Mainly Blues, history and pointless trivia - in no particular order. All opinions are my own etc...
Joined August 2015
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DB retweeted
This councillor represents the most deprived ward in Birmingham.
It has one of the worst child poverty rates in the country. Just 4 in 10 people are employed.
And yet he's focused on events in the Middle East - which Birmingham City Council can do absolutely nothing about.
Today we remember a terrorist plot foiled by the authorities - planned in the Midlands and carried out by a religiously inspired Yorkshire born perpetrator who learned his trade fighting abroad.
DB retweeted
People in Birmingham have watched their council go bankrupt, while the bins overflowed for almost two years.
And yet the Greens and their Lib Dem enablers are banging on about the Middle East.
This kind of sectarian grievance-mongering is completely poisonous.
The BBC is so unabashedly gleeful this morning 😅 the usual buzzwords of “changing demographics”, “college educated” and “urban centres” doing a heavy shift so far.
DB retweeted
There was a goalkeeper called Crocombe
Whose job was to see shots and then choke 'em
Yet in every game
His skill was the same
As Are You Being Served's Mrs Slocombe.
#Millwall
Haven’t noticed this prior to a match before (TMK)?
When you're enjoying the game tonight, please stay alert and be aware of your surroundings. Report anything that doesn’t feel right to security or report online in confidence at gov.uk/ACT.
In an emergency call 999. Remember, action counters terrorism.
DB retweeted
On behalf of the British people, I would like to apologise for the slave trade. I am sorry we were the first great power in history to turn its guns on it. I am sorry it cost us around 2,000 sailors to free 150,000 people they would never meet. I am sorry the rest of the world took so long to follow.
Slavery did not begin with Britain. It is as old as civilisation. Babylon wrote it into law. Rome built an empire on it. The Vikings sold Englishmen through the slave market at Dublin. In 1625 Barbary corsairs took 60 men, women and children out of a Cornish church; by 1640 Parliament was told 3,000 to 5,000 English people were held in Algiers alone.
Every great power of the age took part in the Atlantic trade. Portugal and Spain for a century before an English ship did. Then the Dutch, the French — and the British, who in the eighteenth century carried more than anyone. That is the record. It is not disputed here.
Then a nation turned on the trade that had made it rich.
Wilberforce's bill was beaten year after year. On 25 March 1807 it passed. Then Britain did the part the critics never mention — it sent the Royal Navy to enforce it. The West Africa Squadron sailed in 1808, two ships for 3,000 miles of coast, and hunted slavers for nearly sixty years. Britain paid Spain and Portugal to open their ships to search. HMS Black Joke ran down the slaver El Almirante in 1829 and found 466 people in her hold.
Around 2,000 British sailors died doing it — most of fever, to free people they would never meet. 1,600 slave ships seized. 150,000 Africans set free.
In 1833 Parliament borrowed £20 million to end slavery across the Empire. The debt was not finally redeemed until 2015. The United States needed a civil war. Cuba held slaves until 1886. Brazil until 1888 — eighty-one years after Westminster voted.
Yes, we took part in the trade. Every power of the age did. None of them fought it like we did.
So yes. I will apologise. I am sorry it cost us so much. I am sorry the rest of the world took so long to follow.
That is not something you apologise for. That is something you teach.
#history #britishhistory #royalnavy #westafricasquadron
Attack.
Attack.
Attack.
Chris Davies asked his squad to set out values at a team meeting in Portugal in July. Three words are now on the wall at EPIC.
"The key to it is they’re not my words, they’re our words and that makes a big difference."
Inside today's presser👇
birminghammail.co.uk/sport/f…
DB retweeted
The Government is borrowing to create a "Wealth Fund". The self-delusion is off the scale.
UK Treasury confirms extra £20bn over five years for the so-called National Wealth Fund (£15bn) and the state-owned British Business Bank (£5bn), which lends to business.
Treasury claims this will support around 100,000 jobs by 2035 in AI, defence and green energy — a figure it has pretty much plucked out of thin air and will never really be tested because by 2035 everyone will have forgotten such a modest announcement.
Two takeaways:
Yet more government borrowing. It’s an addiction.
Illustrates government philosophy: growth will come from a bigger, more activist state. Ho hum.
DB retweeted
Today is the 60th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster. My son didn’t know anything about it so we watched the episode of The Crown on @netflix season 3 to help him understand.
This scene particularly moved me. Even though it was an appalling man made tragedy, Prince Phillip explains what he saw when visiting: the families of the victims sang, and sang beautifully, when burying their children.
Which reminded me of when so many families of the massacred Iranians did something similar this January: when burying their children they played music and danced. Two things you are not allowed to do in public under this regime.
Despite the anger and the rage, despite the feeling of utter betrayal, they both collectively chose constructive resilience. So instead of fighting back with hostility or giving up, they focused on upholding core values and finding hope and humanity where there is none, with a fundamental message to those responsible that ‘you can kill us, but you will never break us.’
People make a country, and it’s the realisation of the sheer humanity of these moments in people’s fight for justice and dignity that are the defining moments in the history of a country.
DB retweeted
This beautiful film is around 100 years old. It shows France’s elegant society in the 1920s, capturing the lively boulevards, cafés, and historic landmarks in lovely detail.
DB retweeted
“Looking at those great works of western man and remembering all that he’s achieved in philosophy, poetry, science, law making, it does seem hard to believe that European civilisation can ever vanish. And yet, you know, it has happened once. All the life giving human activities that we lump together under the word ‘civilisation’ have been obliterated once in Western Europe, when the barbarians ran over the Roman Empire.”
- Sir Kenneth Clark
