Is social justice, justice at all?

The Ten Commandments… spiritual wisdom for physical, earthy, human life lived in community; heavenly wisdom for earthly use…the manual for loving God and loving your neighbour as yourself in bullet point format.

The British empire began as a hungry search for wealth, for trade and lands, and where traders pioneered, conquest and colonists followed sooner or later. … it was a huge success.

Are you thinking there is a spelling error in the title, that it should read ‘The Patriarchy?’ That is what feminists continually tell us is one of the great ills of the world, Patriarchy, the rule of fathers and how they systematically oppress women in the world. Like original sin the Patriarchy infests all of human society and twists and distorts it to subjugation by the powerful male.

 Blasphemy!  What an old-fashioned and medieval sounding term, conjuring up images of the Spanish Inquisition or Iranian Ayatollahs, nothing to do with the modern, progressive world in which we are fortunate to live. What has this weird concept got to do with us, any rational person might ask? The Blasphemy Act of 1697 made it an offence in England or Wales, …

In the Greek city of Corinth, in the winter of the year now known as AD57, a man sat down to write what has been, by most measures, the most important letter ever written in Europe, perhaps the world.  The man was the Apostle Paul, previously known as Saul of Tarsus, a Jewish scholar of the finest calibre yet steeped in the culture of the Greco-Roman world.  The letter was addressed to ‘all who are in Rome, beloved of God,’ the nascent Christian church in the capital of the empire…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,’ so wrote Thomas Jefferson in the 1776 Declaration of Independence of the American colonies of Britain. Twenty-three years later ‘Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite’ was the shout  as French revolutionaries stormed the Bastille prison and began the overthrow of the French monarchy.  Republicanism was much in the air in the late eighteenth century

There is of course no such thing as a short history of slavery. Slavery is an institution that has always existed, from the beginning of recorded history until now, so what I will attempt instead is a condensed overview, with an emphasis on that period of the European expansion when white slavers took African slaves across the Atlantic to live, work and die in the Americas, for it is through the prism of that experience that our western society perceives and interprets slavery.

The character and legacy of Winston Churchill has come under attack in recent days for his allegedly racist views and in particular that decisions concerning food movements led to the death by starvation of an estimated 3 million people in India.  This has been described as a war crime. They have led to calls for Churchill’s statue to be removed from Parliament Square, to it being defaced with slogans and graffiti…