Your blog, nouslife.blogspot.com, is worth $35,566.02How Much is Your Blog Worth at Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities Weblog
Plans are being made for the Queen to meet survivors of the Virginia Tech shootings during an official state visit to the US next week, according to reports last night.. Why is the British monarch visiting Virginia? Well, I'm told that Virginia never concluded a treaty with Britain at the end of the war of independence and so technically is still claimed, arguably, as a British sovereign territory. So, of course, she wants to comfort her subjects :-p
One doesn’t have to be on the pastors’ conference circuit long to figure out that prime-time clergy (ages forty to fifty-five), are marinated in this kind of thinking. They have been told repeatedly that this is the only leadership model that will ensure success. (And make no mistake: in new millennium America, success equals the greatest number of seats filled on Sunday morning.) Theirs is a mono-vocal, mono-vision world—one that affords the most uniformity and thus the most control. It is a world of hyperpragmatics where the ends (church growth) can justify the most dehumanizing of processes.
Yes, I endorse the Appeal for the Establishment of a Parliamentary Assembly at the United Nations
I find myself constantly making caveats when I call myself an Evangelical to separate myself from a whole segment of the religious right. I might be an Evangelical in the tradition of John Stott or Mark Noll, but increasingly I feel like they’re in the minority. Maybe I should stop calling myself an Evangelical and just say that I generally have an Evangelical understanding of doctrine, but I don’t subscribe to much of the baggage that comes
Friends of the Earth has just analysed the manifesto of the Scottish Conservatives and given it nought out of 10. That is an even worse result than the analysis of the Conservative party's voting record in the European Parliament - where much environmental law is determined - at the time of the 2004 elections. The Tories were not just the least green party in Britain, but the least green in the whole of Europe. At local level, Conservative councils are simply not heeding Cameron's green call. Even in his own constituency, the Tory West Oxfordshire council is cutting its recycling budget, despite having one of the worst recycling rates in the country. Tory Swale council is holding up the wind farm in the Thames estuary that would provide 1% of all the UK's electricity needs.
Cosmic ordering, a belief that an individual can use his or her own desires to "connect with the cosmos" and bring them to reality,
The connection between human play and God’s creativity is significant for consideration of play as it is manifest at Burning Man. Theologians need not abandon the notion that something is dreadfully wrong with human beings as recorded in the biblical story and as evidenced by humanity’s devastating actions against themselves, nature, and Creator, but this aspect of the biblical narrative might be held in tension in contrast with the notion of co-creatorship so that a theology of play as an aspect of creativity of the imago Dei can be explored.
"Many heavy drinkers mistakenly believe that their behaviour is more common than it actually is," Dr. Wild said. "By seeing how their alcohol use compares to actual population norms, this can motivate heavy drinkers to re-evaluate their use of alcohol."
Baghdad is under pressure from Britain and the US to pass an oil law which would hand long-term control of Iraq's energy assets to foreign multinationals, according to campaigners.
Those of us who want a world parliament are often accused of trying to invent a system of global governance. But there is already a system of global governance. The UN Security Council, the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation make decisions which affect us all. They do so without our consent.
No political issue now stops at the national border. All the most important forces – climate change, terrorism, state aggression, trade, flows of money, demographic pressures, the depletion of resources – can be addressed only at the global level. The question is not whether global decisions need to be made. The question is how to ensure that they are made democratically. Is there any valid answer other than direct representation?
The purpose of a world parliament is to hold the international bodies to account. It is not a panacea. It will not turn the IMF or the UN Security Council into democratic bodies: as they are controlled by the veto powers of their major shareholder and permanent members, nothing but abolition and reconstruction could do so. But it does have the potential to impose a check on them. It wields no army, no police force, no weapons, no ready-made powers. Instead, it possesses something that none of the other global bodies have: legitimacy.
A new analysis by the Local Government Association suggests that the 144 councils that collect household rubbish one week and food waste the next are managing to recycle or compost almost a third of what they pick up (30%). That compares with 23% among the authorities that are not using the new system.
THE FIRST state-funded interfaith schools in Britain could open within three years.
At the heart of the controversy over Mr Chalke’s views was his rejection of one understanding of penal substitutionary atonement as “a vengeful father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed”. He wrote: “The fact is that the cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse. Understandably, both people inside and outside of the Church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith.”
His book was denounced by the principal-elect of Oak Hill College, the Revd Mike Ovey, and two of his students, Steve Jeffery and Andrew Sach, in a response, Pierced for our Transgressions: Rediscovering the glory of penal substitution (IVP, 2007).
... Dr Wright says: “What has happened since the initial flurry of the debate about The Lost Message of Jesus has looked, frankly, like a witch-hunt, with people playing the guilt-by-association game: hands up anyone who likes Steve Chalke; right, now we know who the bad guys are.”
imagine all these enterprising, ambitious people, and all the money they send home (and all the institutions with which they interact to send it) being bent towards even more beneficial ends, becoming better, longer levers for really remaking the nations from which they're traveled into places of prosperity and sustainability. Imagine deciding to make migrant labor truly worldchanging.
Maybe we need to start to rethink migration, not in the light of the discussions we've had in the past (huddled masses and all), but in the light of a 21st Century, globally-intertwined society. Migrants, though they may be looking to better themselves, ought perhaps to be seen (here in the Global North) as our partners in creating the prosperity we expect; and we ought to perhaps regard our interactions with them as the best opportunity we have for global diplomacy and sustainable development. Indeed, I wonder if what we need most of all isn't a new social compact -- one which recognizes the necessity of migrant labor in maintaining the economic prosperity of the North, and seeks to directly and explicitly make the exchange a fair one, useful to both sides. That kind of honesty and fairness seems pretty far off today, I'll admit, but I think it's ultimately a pretty essential component of a world that works, and perhaps it's time that we started advocating for it.
The Secret is out, promising everything from bigger bank accounts to a spiritually fulfilling life, ... the “law of attraction” ... If you want, say, a million dollars, you must first think it. If you want to get out of debt, don’t think “debt.” It just attracts more.
your newly created link will never expire.. You also get a history and can password protect.
Wikipedia represents the democratization of knowledge itself, on a global scale, something possible for the first time in human history. Wikipedia allows everyone equal authority in stating what is known about any given topic. Their new politics of knowledge is deeply, passionately egalitarian. Today's Establishment is nervous about Web 2.0 and Establishment-bashers love it, and for the same reason: its egalitarianism about knowledge means that, with the chorus (or cacophony) of voices out there, there is so much dissent, about everything, that there is a lot less of what "we all know." Insofar as the unity of our culture depends on a large body of background knowledge, handing a megaphone to everyone has the effect of fracturing our culture.
As wonderful as it might be that the hegemony of professionals over knowledge is lessening, there is a downside: our grasp of and respect for reliable information suffers. With the rejection of professionalism has come a widespread rejection of expertise—of the proper role in society of people who make it their life's work to know stuff. This, I maintain, is not a positive development; but it is also not a necessary one. We can imagine a Web 2.0 with experts. We can imagine an Internet that is still egalitarian, but which is more open and welcoming to specialists. The new politics of knowledge that I advocate would place experts at the head of the table, but—unlike the old order—gives the general public a place at the table as well.
Food intake following the food adverts was significantly higher compared with the toy adverts in all weight groups, with the obese children increasing their consumption by 134%; overweight children by 101% and normal weight children by 84%. It was also found that weight dictated food preference during the experiment. Food of differing fat contents was made available to the children to eat at their own will, ranging from high fat sweet snacks to low fat savoury products. The obese group consistently chose the highest fat product - chocolate - whereas the overweight children chose jelly sweets which have a lower fat content, as well as chocolate.I think what this further indicates is that there are people who are likely to be more susceptible to certain kinds of messages and that those who are most susceptible are more likely to respond more fully.
"If we do not take a responsible and long-term view of Africa, and its need to develop and make progress, we will end up ultimately with our own self-interest back in countries like Germany and the UK being damaged as a result of the poverty, the conflict, the mass migration, the spread of terrorism and so on,"
Ordinary godparents are for ensuring your spiritual health, providing an extra source of presents for ungrateful children while they are growing up, and giving teenagers somewhere to storm off to when their real parents don't understand them.
They say Glasgow is the asylum capital of the UK, and complain about 'bogus' asylum seekers streaming here to get everything handed to them on a plate, while poor honest British drunken scum languish without the price of the next pint.
You'd think Glasgow was a tropical paradise that everyone wanted to live in. It is the asylum capital of the UK - but that's because the city council takes asylum seekers because they have so much sub-standard accommodation - that locals won't live in - and get paid by central government to house them. ....
Asylum seekers are generally fine human beings who have got into trouble for standing up for their principals in the world's trouble spots. And since British imperialism, past and present, economic, cultural and military, is the cause of much of the trouble in the world, the least Britain can do is grant asylum.Yeh, while we're apologising for our negative historical impacts as a nation, how about doing a little bit of helping out those who are victims today? And in fact, we need to realised this:
The truth is, Britain would collapse without immigrants. The NHS would collapse first - about a third of its staff are immigrants. Then the pension schemes and the tax base and national insurance. Britain has low unemployment - without immigrants, there'd be no one to do the menial work the British are not prepared to do themselves.See above.
Rather than immigrants sponging off British people, it's the other way around: Britain sponges off the rest of the world. The country can't feed itself, and its clothes are produced in India and China. It's rich because of its imperial history, and it can afford to keep the rest of the world in servitude. Immigrants pay tax, but can't claim the benefits of that tax, because they are not citizens. The BNP vote are unemployable because they are too drunk, lazy and stupid to succeed, despite living in a nanny state where everything is handed to them on a plate. They blame hardworking immigrants for their failure.Sounds harsh, but I have to say, it really sort of looks that way.
But having said all of that, the real fascist threat to Britain doesn't come from the BNP - it comes from New Labour. They are the ones who have embarked on new imperialist adventures, put a CCTV camera on every street, introduced the database state and proposed biometric ID cards. I don't know what the Nazis are complaining about - Blair, Brown and Reid are marching us towards fascism as fast as they can.
York mayor sees London as congestion charge model | Special reports | Guardian UnlimitedSignificant because it's in the USA.... in a speech to mark Earth Day. Pledging to make New York "a brighter, healthier and more economically prosperous city", Mr Bloomberg couched the charge in terms of climate change. "The science is there," he said. "It's time to stop debating it and start dealing with it."
Of course there are objections and this article cites an argument that it is regressive. The reply is that in a capitalist system money talks (I summarise and paraphrase). It misses the point, I guess that it is the poor who disproportionately suffer from the effects of cars and traffic ...
New
Basque Premier Juan José Ibarretxe read an institutional manifesto agreed by consensus by the Basque Government (the Basque nationalist parties PNV and EA and the Spanish leftist party EB) and the socialist party PSE-EE. He apologised to the victims for "not have managed to rise to the occasion as a society", as "we haven’t been able to transmit collectively our support to the thousands of people victims of violence."
chlorine bombs being built by al-Qaeda to terrorise and kill their Muslim brothers, who, we must remember, were so recently oppressed by the atheistic regime of Saddam Hussein. It is as if Protestant and Catholic groups in the French Resistance used the Nazi occupation to blow up each other's churches and market places and slaughter each other's children. Actually, it is weirder in Iraq because the Sunni extremists of al-Qaeda are killing and torturing more Sunnis than Shia, let alone US soldiers.
The thought process is psychopathic: it has the same logic we heard in the ravings of the gunman at Virginia Tech. There is a similarity of exhibitionism, too, a need for attention that must escalate the horror to maintain some kind of foothold in the Western news bulletins.
we argue that we need to move away from the institutionalised logic of the school as factory, to the network logic of the learning community. Indeed, we need to move beyond the concept of ‘extended schools’ - whereby schools extend the range of services they provide – towards a notion of extending learning, whereby learning institutions rethink the possibilities around what can be learnt, where learning can happen and who is involved in the learning process. What this paper implies is that it will not be possible to personalise education whilst maintaining a conception of learning as happening only in certain places, under certain assessment regimes and involving certain people. Instead, we suggest that rather than continuing to build a system based upon the ‘megastructures’ of schools, universities and a national curriculum, we need to move to a system organised through more porous and flexible learning networks that link homes, communities and multiple sites of learning.
periodically debates about the patron saint of England, and his suitability for the position.
Rate the book
Write a review and share your opinion with others. Try to focus on the content of the book. Read our instructions for further information.
Praying the Pattern
As someone involved in the conducting of funerals I would be more than happy to find next-of-kin wanting to think over the event as well and as thoroughly as he does. He implies that Church of England funerals are not capable of being personal or relevant to the grief processes of next-of-kin. This is not so.
Turbulent flow is the enemy of traditional turbines. How about a non-traditional turbine?
“Why should God forgive us through punishing someone else? It was worse than illogical. It was insane. It makes God sound like a psychopath. If any human being behaved like this, we’d say they were a monster." The explanation “just doesn’t work, though sadly it’s one that’s still all too often preached ... The most basic truth about God’s nature is that he is Love, not wrath and punishment.” Some Christians went all through their lives without grasping that, Dr John said. “The cross is not about Jesus reconciling an angry God to us; it’s almost the opposite. . . On the cross, Jesus died for our sins; the price of our sin is paid; but it is not paid to God, but by God. . .”
What if “religion,” and by this I mean the institutional and organizational form around faith, is no longer necessary for the future of faith?
Religions exist in certainty and sanctity; faith lives in inquiry and fluidity. The reason traditional faiths are having a hard time of things is that the present situation is one in which certainty is suspect and sanctity is being redefined.
One of the most interesting dynamics of the present time is the collapse of distinction between the sacred and the profane. Contemporary society allows for the “holy” to be found in the most unexpected places. As Christopher Partridge writes, “The new spiritual awakening makes use of thought-forms, ideas and practices, which are not at all alien to the majority of Westerners. They emerge from an essentially non-Christian religio-cultural milieu, a milieu that both resources and is resourced by popular culture.” The future of Christian faith lies in its ability to inhabit this gray world, not attempting to “sort it out” as much as to be available to help others navigate and negotiate the complexities that such a dynamic raises. To “go with the flow” might seem a trite way of describing theological engagement, but a commitment to fluidity and a willingness to swim in the cultural waters rather than insisting on one’s own paddling pool is a necessary perspective.
My immediate hunch is that the anonymity of the web is the problem. People do not tend to call each other Nazis in public meetings, or on radio phone-ins, because other people would know who they were. But if you're called DaffyDuck you can insult whoever you like. If democracy means anything it means accountability - and that should include accountability for our own words.
1. We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.
We are committed to the "Civility Enforced" standard: we will not post unacceptable content, and we'll delete comments that contain it.
We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that:
- is being used to abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others
- is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person,
- infringes upon a copyright or trademark
- violates an obligation of confidentiality
- violates the privacy of others
We define and determine what is "unacceptable content" on a case-by-case basis, and our definitions are not limited to this list. If we delete a comment or link, we will say so and explain why. [We reserve the right to change these standards at any time with no notice.]
2. We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person.
3. We connect privately before we respond publicly.
When we encounter conflicts and misrepresentation in the blogosphere, we make every effort to talk privately and directly to the person(s) involved--or find an intermediary who can do so--before we publish any posts or comments about the issue.
4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.
When someone who is publishing comments or blog postings that are offensive, we'll tell them so (privately, if possible--see above) and ask them to publicly make amends.
If those published comments could be construed as a threat, and the perpetrator doesn't withdraw them and apologize, we will cooperate with law enforcement to protect the target of the threat.
5. We do not allow anonymous comments.
We require commenters to supply a valid email address before they can post, though we allow commenters to identify themselves with an alias, rather than their real name.
6. We ignore the trolls.
We prefer not to respond to nasty comments about us or our blog, as long as they don't veer into abuse or libel. We believe that feeding the trolls only encourages them--"Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it." Ignoring public attacks is often the best way to contain them.
people who commonly make source-monitoring errors respond to and imagine experiences more strongly than the average person, and they also tend to be more creative.
"It might be harder to discriminate between a vivid image that you'd generated yourself and the memory of a perception of something you actually saw," he said in a telephone interview. Peters also found in his study, detailed in the March issue of Consciousness and Cognition, that people with implausible memories are also more likely to be depressed and to experience sleep problems, and this could also make them more prone to memory mistakes. And once people make this kind of mistake, they might be inclined to stick to their guns for spiritual reasons, McNally said. "It may be a variant expression of certain religious impulses," he said. "We suspect that this might be kind of a psychological buffering mechanism against the fear of death."
As part of its long-range vision, the Foundation looks forward to founding a fully accredited, four-year great books college with a center for advanced Christian studies and school of visual and performing arts.
Those who would birch and flog the teenagers who go bad seem convinced that human action takes place in a vacuum. There is no excuse for murderous, bullying, thoughtless behaviour, but to ignore the circumstances that led to that behaviour is simply crass. Being poor will not in itself make you more likely to murder another person of your own age, but being poor, brutalised and unloved - or loved in a way that alternates neglect and indulgence - might.
gang members run with each other because the street is the one place where they can justify and pity themselves with impunity
As certainly as the Universe itself is unfurling still from that
one vast explosion of creative energy we call the Big Bang,
so a new creation, a new way of living ripples still
from generation to generation – even to us –
from that profoundly secret, still, moment in the dawn of the day,
when God raised up Jesus; when God opened new life, for us, in him.
Nietzsche argued that Christianity gets going by first inventing a religious-type problem - like hell - and then offering itself as the solution; that it's a fictional/metaphysical deliverance from a fictional/metaphysical affliction. In other words: a racket. This may be true of some versions of Christianity - particularly the nasty evangelical salvation story known as penal substitution.
That's why the Easter stories tumble out in bits and pieces, with breathless chasings to and fro and garbled reports - and then, stories like nothing else before or since. As the great New Testament scholar EP Sanders put it, the writers were trying to describe an experience that does not fit a known category. They knew all about ghosts and visions, and they knew it wasn't anything like that.
Equally, they knew the risen Jesus wasn't just a resuscitated corpse, still less someone who had almost died but managed to stagger on after all. They had the puzzled air of people saying, "I know this sounds wacky, but this is truly how it was." They were stumblingly describing the birth of new creation, starting with Jesus but intended for the whole world.
In 2000, when weekly attendance figures were first collected, the number of regular worshippers at the 43 cathedrals was 14,300, compared with 24,800 last year. Seasonal attendance has also increased: 130,000 people attending services over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in 2006, compared with 94,300 in 2000. Attendance at Easter Eve and Easter Sunday services has risen to 52,400 last year from 47,900 in 2000.
The survey of 7000 adults questioned those who did and did not currently attend church. The research concluded that an estimated 7.6 million people (one in seven) attended church each month, and 12.6 million attended at least once a year. Although 53 per cent of respondents described themselves as Christian, nearly two-thirds had nothing to do with a church. Most of these — an estimated 29.3 million — were regarded as unreceptive and “closed to attending church”.
humans have protein needs that can be met by both beans and beef. But you can grow lots and lots of beans in the space it would take a graze a cow. In other words, if humans ate more beans and less beef, than more humans would have their protein needs met. In a world of hunger, I became increasingly uneasy about my meat consumption. ...
becoming increasingly aware that many in the emerging culture were vegetarian, and that good, contextual, missiology would want to consider Paul's words "to the Jew I become a Jew, to the vegetarian, I become a vegetarian."
So I went vegetarian. One of the upsides for me has been a far greater link between my everyday life and my spirituality. My Christian faith feels more entwined with my lifestyle and I am made constantly aware of the justice issues around human consumption every time I eat.
So you have stolen water from a drought-ridden part of the world being imported to one of the most drenched. Water is already a major source of conflict in the Middle East, with Israel 'making the desert bloom' by stealing most of the Jordan.
The Highlands of Scotland are saturated with clean fresh water. It falls from the skies, it squelches underfoot, and streams, burns and rivers are full of it. If you need to drink from a water cooler, it's not as if Scottish companies don't bottle the stuff.
But I'm sure it makes good market sense.
We must remember, though, that biomass from waste will only meet a tiny proportion of our energy demand – there is little chance of it having any measurable impact on our greenhouse gas emissions. Above all, we must remember that the EU Biofuel Directive, UN policies, bilateral biofuel agreements, etc. have nothing whatsoever to do with this ‘green’ idea. They are putting a global blueprint into action which is threatening local communities, biodiversity, water supplies, rainforest and the climate across the globe.
There can be bureaucracy without accountability, but can there be accountability without bureaucracy?
Atonement-speak obscures the distinction between "guilt" - a private, often religious emotion connected to personal wrongdoing - and a more demanding and necessary move: acknowledging that our lives are shaped by historical processes through which we have accrued benefits at the expense of others. As the service itself demonstrated, the atonement mode of acknowledging the past comes complete with built-in absolution, a rhetorical clean chit that you can give yourself without further consideration of how the past lives on in the present, and how you might redress material inequities inherited from that time.And that is of course, exactly the danger: we will just let the thing become past without actually thinking about the way that our present prosperity has been built on exploitation and the time-forward entail of that is structural inequalities which serve to continue and even widen the gap further. We may not be personally responsible for the genesis of those inequalities, but we are for their continuance, to some degree. But we also have to face the full truth of the past which includes this:
We know that government and politicians stop short of a full apology because they are aware of legal implications that would strengthen the case for reparations. Moreover, reparations themselves would force us to face up to the fact that the horrors of the past were not merely momentary lapses of moral judgment that can be redeemed through public enactments of remorse. They were systematic projects of national self-enrichment at the expense of other societies. ... A real apology would involve not only the cancellation of so-called "third world debt", itself the consequence of colonial depredation, but also some form of reparations (including relabelling "aid" as such).
Given that slavery and indentured labour were part of a philosophy of exploitative profit-making which the writer Barry Unsworth critically calls "sacred hunger", we might also use this commemorative year to ask ourselves to what extent our lifestyles continue to appease this appetite. Profiting from cheap labour is far from a thing of the past: witness the continuing movement of large corporations to poor countries where they can pay low wages in abusive working conditions.
Such self-critical reflections apply to descendants of the enslaved and the colonised as well. The Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid reminds her fellow descendants of slaves to reflect on "who captured and delivered [their ancestors] to the European master". I suspect that this would involve certain Muslim nations too.
And in the end, it is all woven so finely into the fabric of history that the 'good' and the 'evil' cannot be pulled out and made distinct, except by tendentious selection. There never was a society colonised by Empire, that did not have its own faults and did not practise its own oppressions. Is the one large 'crime' of Empire so much worse than the thousand small crimes of, for example, the Iroquois torture-stake, or Indian sati, or Aztec sacrifice, or the Barbary slavers, or, or, or.....?
it is obvious that having the Romans invade everywhere, take over and then forcefully teaching us all about order, government, engineering and civilised behaviour was in 'net' terms a very good thing for the world. The same is equally obvious of the British Empire, the French Empire, the 'cultural' American Empire and arguably the Soviet Empire.
However the boot on the other foot of course, (or is it the other side of the same coin?) is that Dr Gopal works at an institution that charges students from the same third world countries almost seven times what it charges the sons and daughters of wealthy natives.
Is it all Europeans who are to blame?
I thought that women were oppressed, marginalised, and not given any political voice during those years - so it can't be their fault.
And about 70% of the male population didn't actually have a vote until Universal Male Suffrage kicked in, so you can't really hold them to account.
In fact, slavery served only to undercut and unemploy the average working man, so if anything he suffered a net loss because of it. Bridges and roads were built by private businesses, which the state paid for, so if the country is to be held to account for a collective public purse, well, it has already been paid for. Chase the descendants of the people who were paid for this, if blame wants to be laid somewhere - after all, they're the true recipients of the benefit, not an entire nation-state.
When the Emancipation of Slavery act kicked in in 1833, the government paid considerable recompense to the slave owners - I remember there was a Bishop of Leeds or something who owned 633 slaves, and received a not inconsiderable sum for his trouble.
Yes, slavery was part of the British empire as it was part of the Roman empire, the Chinese empire, the Aztecs, the moghuls, the Ottomans, the Arabs, the Sokoto sultanate etc. Everyone.
Britain's uniqueness comes through its moral change. NO other state before Britain deliberately gave up slavery. Before that everyone thought it was normal. If Britain had chosen differently we may still have slaves today.
It's very odd to think that people could still be 'proud' or 'ashamed' of the British Empire, as if empire-building was a team sport. It was the endeavour of a social, commericial and political elite, that was trans-national - our London capitalists colluded with the Virginia slave-masters, the Ghanian traders, etc. The idea that 'we' as a nation should examine our past in the framework of what 'we' did seems sub-GCSE.
I got a response from my MP which got me kind of mad. You'll see why as I reproduce it here. Apologies for the strange changes in types...
