Injustice

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Most people would think that the Financial Times is the organ of the Establishment. They would be wrong, and I would encourage people to give it the break that all good journalism deserves. The fact is that it's strapline: "Without Fear & Without Favour" holds pretty much true - that it's notionally-intended readership is largely the privileged and wealthy bothers me not a jot, because it will always hold the Establishment and its government to book, and does so on a weekly, if not daily basis.

The reason I bring this up is a particularly fine triple book review in this weekend's paper, centring on this country's woeful dealing with slavery and it's part in it. I live in a part of North Wales that was and still is, to an extent, owned and controlled by the descendants of English slaveowners, whose fortunes were made, not just on the backs of the enslaved, but from the noisome reparations made to them for 'loss of property' when that hideous trade was legislated against in 1833.

Since then, we have paid the estates of those slavers the stupendous sum of around £17 billion; those payments only ceasing in very recent years. The illustration above heads the article. It is an image with which we are all only too familiar - Jane & I both agree that it is one of the most obscene images that we know of, and it is to the shame of us all, but particularly to this government which refuses point-blank to contextualise the history of the ruling classes and make true and appropriate reparations to the victims of slavery. If, dear reader you don't mind, I'll repost my poem prompted  by recent events and the Black Lives Matter movement. It seems appropriate.


Shame

shame stains

                   deep

                   and long

                   the colour of pain

                   and estrangement

                   the colour of not belonging

                   the colour of not wanting

                   the colour of hating

                   the

                   not you

                   the colour of falsity

                   the colour of lies

                   the colour of power

                   over

                   the

                   power-less

                   the colour of

                   lost

                   hope

                   the

                   colour

                   of

                   shame


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