The UK government is saying that they’re desperate to circumvent the *law* on refuge and asylum and targeting immigration lawyers as politically motivated. This is what fascism looks like. https://twitter.com/ukhomeoffice/status/1298674067323727872

It’s inconceivable to me that the people who are so *proud* of the Royal Navy’s role in suppressing the slave trade are also perfectly happy to let people seeking refuge drown and be forced into planes and sent where they fear for their lives.

Except it is conceivable of course, because no one on here who has ever sung the praises of the anti-slave trade patrol has ever given one solitary shit about the suffering of other people. Liberated Africans are just some abstract concept to “prove” how Great Britain is.

Samuel Crowther, the nine year old Yoruba boy kidnapped as a child in wartime, who became the first Black Bishop of the Church of England, was a child needing refuge, rescued by the anti slave trade patrol.

Thomas King was an Egba boy, rescued by the patrols, who sought refuge in Sierra Leone and studied medicine and was able to be reunited with his mother.

James Covey was only 14 when he acted as interpreter for the Amistad rebels. He was enslaved, and sought refuge in Sierra Leone.

The British suppression of the slave trade is a complicated and difficult history, filled with compromises, and selfishness. Much like contemporary refugee law and policy. But to try and revel in pride in one, and turn away people seeking refuge now is base hypocrisy.

If you want to know more about the brave and brilliant people who survived the slave trade and forged a new home in Sierra Leone, my friend Richard (not on twitter) spent a decade writing this to highlight this important history.

You don’t get to sully the memory of these people. You don’t get to claim to be proud of slave trade suppression and ask the govt to turn people back. You don’t get to post you’re “proud of empire“ and not open your eyes to its horrors, horrors people live through today.