As the Edinburgh Slavery and Colonialism Review Group hits the headlines again for the possible targeting of Rabbie Burns, it’s worth asking what this strange obsession with slavery is all about.
Burns may be targeted because he accepted a job on a Jamaican plantation, although he didn’t take up the post, and the commission is searching for anyone and everyone who may have had a connection with slavery. More statues could be pulled down depending upon the review group’s findings.
Of course, none of the individuals being targeted for their connection with slavery are alive today; this is about people who lived two or three hundred years ago. There is no new campaign to bring back slavery; indeed I suspect if you found anyone in Scotland who said they were in favour of slavery, they would be in an asylum.
The very idea of buying and selling people is so alien to us it raises serious questions about what on earth has this new obsession with slavery got to do with anyone or anything today.
Reading the blurb for this slavery review group we find talk of the need to “rectify the glorification of slavery” despite the reality that not a single human being in Scotland does this.
Sir Geoff Palmer, chair of the group said the aim was for “fairness and justice to all”. But what does this mean? Who is being unfairly treated or not receiving justice?
Edinburgh council leader Adam McVey argues that we have a responsibility to face up to the city’s past. If by this he means opposing slavery, it’s worth bearing in mind that slavery was abolished across the UK more than 200 years ago.
But this is not what he means; neither he nor the review group are actually talking about slavery, or any support for slavery. They’re talking about the sensibility expressed by the Black Lives Matter movement that “shone a bright light” that highlighted possible “exclusions” that might exist in Edinburgh.
The language here is convoluted, and I suspect, largely meaningless to most people, regardless of the colour of their skin. But McVey elaborates, explaining that it is “about people who live here now and their experience”.
The key expression here is that of “experience”, not the experience of any real injustice in housing provision, exclusion from the workplace or police brutality in the here and now, but the new imagined and constructed injustice of the harm created, the “feeling” some people supposedly have when they walk past an old slave-related statue.
“It’s important that we listen to and act upon the views of the BAME community,” says deputy council leader Cammy Day. But is this really what ordinary black people in Scotland worry about? And who is the BAME community? Do all none-white people think and feel the same way, or is this a new type of racial stereotyping?
What we are witnessing here is a new and very strange type of governing, what could be called governing through emotion.
Increasingly we find this governing through emotion is being adopted in society. Trigger warnings, where students are warned about the potentially harmful content in university modules, is a good example of this. The statue question in many respects is about trigger warnings in public places and the apparent need to protect people from being hurt by inanimate objects, the need to turn streets into a "safe space".
Not very long ago this idea that we need to protect people from words and objects would have been seen as backward and infantile. Today our immature elites are to be found taking the knee or even celebrating this childlike performance that has replaced rational and serious politics.
Unable to make history in the here and now, the authorities and the modern-day activists are left searching for a sense of virtue that is found through the tragic, philistine and emotivist destruction of the past.
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