Retired traffic cop, advanced riding and driving examiner. Now semi retired but part time Community transport driver and MiDAS instructor & examiner
Reading, Berkshire
Joined October 2012
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Tony Carter 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
Tony Carter retweeted
The government’s grandest plane, an A321 jet, took off from Stansted at 6.05 a.m. this morning. Burnham wasn't on it. It flew 34 minutes to Manchester to collect the PM, then set off for the Commonwealth summit in Antigua. Guido estimates the detour cost around £20,000 of taxpayer cash. Avanti not good enough for him?
Flight tracking data shows the jet landed in Manchester at 6.39 a.m. and left again at 8.06 a.m., heading for a refuelling stop in Newfoundland before the Caribbean. The government eventually publishes what every trip on the plane costs. Starmer’s same-day trip to Paris on in April came to £39,756 at roughly £20,000 a leg. Stansted to Manchester is shorter than Paris, but every additional leg brings its own landing and handling fees. About £18,000-20,000’s worth according to Guido’s fag packet maths…
The whole jaunt, there and back, comes to about 21 hours of flying. Based on Starmer’s £121,239 trip to Yerevan in May and Yvette Cooper’s £148,700 trip to Washington in December, long-haul flying on the plane costs between £9,500 and £12,400 an hour. That puts Burnham's full trip at about £250,000.
Burnham took the same government jet from Glasgow to Manchester in July to open No10 North, despite a choice of trains. When Liz Truss used the same plane to fly to Australia, @AngelaRayner called it a “ridiculous waste of half a million pounds on a private jet trip”. Thoughts on this one, Ange?
What a remarkable story.
People like this brave lady should never be forgotten
🇬🇧Mary Ellis delivered a Wellington bomber. The ground crew searched it because they didn’t believe she was the pilot.
They looked through the aircraft from nose to tail. She had flown it there.
During the war, she was Mary Wilkins, a farmer’s daughter from Oxfordshire who joined Britain’s Air Transport Auxiliary in October 1941.
Her job was to deliver aircraft where they were needed.
That meant learning to handle very different machines, and then climbing into them and flying them across Britain.
In her later recorded testimony, she described navigating delivery flights without radio assistance, finding unfamiliar airfields, and switching between aircraft types.
The variety was extraordinary. Spitfires. Wellingtons. Mosquitos. Hudsons. Over her ATA service, she ferried around 1,000 aircraft of 76 different types to 210 airfields. Among them were 403 Spitfires.
Then, in the summer of 1945, came something very different: the Gloster Meteor. She became one of only two ATA women to ferry Britain’s first operational jet fighter.
Every aircraft delivery was a flight someone had to make before the machine could begin its next assignment.
Mary made around a thousand of them.
Mary Ellis died on July 24, 2018, at the age of 101. Let’s remember her.
For more WWII stories, follow @Vanguard_WW2
Tony Carter retweeted
The budget chain Poundland is about to go bust.
Soaring labour costs introduced by this govt have brought it to its knees risking 12,000 jobs.
Business Sec Jonathan Reynolds has written to the company asking for an explanation of what's gone wrong.
Clueless Labour muppets.
Tony Carter retweeted
Refugees and Queer refugees …….ffs ….at least I didn’t contribute a penny and nor should anyone else @DefundBBC @BBC @BBCNews
