Part 1 of a two-part examination of Manchester’s history under attack by liberal journalists.
On April 1st 2023, The Guardian newspaper presented its readers with an 80-page supplement. Entitled ‘Special Issue: Cotton Capital. How Slavery Shaped the Guardian. Britain and the World’.
The Guardian is well known as being part of the liberal and political left’s mainstream media messaging service. The Guardian newspaper was originally the ‘Manchester Guardian’ and first made an appearance in 1821 as a radical news sheet campaigning for workers’ rights and liberal causes.
“This Guardian report and similar articles across the following week, are an insult to the city and people of Manchester and ignores the long history of the White working-class and the working-class struggle to build Manchester and its industry.”
In the 20th Century the newspaper moved to London and dropped the ‘Manchester’ name from its title, but became even more tied into left-wing causes. Today it is owned by the Scott Trust and sees itself as a publication fighting for social justice causes and is particularly keen to champion real and imagined issues concerning racial equality and multiculturalism.
It is in this vein of embracing perceived ‘White Guilt’ that The Guardian looks back to its roots in Manchester and has commissioned this 80-page publication which is a hand-wringing confession of the newspaper founder’s tenuous links to the slave trade through their involvement in Manchester’s cotton textile industry.
The entire Guardian report is based on the notion that by buying raw cotton from the plantations of the southern American states, the cotton industry barons of Lancashire were therefore guilty of collusion in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Add to that the fact that one of the Guardian’s founding fathers had financial interests in a Caribbean sugar plantation, which were worked by “enslaved Africans,” therefore the Guardian newspaper in 2023 obviously carries enormous moral guilt because of its Manchester roots.
Manchester was once held up as an example of British industry and innovation, the shining star of the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th Century. The White British working-class flocked to Manchester from the late 18th Century and across the 19th Century to find paid work. What was once a small Lancashire town expanded and developed at a rapid pace into an industrial and economic giant.
The rapid growth of the city had a serious downside, the poverty, the slum housing, child labour and long working hours on low wages; these are conveniently ignored by this Guardian report because of course the White British working-class and the modern-day descendants of White British mill workers are now all guilty of ‘White Privilege’.
Manchester also drew in thousands of starving Irish in the late 1840’s and early 1850’s during the Irish Potato Famine. This is quietly ignored by these Guardian articles because the dreadful conditions experienced by the Irish diaspora does not fit into the Cultural Marxist model of ‘White Privilege’.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade was not created by the industrialists of Manchester
The enslavement of Black Africans had gone on for centuries at the hands of the Arabs and complicit Black African kings and tribal chieftains with no ties to the region of Lancashire where Manchester arose. These hand-wringing liberals, black academics and journalists need to take a closer look at those West African kings and chieftains who sought out the White slave traffickers to sell the people from lesser status tribes and tribal prisoners captured by their warriors in raids in the African interior.
This report and similar articles across the following week, are an insult to the city and people of Manchester and ignores the long history of the White working-class and the working-class struggle to build Manchester, its industry.
This London centric, liberal middle-class hand-wringing is an attempt to blur and re-write the history of one of the most important cities in the North of England. The Guardian publication and the academic ‘research’ behind it, is an exercise in Cultural Marxist manipulation of our nation’s history in the interests of furthering the ‘Black Lives Matter’ agenda.
Shown below is The Guardian’s listing of the academics, journalists and black activists sponsored by the Guardian/Scott Trust to produce the supplement. The last two pages list the names of the identified “enslaved people linked to The Manchester Guardian’s founders”.
This gesture of self-flagellation in the service of supposed social justice in April 2023 is little more than virtue signalling and self-inflicted ‘White Guilt’.
In Part 2 of the British Movement Northern Region report on this campaign by the newspaper will examine the anti-white and pro-BLM elements to both the supplement and to some of the Guardian articles criticising the city of Manchester that followed across the first week of April 2023.
Resources:
Top Image: Reproduction of the front page of The Guardian’s supplement.
Bottom Image: The Guardian’s listing of the academics, journalists and black activists sponsored to produce the supplement.
The British Movement welcomes articles for possible inclusion on this site from members and supporters across the North of England. Please remember that we have to operate within the laws of this country – we will not include any content that is against the current laws of the United Kingdom. News reports should be topical and be relevant to the regions covered by this website.
