What a fantastic performance on Britain's Got Talent (for once)



Makes you proud to be British.

Britain will never be slaves, but it was OK to kidnap, import and sell them.

And Arabs didn't? and they still do, at least this country was fundamental in ending the slave trade.

Actually, the word in the song is "Britons".

As Horus says, whilst our record in the slave trade was not nice, at least we took a lead role in ending it - insofar as we were able. The cost of compensating the slave owners in the 19th century was enormous and set up many of the families involved for generations.

The slaves, of course, got nothing...apart from their freedom, And that proved to be a mixed blessing in many cases

I think Mauritania is the only country where there is some element of legal slavery but it's modern day equivalent is rampant :

India. > Est. population in modern slavery: 14.3 million. ...
China. > Est. population in modern slavery: 3.2 million. ...
Pakistan. > Est. population in modern slavery: 2.1 million. ...
Uzbekistan. > Est. population in modern slavery: 1.2 million

Yes, quite correct, as is the case across the globe, but we were disusing Britain.



An apostrophe pedantic lover.

Aah is wot aah is dear

So much so I see I've put a superfluous one in "its" above. Oh dear......( gives self smack on wrist)

Spoiler: Toggle

BY is giving me private lessons....but i'm not up to his standards yet.

We didn’t kidnap them Dusak they were sold to us by Africans (you’ve been watching too many episodes of roots) FYI it took Britain’s occupation of Egypt to eradicate slavery in the country.

In a direct sense, yes.

But with the British involvement in Egypt came a vast expansion of cotton growing (to supply the Lancashire mills), the expropriation of land by the Khedive and his coterie, and the reduction of most Egyptians to landless serfs...little different to slaves in many ways.

The main source of slaves was via Arab Muslim slavers trading out of Zanzibar and employing Africans to procure slaves on their behalf, they even raided parts of Europe and this trade pre-dates British and European involvement by some 700 years. Also you cannot just condemn the British involvement without taking all aspects of this dreadful practice into account and point the finger at the main instigators which were the Arab traders.

The D-Day Darlings certainly performed better in the semi-final of Britain's Got Talent than they did in their first audition - not that they were bad, they just weren't that good. However, I don't think they are a particularly exceptional choir/group. Certainly there are other groups performing patriotic/war years music (although not in this years BGT) that would give them a run for their money.

What the D-Day Darlings have got going for them in this years BGT is the timing. The UK is in patriotic mood and splendour. It is a particularly good year for waving the red, white and blue of the Union Flag high (even though there are those that would like to separate its components): 100 years since the end of the First World War; 100 years of the Royal Air Force; A Royal Wedding. And no doubt other anniversaries and celebrations that I can't think of at the moment.

I wish them good luck in the competition. I personally think they have to up their game musically, but I also think they will be an appropriate act for the Royal Variety Performance.

In modern day wahhabi dominated Saudi Arabia, slavery is not only practiced in all but name against some foreign workers, but it remains part of their ideology.

. Prominent Saudi clerics, such as the popular television personality and author of school textbooks Saleh al-Fawzan, have declared in recent years that ‘slavery is part of Islam. Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain for as long as there is Islam’. He accuses Muslims who reject slavery of being ‘apostates’, for which the penalty in Saudi Arabia is execution. Those who reject slavery, therefore, deserve to be killed.

(The House of Islam - Ed Husain)

British Involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Boarding the slave ship
For well over 300 years, European countries forced Africans onto slave ships and transported them across the Atlantic Ocean.

The first European nation to engage in the Transatlantic Slave Trade was Portugal in the mid to late 1400's. Captain John Hawkins made the first known English slaving voyage to Africa, in 1562, in the reign of Elizabeth 1. Hawkins made three such journeys over a period of six years. He captured over 1200 Africans and sold them as goods in the Spanish colonies in the Americas.

To start with, British traders supplied slaves for the Spanish and Portuguese colonists in America. However, as British settlements in the Caribbean and North America grew, often through wars with European countries such as Holland, Spain and France, British slave traders increasingly supplied British colonies

The exact number of British ships that took part in the Slave Trade will probably never be known but, in the 245 years between Hawkins first voyage and the abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807, merchants in Britain despatched about 10,000 voyages to Africa for slaves, with merchants in other parts of the British Empire perhaps fitting out a further 1,150 voyages.

Historian, Professor David Richardson, has calculated that British ships carried 3.4 million or more enslaved Africans to the Americas.

Only the Portuguese, who carried on the trade for almost 50 years after Britain had abolished its Slave Trade, carried more enslaved Africans to the Americas than the British (the most recent estimate suggests just over 5 million people).

Estimates, based on records of voyages in the archives of port customs and maritime insurance records, put the total number of African slaves transported by European traders, to at least 12 million people.

The first record of enslaved Africans being landed in the British colony of Virginia was in 1619. Barbados became the first British settlement in the Caribbean in 1625 and the British took control of Jamaica in 1655.

The establishment of the Royal African Company in 1672 formalised the Slave Trade under a royal charter and gave a monopoly to the port of London. The ports of Bristol and Liverpool, in particular, lobbied to have the charter changed and, in 1698, the monopoly was taken away.

British involvement expanded rapidly in response to the demand for labour to cultivate sugar in Barbados and other British West Indian islands. In the 1660s, the number of slaves taken from Africa in British ships averaged 6,700 per year. By the 1760s, Britain was the foremost European country engaged in the Slave Trade. Of the 80,000 Africans chained and shackled and transported across to the Americas each year, 42,000 were carried by British slave ships.

The profits gained from chattel slavery helped to finance the Industrial Revolution and the Caribbean islands became the hub of the British Empire. The sugar colonies were Britain's most valuable colonies. By the end of the eighteenth century, four million pounds came into Britain from its West Indian plantations, compared with one million from the rest of the world.

Who benefited from the Transatlantic Slave Trade?

In the Transatlantic Slave Trade, triangle ships never sailed empty and some people made enormous profits. This Slave Trade was the richest part of Britain's trade in the 18th century. James Houston, who worked for a firm of 18th-century slave merchants, wrote, "What a glorious and advantageous trade this is... It is the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves."

Between 1750 and 1780, about 70% of the government's total income came from taxes on goods from its colonies. The money made on the Transatlantic Slave Trade triangle was vast and poured into Britain and other European countries involved in slavery, changing their landscapes forever. In Britain, those who had made much of their wealth from the trade built fine mansions, established banks such as the Bank of England and funded new industries.

Who profited?

British slave ship owners - some voyages made 20-50% profit. Large sums of money were made by ship owners who never left England.
British Slave Traders - who bought and sold enslaved Africans.
Plantation Owners - who used slave labour to grow their crops. Vast profits could be made by using unpaid workers. Planters often retired to Britain with the profits they made and had grand country houses built for them. Some planters used the money they had made to become MPs. Others invested their profits in new factories and inventions, helping to finance the Industrial Revolution.
The factory owners in Britain - who had a market for their goods. Textiles from Yorkshire and Lancashire were bought by slave-captains to barter with. One half of the textiles produced in Manchester were exported to Africa and half to the West Indies. In addition, industrial plants were built to refine the imported raw sugar. Glassware was needed to bottle the rum.
West African leaders involved in the trade - who captured people and sold them as slaves to Europeans.
The ports - Bristol and Liverpool became major ports through fitting out slave ships and handling the cargoes they brought back. Between 1700 and 1800, Liverpool's population rose from 5000 to 78,000.
Bankers - banks and finance houses grew rich from the fees and interest they earned from merchants who borrowed money for their long voyages.
Ordinary people - the Transatlantic Slave Trade provided many jobs for people back in Britain. Many people worked in factories which sold their goods to West Africa. These goods would then be traded for enslaved Africans. Birmingham had over 4000 gun-makers, with 100,000 guns a year going to slave-traders.
Others worked in factories that had been set up with money made from the Slave Trade. Many trades-people bought a share in a slave ship. Slave labour also made goods, such as sugar, more affordable for people living in Britain.

I think it fair to say that we were guilty by association.

I don't think anyone would dispute that Dusak.

The point Horus was making was that the actual capturing of slaves was carried out, to a large extent, by Arab slave traders and Africans themselves.....human booty being one of the prizes of inter-tribe warfare.

British involvement was mainly in transporting them, and putting them to work in our Caribbean colonies.

Pre-emancipation, the British need for slave labour was undoubtedly a factor in this horrendous practice.....in the same way that the West's desire for cocaine fuels the growers in South America and the brutal cartels who control the supply and the transportation of it.

We saw the need to end the practice of slavery, and did something about it, well ahead of other Europeans - and our American cousins

Exactly my point, whereas I neither deny or condone the British involvement I do think that we are often guilty of beating ourselves with a stick over such issues as slavery and having a colonial empire etc. Both are in our historical past and have little or no relevance to the present day, but many seem happy to ignore similar empires and practices that reflect badly on other cultures and civilisations whilst condemning our own. What about the brutality of the Roman Empire with its entrenched use of slaves and colonial expansion. The Ottoman Empire with its janissary (Christian slave) army and empirical dreams and forays into Europe, Mehmed the Conqueror, Suliman the Magnificent. The Arab conquest of Egypt, Saladin. The Moors invasion and occupation of Spain, even Islam itself is an expansionist religion and in the past has conquered and enslaved people, many have arisen from the Muslim ranks to try and conquer the known world, remember the Mahdi of Sudan? and don’t forget The Mughal and the Greek Empires, the list is endless when you start criticising the past actions of just one country in isolation, everything must be viewed from the prevailing norms of that particular era.

I agree with both posts, but greed is a powerful motivator, so I can not except that there was not some kind of band of chancres willing to go the extra distance in capturing their own slaves, British lead and fitted out. Pirates where everywhere, of all nationalities, looking for that quick profit. I tend not to dwell on the past histories of our once so called glorious empire, what happened yesterday, is still actively happening today, or is taking place on our territory. We have learned next to nothing. IMO.

For those of us in the UK you can now download an app called Safe Car Wash. The aim of this is to help end modern day slavery in car washes. It gathers info and in many cases reports findings to the police.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cdnpj5jz9gyt/slavery