Reform are bleating to corporate media about reparations

Reform – the UK media’s darling – is currently being given a platform to air cruel statements about slavery and reparation demands on most UK news channels and platforms.

A resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly declared the transatlantic slave trade and the associated system of racialised chattel enslavement to be the gravest crime against humanity, a text that saw the UK and Ukraine abstain, as the measure passed with 123 votes in favour and only three countries, Argentina, Israel, and the United States, voting against.

Reform have corporate media in the palm of their hand

Zia Yusuf’s face has been on various videos this morning, expressing how aghast he is!

Darren Grimes is also at hand to indulge Yusuf’s xenophobia.

What opposition?

The mainstream media is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing. It is lending credence to voices talking about a symbolic vote by the UN General Assembly, to channel the indignation that people are feeling at the state of the world.

For fuck sake, Trump is literally threatening nuclear armageddon – but let’s please give a mic to Farage and his fan boys, Yusuf and Grimes, to see how they feel about the UN’s PR.

As Professor Kehinde Andrews pointed out on his podcast Make It Plain, the UN resolution is useless. It is not legally binding. The General Assembly has no power. The Security Council – with its five permanent members who have veto power, including the UK and US – is where real decisions are made. This resolution changes nothing.

Andrews notes that when Britain abolished slavery, it gave the largest payment in history, about 5% of GDP, to slave owners. The enslaved got nothing.

Britain’s industrial revolution was because of slavery. As Professor Kehinde Andrews put it: gold, silver, indigo, tobacco, sugar, cotton.

Those six commodities make the industrial revolution happen. Without those commodities, there is no Industrial Revolution. It is that simple.

Outright lie

So when Reform UK talks about the “bank being closed” and threatens to ban visas over a UN press release, they are defending a lie. Full stop. The lie that Britain’s wealth is clean.

The media run Reform’s theatre of indignation because that is their job.

As Professor Michael Parenti documented in Inventing Reality, the media treat mass atrocity as if the victims were just unfortunate figures in a “tragedy ordained by destiny”, never naming the perpetrators, never counting the debt, never asking who still profits.

Parenti wrote:

The most effective propaganda is that which relies on framing rather than on falsehood. By bending the truth rather than breaking it,using emphasis, nuance, innuendo, and peripheral embellishments,communicators can create a desired impression without resorting to explicit advocacy and without departing too far from the appearance of objectivity.

How apt is this analysis to the Gaza genocide, slavery, austerity deaths – the list is long and bloody.

Featured image via the Canary