A surefire bolt on

+Any moment now there’s going to be a massive outcry in the press about the racist jottings of our Dear Leader. You may recall what happened when it was discovered that Jeremy Corbyn had written a foreword in a reprint of the historian John Hobson’s Imperialism, first published in 1902. In that book, Hobson had set down a number of anti-Semitic views, although Corbyn’s attention was focused on what the author had to say about exploitation and colonialism in Africa. The press had a field day, and predictably the Jewish ‘Labour’ Movement was mightily upset. Will such outrage emerge now that, according to today’s Guardian, ‘City bank praised by Johnson had links to slavery, database reveals’ ? The private bank, Arbuthnot Latham, which serves the wealthy, had a founder who was compensated when slavery was abolished. It is currently run by a mega donor to the Tory party. Johnson praised the bank’s role in a foreword in a book on its history — it ‘financed everything from coffee plantations in Ceylon to gold mining in South Africa to banana growers in Jamaica.’ Some businesses with historic links to slavery have promised to pay reparations—Greene King brewers for example. I would say at the very minimum that those whose predecessors received compensation from the state for the loss of their slaves should repay that amount, adjusted for inflation. Arbuthnot Latham owes £370,000— less than its chief Sir Henry Angest has donated to the Tory Party, so they should have no grounds for complaint. It is interesting to note that the loan the government borrowed to pay off the slave owners in the 1800s was only finally paid off in 2015.
 
+Trump, as we already knew is as thick as pig shit (how coarse!  - but that’s Trump) and now his former National Security Advisor John Bolton has joined a long list of Trump’s ex-servants to make the point in his own memoir soon to be published. This apparently quotes Trump asking Theresa May ‘Oh, are you a nuclear power?’ Well, actually I think this question demonstrates Trump’s great intellect, since he must have grasped that without US permission, the UK’s ’independent deterrent’ is no such thing. Perhaps the President has a sense of irony after all.