A village is named after him – oh dear, what to do …

A little-noticed story made it into the DT at the weekend. It has now been picked up by the Times and the DM. It demonstrates the waste of time and resources of local councils bent on eradicating the history of our country, allegedly littered with slave owners or those who are alleged to have supported or ‘profited’ from slavery. The historical facts are totally irrelevant – if they’re even known by those who see ‘institutional racism’ everywhere they look.

To start with and for background, one other report caught my eye. It ‘s always good to know that one’s gut feelings are spot on. After all, nowadays we’re supposed to keep quiet unless ‘Teh Science’ has spoken. The DM writes:

“One in three young people believe those who disagree with them on politics must be factually wrong, a study suggests. […] The report was based on analysis of polls and focus groups involving 10,000 people between February 2020 and early this year. It concluded that young people were not being taught enough about the importance of respect for others’ opinions at school and university.” (link)

I suggest that the young people who believe that those who disagree with them are simply wrong were taught by their elders that this is the cease. These ‘elders’ sit in local and government offices and are, as we’ve noticed, hell-bent on inflicting Wokery on all areas of public life. The vehicle is the BLM-driven ‘anti-slavery’ campaign. Institutions from universities to museums to historical trusts and local communities have been going through any biography of any statue to ‘prove’ that every historical figure of renown since the discovery of the Americas was a slave owner or supporter of slavery. They all must be toppled from their pedestals, literally to metaphorically.

Nearly a year ago – while we were in the grip of that 2nd wave lockdown – the Welsh government, a Labour fiefdom since devolution in 1999, undertook their virtue-signalling exercise. They:

“spent more than £17,000 on an audit of almost 600 statues, buildings and street names to examine their links to slavery.The report by the Labour-led administration identified 209 monuments, buildings or street names commemorating people ‘who were directly involved with slavery and the slave trade, or opposed its abolition’.” (link)

It took until now for some diligent writer at the DT to have a look at that report. The Times and DM duly copied that article for their editions this morning. Please do not ingest any beverages now – I won’t be held responsible when you splutter all over your keyboards or PC screens!

To my amazement this Welsh audit has now ‘proven’ that a whole Welsh village is tainted by slavery! This village has the name ‘Nelson’. According to that audit is was named after the Admiral – even though it wasn’t. Admiral Nelson is, according to BLM activists, a horrible man because one letter was found where he wasn’t quite as explicitly anti-slavery as they would wish. Never mind that this letter is open to interpretation – he’s tainted and he must be besmirched.

As for that Welsh village – you really couldn’t make it up! The village was named after an inn which was the only building in that area at the time. Lord Nelson spent the night there in 1803 and so, in the then usual fashion, the inn was named after him. Once coal pits were opened and a railway was built, the place expanded and took its English name from the pub. Some ‘celebration’ of slavery, innit! Here’s the ‘official’ reason for those Labour government employees to put the whole village on their list as ‘problematical’:

“Although the admiral never took part in slave activities, he expressed support for slave owners – believing that abolition would undermine the Royal Navy, which depended on merchant crew in wartime.” (link)

The accusation is based on one (!) letter Lord Nelson wrote. We remember, do we not, that Nelson died at Trafalgar in 1805, at a time when the Parliamentarians – all white UK gentlemen, let’s not forget! – had not yet got the Abolition Laws on the statute books.  That happened in 1822. There was also that insignificant event of the Napoleonic Wars, but who cares about that now! No, “Lord Nelson is listed in the dossier as he is viewed as a figure who “opposed abolition of the slave trade or slavery”. (link, paywalled)

Clearly, any historical figure who didn’t support Wilberforce from the get-go has to be a supporter of slavery and must be condemned – by people with scant knowledge of history but with a proper political attitude, taking the knee metaphorically:

“Documents from the Labour-led council use a traffic-light system of “culpability” for historic figures with places named after them, from red to green, with sites related to Lord Nelson listed in the amber category, which denotes ambiguous blame for the slave trade. Lord Nelson, hailed as a national hero after being killed aboard HMS Victory in 1805, is among the historical figures listed in the dossier because they “opposed abolition of the slave trade or slavery”. With his level of culpability established in the dossier, officials who compiled the list note that there are “no street names but a village named Nelson in the Caerphilly area”. (paywalled link)

It’s these wokeists who ‘establish levels of culpability’, just like that. Of course there’s one way out open to the Welsh. This village can show they didn’t mean it by simply using the Welsh name, Ffos y Gerddinen (link). If you want to know what that name stands for, go here.

There’s one other historical figure, contemporaneous with Lord Nelson, in the crosshairs of the BLM acolytes in Wales and of course in England – the 1st Duke of Wellington. Naturally, that attracted my attention no end! However, this is going to be tricky for the BLM lot because the Iron Duke insisted that anti-slavery legislation was put in place when Spain asked him to help setting up their constitution after he’d defeated Napoleon and driven the French out of Spain.

It’s also tricky because of the many statues of him scattered across the country, and of the many pubs with “Wellington” in their names and it’ll be very tricky indeed because of his own words during an exchange in the House of Lords in 1833 as documented in Hansard:

“With respect to not being friendly to the abolition, he [Duke Wellington] wished to say that he had done more in the way of negotiation, written more notes, and entered into more treaties on the subject of the abolition of the slave trade, and of putting an end to slavery than any man living.” (link)

It is an interesting exchange, demonstrating that there’s quite a political tradition of what today we’d call ‘taking the knee’ – even amongst the noble lords sitting in the HoL at that time. 

I leave you with this puzzle which none of our wokeists can answer: if the name ‘Nelson’ now means one supports slavery – I can be as sweeping as any wokeist! – then Nelson Mandela must have supported slavery, correct? Or is it one ‘rule of names’ for us and one for the wokeists? Intriguing …

KBO