Posted on

Hard Borders in London and the Napoleon of Notting Hill

On Monday morning, the Foreign Secretary Rt. Hon. Boris Johnson MP was asked on BBC radio what the British Government’s vision of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland would look like, should the UK leave the EU Single Market and Customs Union. In a garbled answer about the power of technology to facilitate frictionless trade, he put forward this analogy:

There is no border between Camden and Westminster, but when I was mayor of London we anaesthetically and invisibly took hundreds of millions of pounds from the accounts of people travelling between those two boroughs without any need for border checks whatever.

He was presumbaly referring to London’s Congestion Charge. Journalists and social media users spent the rest of the morning mocking this wholly inappropriate analogy with the centuries old troubles in Ireland.


All this made me think about one of my favourite books, The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesteron. In that story, written in 1904 but set in 1984, a whimsical king named Auberon Quin (appointed by lottery, the population having long since given up on both democracy and hereditary monarchy) decrees that each London Borough becomes its own city state. He sets about creating coats of arms and other heraldic items for each. Continue reading “Hard Borders in London and the Napoleon of Notting Hill”

Posted on

Social Cost of Slavery

Via Blattman, by way of Sides and Sullivan, an interesting piece of research on how the slave trade had an impact down the generations:

we show that individuals whose ancestors were heavily threatened by the slave trade today exhibit less trust in neighbors, family co-ethnics, and their local government. (pdf)

This reminds me of several things.  The first is the debate between Alan Keyes and Barack Obama in 2004, when they contested the Illinois Senate seat that Obama eventually won by a landslide.  Keyes essentially accused Obama of being “not black enough“:

Barack Obama and I are of the same race, but we are not of the same heritage. And there is a distinction. Race is something physical. Heritage is something that may have an element that is physical or biological, but that also includes other elements of history and experience–the kinds of things that have helped to shape the mind and heart of an individual and that are not determined by physics and biology. And we are of different heritages. I’m of a slave heritage, and he is not.

Although Keyes was right to make the distinction between heritage and race, he was wrong to think it had any electoral relevance.  And in the light of the Harvard research, it looks like he was wrong about the extent of the differences between his and Obama’s heritage.   Even if Obama, through his father, is not of slave descent, he is however from a people from whence slaves were drawn.  And that brings with it similar social problems to bona fide slave children (as Keyes would have it).
Second, I’m reminded incidentally of the correlation between the counties that voted blue (i.e. Democrat) last November, and the cotton picking regions of mid-nineteenth century America.
Thirdly, I’m reminded of G.K. Chesterton’s formulation: “We are the heir of all ages”.
Which in turn allows me to ponder the idea of ancestor worship, popular in many African cultures.  Taken literally, the idea that your forebears might be watching you seems like an irrelevant and primitive idea.  However, seen through the prism of the Harvard research, the idea of being haunted by your country’s collective past takes on a new and very real meaning.  The unease of great-grandparents long-since buried, still festers in the soul, and it cannot be excised by education, science or modernity.

Part of the 'Gambella Stories' series by Turkairo
Part of the ‘Gambella Stories’ series by Turkairo