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The General Politics Thread v2.0 (AKA the "Labour are Cunts" thread)


David

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Racking my brains as to where to put this (I could've sworn we had a history thread, would that be appropriate?) but as this is political, I need to tell you all to watch the new documentary on 'the troubles' on the iplayer, Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ff7cg0

A part of recent (and local) history that I will hold my hands up and admit I don't know enough about. Why it isn't taught on schools I don't know why (my eldest said they do it at GCSE level she's been told)

It's really well told, there are perspectives from all sides and I just feel it's an important watch if you have any interest in British and Irish politics. 

If anyone has any book (or articles/films/TV) recommendations on the subject, please do say as I'd like to learn more and feel free to split into a separate topic if you so wish.

I reckon this again shows why the BBC is quite often the absolute best when it comes to documentary making.

 

Edited by SuperBacon
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Spotlight On The Troubles was a 7 parter (I think) from the BBC that was brilliant. I’ll give this one a watch but I wonder if like their Hip Hop stuff, it’ll be saying anything they haven’t said before. 

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1 hour ago, SuperBacon said:

A part of recent (and local) history that I will hold my hands up and admit I don't know enough about. Why it isn't taught on schools I don't know why (my eldest said they do it at GCSE level she's been told)

The same reason that British schoolkids are very rarely taught about anything to do with the most significant thing the UK ever did politically, i.e. the British empire. Nothing about the Opium Wars, the Raj, the several hundred years of brutality towards the Irish, the arrogant and ham-fisted foundation of Israel via force instead of negotiation (resulting in the constant cycle of violence and reprisal we constantly see in the news), the Boer Wars and extensive use of concentration camps, the colonisation of a quarter of the globe and the pillage and murder that followed, and the post-imperial phenomenon of Neo-Colonialism in which the UK heartily participated in destabilising and continuing to impoverish various, emergent Third World countries - it's almost as if the establishment don't want people to know about it, because, if they did, they might not continue to keep voting the way they do. 

EDIT: Oh, and it's also given rise to a load of revisionists trying to distort that picture by referring to Britain's abolition of slavery and supposed "crusade" against it afterwards, completely ignoring the fact that the main driver of it was down to economics and imperialist competition, and completely ignoring the British empire's overall pattern of behaviour before and after it.

Edited by Carbomb
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27 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

the British empire

This isn't true anymore. All the history she has been taught this year has focused on the empire and their part in history.

She recently finished a module on Auschwitz and the teacher made sure to educate them that concentration camps had been used before, by the British, in previous wars.

Don't tell the Daily Mail though eh? I don't know if it's on the curriculum or her teacher just went a bit "rogue" with the lesson plan.

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1 minute ago, SuperBacon said:

This isn't true anymore. All the history she has been taught this year has focused on the empire and their part in history.

I am glad to hear this, but there's been decades of damage done. I'm aware it's not possible to teach everything, but there's just been so much glossed over, it's not surprising that people like Farage, Enoch Powell, Nick Griffin, and Colin Jordan were able to get traction for so long.

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2 hours ago, Carbomb said:

I'm aware it's not possible to teach everything, 

But it’s so “Top heavy” so to speak. Obviously at school level you can only do the “Highlights”, but it’s always kings and queens, upper class history and hardly ever working class history. 
 

We are all told, as you point out, how “Britain ended slavery” as if it was benevolence. We are taught about Wilberforce but not how Britain still profited from slavery long afterwards, or how workers in the Manchester cotton mills striked because they refused to handle slave picked cotton. 
 

Manchester has an abundance of working class history and museums. Obviously with the monarchy and parliament being in London you’ll have museums and attractions based on them, but I do wonder if it’s a north south divide thing as well?

Did you ever watch a BBC mini series about ending apartheid? It was years ago and started Johnny Lee Miller. It focused on how political arguments weren’t making headway in ending apartheid so they focused on economic opportunities to showcase to the Sith Ifrikins how they’d benefit from ending it. 

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Just now, Keith Houchen said:

But it’s so “Top heavy” so to speak. Obviously at school level you can only do the “Highlights”, but it’s always kings and queens, upper class history and hardly ever working class history. 
 

We are all told, as you point out, how “Britain ended slavery” as if it was benevolence. We are taught about Wilberforce but not how Britain still profited from slavery long afterwards, or how workers in the Manchester cotton mills striked because they refused to handle slave picked cotton.
 

Manchester has an abundance of working class history and museums. Obviously with the monarchy and parliament being in London you’ll have museums and attractions based on them, but I do wonder if it’s a north south divide thing as well?

Did you ever watch a BBC mini series about ending apartheid? It was years ago and started Johnny Lee Miller. It focused on how political arguments weren’t making headway in ending apartheid so they focused on economic opportunities to showcase to the Sith Ifrikins how they’d benefit from ending it. 

Absolutely, it's top-heavy. It's something my dad used to rant about a lot, as well, calling it "gossip history" - focusing on the excesses of the ruling classes as though they were the drivers of history, ignoring all the power complexes that backed them.

I didn't know that about the Manchester cotton mill workers - thanks for that. I would not be surprised if it's a consequence of the north/south divide. People go on about the Industrial Revolution benefiting us, but what's never really discussed is how, for the first couple of hundred years or so, it only really benefited the bosses and the establishment. We talk about the Luddites, but there's never really any detailed and honest discussion about them, because that would entail having to come to a conclusive statement that the working classes were simply collateral damage in Capital's evolution of wealth generation. 

All that time, the north had all the supposed trappings of investment and industry - factories, ports, you name it. Why is it, then, that the north was not only still poor, but also so precarious that it practically collapsed in post-Industrial Britain? Because all the wealth generated by the north was funnelled down south. The vast majority of wealthy owners didn't want to live in the north, they didn't want to spend their money in the north - they just wanted to harvest it from the north.

 

I didn't know about that mini-series, but it doesn't surprise me. What is not often discussed is how so many black South Africans are still poor because, despite Mandela's efforts (and there are arguments to say he sacrificed too much of the opportunity for re-distribution on the altar of reconciliation), nothing was done to remedy the systemic inequality created by colonial imperialism, and perpetuated and deepened by the West-enabled apartheid state. 

White South Africans are now better off than they've ever been, because now they're allowed to profit off blacks, Indians, and Cape coloured, whereas apartheid rules prevented them from doing business with them, limiting them just to big, lucrative deals with European and American corporates.

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There's a decent historical podcast called Empire. The presenters can be a bit childish at times. They started with the East India Company and I'm currently listening to them working through the Ottoman Empire. Worth a listen. The creation of Israel will also be covered.

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1 hour ago, Carbomb said:

 

I didn't know about that mini-series, but it doesn't surprise me

It was actually a film called Endgame. Not to be confused with the film of the same name released in the same year starring Kurt Angle. 

 

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I have a small collection of books on the subject that wasn't taught in school, and quite enjoyed episode 1 of the new BBC show. One thing that was touched on, but not explored in excessive detail, was just how discriminatory Northern Ireland was at the time. Between 1922 and the late 1960s the convention was that Northern Ireland wasn't even discussed at Westminster, so there was very little external oversight as to how the parliament at Stormont chose to govern. Discrimination against the Catholic minority was very much ingrained into the whole system, in employment, voting and housing. A frequently cited example of the latter being the Emily Beattie situation, where miraculously (or is it only Catholics that have miracles?) a 19 year old single Protestant woman was allocated a three bedroom council house all to herself despite entire Catholic families being far more in need of the house in question. That she happened to be the secretary of a Unionist politician was just sheer coincidence...

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Not sure how much of my input would be appreciated, but I'm a Head of History at a school in Oxfordshire. 

 

I'm looking at redoing our KS3 Schemes of Learning (again), but we are still straitjacketed by the National Curriculum and OFSTED; whilst the only thing we legally have to cover is the Holocaust, we still have to cover a lot of different things - nice and vague:

 

the development of Church and State in Medieval Britain

Church, state and society in the Renaissance

ideas, politics, power, industry and empire in Britain

Britain, Europe and the wider world in the 20th century

something outside of Europe.

 

We only get an hour a week at Y7/8, and two at Y9, so it's very difficult to miss stuff out - instead of cutting stuff, I've tried to include more awareness of racism etc. throughout the SoL - talking about the Black Tudors (from Miranda Kaufman's book) when analysing Elizabethan England, talking about the Empire's impact on indigenous people etc. I'd love to teach about the Troubles, but it's really difficult to find an even keel of stuff that are on both sides - same as when I tried to come up with lessons on the Israel/Palestine conflict. 

 

I try my best, though! 

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1 hour ago, SuperBacon said:

@Tamura any recommendations out of those books?

It's actually quite difficult as I don't have many that can really be considered a broad and perhaps more importantly complete overview, for example "The Irish Troubles" on the second shelf down is pretty comprehensive as far as it goes, but it was published in mid-1993 so only covers up to 1992. Although I don't own a copy "Northern Ireland: The Fragile Peace" by Feargal Cochrane was published in 2021 covers everything, gets good reviews and is available new and not too expensive. I've always found Peter Taylor's trilogy ("Provos: The IRA and Sinn Féin" from 1998, "Loyalists" from 1999 and "Brits" from 2001) to be excellent, but only if you're ok with them only going up to around the conventional end of the Troubles (Good Friday Agreement in 1998) and leaving the post-GFA stuff. "Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA" by Richard English (2003) and "A Secret History of the IRA" (2007 second edition would be the preferred option, not the 2003 first edition) by Ed Moloney are excellent, although as the titles suggest they obviously cover the IRA in more detail there's more than enough context to understand what's going on with the loyalists and British and Irish governments too. Did a quick check and all of those are available cheaply enough online from the usual marketplaces, they were also published on mass-market publishers so there's a better chance of them also being available at libraries too. On the loyalist side there's "Crimes of Loyalty: A History of the UDA" (2006) by Ian S. Wood and "UVF - The Endgame" (2007) by Jim Cusack and Henry McDonald, and "UDA: Inside the Heart of Loyalist Terror" (2004) by the same authors is good too (much cheaper on eBay than Amazon btw). Some are available in ebook too, I remember seeing the UVF was only £2.99 just now.

Edited by Tamura
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TV wise there's a four-part series on the latter half of the Troubles on iPlayer.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0f9ctf1/endgame-in-ireland

If you don't mind a somewhat illicit source there's a 10 episode Peter Taylor sister series to his Provos, Loyalists and Brits trilogy, search for "Provos" on The Pirate Bay.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUNc43ZM5vB1Vz2vmv2P-DA

That's a decent channel, good collection of documentaries.

 

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