Give you a sample. Today’s e-mail from Unherd promotes: Taylor Swift is our feudal princessBillionaire glitz blinds us to inequality – Mary Harrington
Really? Does it? On which planet?. Still. Managed to get Taylor Swift & inequality in consecutive sentences. How much was that worth to the Harrington bank balance?
For some time now, I’ve been questioning whether the abolition of slavery was useful.
What did the British people get out of it? Loads of taxpayers’ money paid to slave owners (for which we are now blamed)? Further cost in terms of lives lost and money spent patrolling the water? We, the first nation to attempt anything of this kind, are also the first nation at the top of the ‘reparations’ list.
Might as well not have bothered 200 years ago, found ourselves now in the same group as any other Western Nation, and none of that cost would have had to have been paid.
In short, from the perspective of the British people whose government ought to be advancing their interests, what was useful about the Abol of slavery?
I see your point. On the other hand once enough of the population has had a religious awakening and decided that slavery is intolerable it was a pretty decent performance to abolish it without the likes of the American Civil War and the later unpleasantnesses.
The value of eternal salvation is greater than all the money in the world. So, to Evangelical Christians, or even the CofE, the price paid for the abolition of slavery is worth it N times over.
If you think that we should provide old age pensions for those too old to work or disability grants to those unable to do so or Motability Scooters or Job Seekers’ Allowance for those searching for work then the relatively small cost of abolishing slavery was well worth it.
That’s an interesting counterfactual being proposed. Suppose that in the early 19th century the British government had simply said to the colonies:
1) We won’t buy your stuff if it’s made with slave labour
2) You can’t buy our stuff either
3) If you have a slave rebellion we won’t help. You’re independent now.
4) We’ll still patrol the Atlantic to prevent the trade in new slaves, ‘cos it disgusts us.
We’d be in a rather different place today.
Or just sit on our hands and don’t be evangelical.
ISTM that running through public life in this country are these strains, first of puritanism, then of evangelism, then of progressivism and then of socialism. And they’ve ended up intertwined and coded into elite politics and culture as DNA, so that government ends up as a supposedly moral, or crusading, project.
Which is why Blairites – from the man himself, down through Callmedave, and so on – routinely say of x ‘It is right that we do x’.
I think we should just stop white-knighting. Government ought to be amoral, not evangelising.
And we should let naval captains sell the booty they plunder from captured ships.
Theophrastus
11 days ago
Depends on your definition of ‘evangelical’. There are evangelical protestant sects, there are evangelical Anglicans (generally low but also high Church) and evangelical Roman Catholics. Being ‘evangelical’ is a rather vague mode of operation, not a doctrine.
Tim Montgomerie is an evangelical Anglican. Paul Marshall is an interesting fish: apparently radicalised by Brexit, he has moved from the Lib Dems (former advisor to Charles Kennedy) to the Conservatives and then to be an ally of Reform UK at GB News but not at the Spectator or Unherd…
If you read Unherd it is evangelical. It’s just more of the religion of university grads telling us what we should think..
Give you a sample. Today’s e-mail from Unherd promotes:
Taylor Swift is our feudal princess Billionaire glitz blinds us to inequality – Mary Harrington
Really? Does it? On which planet?. Still. Managed to get Taylor Swift & inequality in consecutive sentences. How much was that worth to the Harrington bank balance?
Mary Harrington is cuckoo…
The evangelicals – with the Quakers – abolished slavery. Have they done anything useful since then?
For some time now, I’ve been questioning whether the abolition of slavery was useful.
What did the British people get out of it? Loads of taxpayers’ money paid to slave owners (for which we are now blamed)? Further cost in terms of lives lost and money spent patrolling the water? We, the first nation to attempt anything of this kind, are also the first nation at the top of the ‘reparations’ list.
Might as well not have bothered 200 years ago, found ourselves now in the same group as any other Western Nation, and none of that cost would have had to have been paid.
In short, from the perspective of the British people whose government ought to be advancing their interests, what was useful about the Abol of slavery?
I see your point. On the other hand once enough of the population has had a religious awakening and decided that slavery is intolerable it was a pretty decent performance to abolish it without the likes of the American Civil War and the later unpleasantnesses.
The value of eternal salvation is greater than all the money in the world. So, to Evangelical Christians, or even the CofE, the price paid for the abolition of slavery is worth it N times over.
If you think that we should provide old age pensions for those too old to work or disability grants to those unable to do so or Motability Scooters or Job Seekers’ Allowance for those searching for work then the relatively small cost of abolishing slavery was well worth it.
That’s an interesting counterfactual being proposed. Suppose that in the early 19th century the British government had simply said to the colonies:
1) We won’t buy your stuff if it’s made with slave labour
2) You can’t buy our stuff either
3) If you have a slave rebellion we won’t help. You’re independent now.
4) We’ll still patrol the Atlantic to prevent the trade in new slaves, ‘cos it disgusts us.
We’d be in a rather different place today.
Or just sit on our hands and don’t be evangelical.
ISTM that running through public life in this country are these strains, first of puritanism, then of evangelism, then of progressivism and then of socialism. And they’ve ended up intertwined and coded into elite politics and culture as DNA, so that government ends up as a supposedly moral, or crusading, project.
Which is why Blairites – from the man himself, down through Callmedave, and so on – routinely say of x ‘It is right that we do x’.
I think we should just stop white-knighting. Government ought to be amoral, not evangelising.
And we should let naval captains sell the booty they plunder from captured ships.
Depends on your definition of ‘evangelical’. There are evangelical protestant sects, there are evangelical Anglicans (generally low but also high Church) and evangelical Roman Catholics. Being ‘evangelical’ is a rather vague mode of operation, not a doctrine.
Tim Montgomerie is an evangelical Anglican. Paul Marshall is an interesting fish: apparently radicalised by Brexit, he has moved from the Lib Dems (former advisor to Charles Kennedy) to the Conservatives and then to be an ally of Reform UK at GB News but not at the Spectator or Unherd…
His son Winston is based, and has an intelligent channel on YT.