deep sorrow:
'It is hard to believe that what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time,' the Prime Minister will say. 'Personally I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was - how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition, but also to express our deep sorrow that it ever happened, that it ever could have happened and to rejoice at the different and better times we live in today.'Guardian UK 26.Nov.06
[...]
The Prime Minister's decision to make a statement on the issue will reignite the debate on the role of apology in modern politics. He was criticised when, in 1997, he said he 'reflected' on the deaths caused by the Irish Potato Famine.
-
I had a hard time understanding the first guy that told me that leasing a car, once you get into the economic brackets he was moving through, makes far more sense than buying one.
Even though the immediate monthly fees are generally higher, the overall cost, the actual ding for the actual ride, is far lower. No maintenance, and you don't have to worry about selling it when it gets too old to suit the bill.
Owning human beings, especially human beings capable of long hours of strenuous manual labor, is very cost-intensive. You have to feed them, and water them, and protect them from the elements and predators.
You don't just go beating them to death when they don't work to your standards of efficiency, except now and again as an example to the rest; unless, like in the Belgian Congo back in the day, you had a more than plentiful supply to hand, and the labor involved was in the short-term extraction of local resources, in this case rubber, and you could therefore afford to run through them like disposable gloves.
In the American colonies, and the Carribbean - in most of the places it would be appropriate for Blair to be apologizing for the British having brought the unwilling and violently coerced Africans his critics identify with - good slaves were hard to come by and worth substantial amounts of money. Consequently they had to be maintained, which meant fed, sheltered, even doctored up a little - to protect the investment.
Leasing human beings is much cheaper in the long run, and has almost none of the overhead slavery inevitably brings.
So the Irish Potato Famine so-called, kicking loose untold hundreds of thousands of relatively starving and thus more than willing laborers, men and women, and children too let's remember, more than willing to work all day and all week for enough food to keep from dying in their tracks.
It isn't slavery if there's wages paid, no matter how low those wages are.
And they would be having to find their own shelter at the end of that working day now, wouldn't they.
For sure it's none of yours where they sleep, or when, so long as they're back to work on time and doing a full day's worth while they're there.
And they can bloody well feed themselves if they want to eat now can't they?
