A Sorrier Britishness

Following a report by unelected academics, Glasgow authorities have acknowledged and apologised for the intimate connections between the city and the profits of woke-free pluck and gumption. At least eleven buildings and eight monuments are connected to people involved in the Atlantic slave trade; and no less than sixty-two streets are named after entrepreneurs who utilised slave labour to grow an addictive carcinogen for profit, possibly without even the redeeming modern practice of selling the poison back to the slaves. The Agence France-Presse report refers optimistically to Britain's increasing reckoning with its colonial legacy, and it is to be hoped that the Glaswegian example will encourage further reassessment. Unlike the English, who famously had no significant involvement in the slave trade other than a world-beating abolition, it appears that lesser Britons were in it up to their necks.