Green Greed And Reparations

The Green Party has been making a lot of headlines recently, thanks to its charismatic but deeply stupid new leader Zack Polanski. One outlier poll even showed it in the lead, slightly ahead of Reform UK. I don’t put too much weight on that poll for various reasons, but there’s no doubt the Greens have broken out of their traditional strongholds of Brighton and Bristol to become a national political force.

In many ways this is deeply unfortunate, because while many people still see the Greens as a party of cuddly Save The Whales activists in sandals and badly knitted pullovers, the reality is that they’re far-left extremists who are promoting a wide range of dangerous, and often frankly insane, policies. If they were to end up in government, either alone or as part of a coalition, it would be a disaster for Britain.

One reason the Greens are so dangerous is that they can’t see a passing bandwagon without feeling compelled to jump aboard. You name it; if it attracts hordes of frothing far-left nutters, the Greens will get involved. They want open borders, with anyone from anywhere in the world allowed to come here and have the rights to vote and claim benefits from the day they arrive. They want to legalise methamphetamine and crack cocaine. They want to make date rape drug GHB available “for recreational purposes” (no, I am not joking).

And now they’ve embraced the lunatic demand for Britain to pay trillions of pounds in “reparations” for slavery.

In case you haven’t heard of this nonsense before, what’s happening is that various former colonies - mostly in the Caribbean - are agitating for vast sums of money to compensate them for the historic evil of slavery. A minor argument against this is that it’s unfair for British people who never owned slaves to pay huge handouts to people who never were slaves. A major argument against it is that the whole thing is ahistorical rubbish.

It’s certainly true that many British people were involved in the slave trade. Well, so what? At the time, people from everywhere were involved in the slave trade. Every civilisation in human history has, for at least part of its existence, practiced slavery. Slavery is described in the Torah. It’s described in the New Testament. It’s described in the Koran. Moses owned slaves. Mohammed owned slaves. The ancient Greeks and Romans owned slaves. Slaves built Egypt’s pyramids, and watered the steps of the Aztec pyramids with their blood. Slavery was everywhere, and nobody except some (not all) of the slaves themselves thought it was wrong.

If you have an image of British (and French, and Spanish, and Belgian, and Portuguese, and… well everyone’s) slavers running round the African jungle with a big net, catching people to be shipped to America, think again. Most early European explorers were terrified of the African interior, which had a well-deserved reputation for a horrible climate, dangerous wildlife and, most of all, disease. An old sailors’ ditty about the Bight of Benin in West Africa sums up everyone’s feelings about the area:

Beware and take care of the Bight of Benin,

There’s one comes out for forty goes in.

Luckily for them, European traders didn’t need to hunt slaves in the African interior. When they first reached the area they found it already had huge, thriving slave markets. Well, of course it did - because Africans had been selling each other in large numbers for centuries. European traders only bought what Africans were already selling, and let’s be brutally honest about this: African slaves were much better off being shipped to Jamaica or South Carolina than marched along the Hyena Road to an unspeakable fate in the harems and rowing galleys of the Middle East.

And there’s even more to the story. Not only is Britain not uniquely to blame for the undeniable crimes of the slave trade; we are uniquely responsible for ending it. This country was the first to develop a real abolitionist movement, which started to gain political power in the late 18th century. In fact slavery had disappeared in Britain itself by the 12th century; the new abolitionist movement had the much loftier and more ambitious goal of stamping it out everywhere. British participation in the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in 1807. A year later the Royal Navy formed the West Africa Squadron, which for the next 59 years patrolled the slave coast, intercepting suspect ships and freeing an estimated 150,000 abducted Africans from slavery. Almost 1,600 men of the Squadron died carrying out this mission, mostly of disease. Finally, in 1833, the British government bought every single slave in the British Empire, freed them all and completely banned the institution of slavery throughout the Empire.

Britain’s decades-long (and ruinously expensive - we didn’t finish paying off the costs until 2015) crusade against slavery faced plenty of opposition. Other European nations, and several former colonies in South America (Brazil was a particularly stubborn supporter of the trade) pushed back against what they saw as Britain’s arrogance and bullying.

The British Empire, of course, didn’t care what anyone else thought. Once slavery had been stamped out within the Empire itself, the Imperial centre used every lever at its disposal to pressure other countries into ending it too. Favourable trade terms were made conditional on ending slavery. Economic pressure and sanctions - even outright blockades - were used against holdouts. Ultimately, if those didn’t work, the Empire had no qualms about using force to eradicate the vile trade.

And that brings us back to the Green party.

Like any far-left group the Greens include a multitude of special interest groups and extremist factions, and one of these is the Global Majority Greens. This appears to be a group of anti-white lunatics, and naturally it has a “Spokesperson on Reparations” who wants Britain to shell out trillions to people in the third world over crimes someone else committed against their ancestors centuries ago. This spokesperson is Antoinette Fernandez, who despite her Franco-Spanish name is Nigerian. She’s an upper-class Nigerian, too; her father was a multimillionaire businessman and the country’s ambassador to the UN, and she’s actually descended from Nigerian royalty. Nevertheless, she feels hard done to by the British Empire, and a couple of years ago she decided to have a good whine about it on Twitter:

The first thing I have to say is that what Fernandez claims here is absolutely true: The Royal Navy did threaten to bombard Lagos unless Oba Dosumnu signed a treaty that turned his kingdom into a protectorate of the British Empire. Dosumnu signed on 6 August 1861; he was allowed to remain on his throne, but from then until the territory’s absorption into the larger protectorate of Southern Nigeria in 1906, the Obas of Lagos ruled under British guidance and in accordance with British law. The 1861 treaty effectively ended Lagos’s independence.

So Fernandez is telling the truth but, naturally, she isn’t telling the whole truth. What she neglected to mention is why Royal Navy gunboats showed up off Lagos and threatened to flatten it unless the Oba accepted British rule. Awkwardly, it’s because Lagos had entered the slave trade in a big way in the early 18th century and, by the 1840s, had some of the largest slave markets in West Africa. The British Empire had become increasingly unhappy about this over the course of several decades, culminating in the 1851 Reduction of Lagos. On that occasion a naval squadron did bombard the city, deposing Oba Kosoko and replacing him with Dosumnu’s father Akitoye. However, even that wasn’t enough to eradicate the trade from Lagos and the territory it controlled. The 1861 intervention was a different matter. After the annexation of Lagos the kingdom’s people came under the full protection of British law - and in the mid-19th century, with the Empire at its height, this was powerful protection indeed. It would be a very unwise slaver who tried capturing and selling British subjects, because Britain was likely to show its displeasure in a fairly physical way. “Gunboat diplomacy” was a very real thing in the 19th century, and this country was the master of it.

Of course, Fernandez knows all this. She isn’t stupid - just greedy and dishonest. She is fully aware that Britain deposed her great great grandfather as part of our campaign to wipe out the slave trade. She just… doesn’t care. All that matters to her is that the nasty British shut down her family’s lucrative slavery racket, and now she thinks we should pay for it.

This is the sort of people who run the Greens now. They have no coherent political ideology; the same party embraces both extreme interpretations of gender ideology and fundamentalist Islam, whose followers would quite happily throw all the gender ideologues off a roof. To the Greens, that doesn’t matter. They have no grand plan to fix all the things that are wrong with our poor suffering country. What they have instead is a huge bag of grievances and nutty ideas, and the only reason they want power is so the party’s many factions can each inflict its own brand of insanity on us. Whether it’s open borders, rape drugs or deliberate poverty, they’ll just keep pushing through crazy new laws until the whole mess collapses into infighting and disaster.

The Greens aren’t just misguided or incompetent: They are actively dangerous. This demented party must not get into government - because, if they do, Britain will not survive the experience.

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