same with slavery ( for instance ) – it is morally abhorrent to us and it nis good that we are reminded that it happened so that it does not happen again, but it is nothing to do with us.
““I’m glad my great Grandpappy got on the boat”.
C.M. Clay.”
Even as a slave, he’d probably have lived no worse than when he was back home.
I have no doubt that there were sadistic slave owners who also liked to rape the girls, but how common was that compared to owners who just wanted the cotton picked and wanted a well-motivated workforce to do it? How commonly did owners force themselves on the girls, rather than the girls being attracted to rich, powerful men?
We just don’t know, but the way I look at the media today, it always cherry picks the worst cases and then exaggerates them. And history never puts into context the alternative. Like the GWR factory was pretty dangerous in the late 19th century but it meant getting better fed than living in the villages around Swindon.
Most people who got free in the 1850s were going to be doing what else, exactly? Right, picking cotton as free men. They wouldn’t have been a whole lot richer than a slave. Which leads me to conclude that the people who left were either people who were working for sadists, or the people who had a lot of ambition.
Very fun part of this collection:
https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/
Ex-slaves all interviewed in hte 1930s insisting that the 1870s and 1880s were a lower standard – physically – of living than the 1850s.
“to a country that abolished serfdom back in the 16th century” Since nobody had met a serf in generations they tidied up the law. Well done them.
Serfdom seems, in reality, largely to have abolished itself in the generations after the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt.
Abolishing slavery – that was different. The Normans did that consciously and deliberately.
I’ve sometimes wondered when slavery was abolished in Ireland but have had no success in googling for it.
“ all Europeans being 15th cousins or whatever it is”
Is that actually true, or is it mathematics based on assuming that all our ancestors are distinct (I.e, that we each have 16 different great-great grandparents, etc.)?
I’d have thought assortative mating and geography would have meant there were probably still groups of people with no common human ancestor (unless you want to count Adam & Eve or Noah).
Good news for sure.
He’ll be stopping all foreign aid to those slave states in Africa and diverting the funds to the Indian space programme. And refusing to return those Benin bronzes. As for the Elgin marbles, Greece had slavery too.
Addolff – We are considerably poorer for having David Lammy in our society though.
So I hate slavery.
Ottokring,
““Sins of the fathers” and all that. The present generation of Germans or Japanese are not guilty of what the 1933-45 mob did, but they must not forget that it happened. Same with slavery ( for instance ) – it is morally abhorrent to us and it nis good that we are reminded that it happened so that it does not happen again, but it is nothing to do with us.”
It’s not going to happen again, because the incentives have changed. It’s a waste of time sending kids to visit Auschwitz, because well, why is some German going to bother invading Poland? WW2 was about Germans with empty bellies wanting to be fed better, so, you invade Poland, you remove who is on a nice bit of land, and you start farming on it instead. It’s worth you, as a citizen, paying some SS guys a lot of money to kill civilians.
Once you get lots of inorganic fertilisers, farm machinery, efficient transportation of food, everyone has reasonably full bellies. At which point, people generally would rather not go killing civilians. Which is why across the world, war barely exists now. Nicking agricultural land isn’t worth the cost.
And slavery is the same. It isn’t worth feeding and housing 100 people compared to a cotton picking machine now. We also all got rich enough as a society that we would object to buying goods made with slave labour and would rather pay more for goods made by employees. Same as how we no longer consider children working at 12 to be moral, where we did 150 years ago.
Does he know this for a fact?
It would be amusing if, like black lefty tv motormouth Sunny Hostin or black marxist professor Angela Davis, he was to discover that his ancestors were in fact the owners – not the slaves.
“I’ve sometimes wondered when slavery was abolished in Ireland but have had no success in googling for it.”
It would not have been while the Muslims were still buying them – Dublin was founded as a slave market.
@RichardT – “Is that actually true, or is it mathematics”
It started with mathematics. You can read the paper at http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/NatureCommonAncestors-Article.pdf
Since then, various genetic studies have been done which show that there is a very substantial effect. For example, this one says “We find that even geographically distant Europeans share ubiquitous common ancestry within the past 1,000 years”
(https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001555)
Once you get lots of inorganic fertilisers, farm machinery, efficient transportation of food, everyone has reasonably full bellies. At which point, people generally would rather not go killing civilians.
The very things that the WEF and net zero crowd are trying to ban, because polar bears.
A cynic might suggest that they’re doing it to make food scarce and hence make people fight to reduce the population…