The Royal African Company(founded 1660)was responsible for transporting 187,000 slaves from Africa to English colonies including the Caribbean islands between 1672 and 1720. Many were branded with the initials of the Royal who founded the Company, the Duke of York ‘DY’. How this translates into the wealth of the Royal Family remains open to question. It may be suggested that this is a matter for the Government not the Royals but there is surely nothing to stop the Royal Family from signalling that they believe reparations in some form should be forthcoming.
Of course the defenders of British history with nothing left out are back again suggesting that slavery and Britain’s role in it doesn’t need to be looked at or understood further.
Fortunately some significant new research has uncovered exactly who the British slave traders were, what positions they held and what they did with their wealth
The historian David Olusoga made a two part TV series about the findings which was broadcast on the BBC earlier in 2026.
Keir Starmer appeared to be a man of few principles except one, that his support for Arsenal.
I no huge fan of his successor in the Holborn and St Pancras seat Sagal Abdi-Wali but she deserves credit for mentioning her support for Spurs in her maiden speech in the Commons on 2nd November.
It may be very modest progress in history but it is progress
My constituency has a sporting legacy stretching back over a century, and I am pleased to make a little history of my own, as Holborn and St Pancras’s first Tottenham Hotspur supporter MP, bringing an end to a rather lengthy period of Arsenal and West Ham dominance in our representation in this House. If supporting Spurs had a dictionary definition, it would read something like this: “To remain eternally hopeful despite overwhelming evidence, and to return, every season, convinced that this will finally be your year.” I hope that combination of optimism and sheer refusal to give up will serve me well in this House.
Celebrity Traitors 2026 ended on 30th October with two Faithful winners donating the prize money to refugee charities.
However there is a bottom line beyond the series itself.
The Observer (1st November) published a chart showing the growth of followers on the Insta accounts of the participants (where they have them)
Traitors tend to do better because they get more airtime, which explains why participants often want to be Traitors, but clearly there are other factors at work. According to Lambert who produce the show for the BBC there is a already significant interest in the 2027 series and they are looking for an upgrade in the celebs that appear. Liz Truss is not, at the moment, in the running, although she was before series one aired.
Meanwhile for those missing their Traitors fix BBC1 & IPlayer have started airing series 2 of Traitors Ireland, which uses an Irish castle but otherwise sticks closely to the format of the UK versions.
Liz Truss attacks Ed Miliband’s parents, Ralph Miliband & Marion Kozak
After Ed Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, posted a brief statement on social media about why Britian in 2026 must accept it’s role in the slave trade, Liz Truss popped up and demanded that he apologise for his family’s role in Communism.
Like pretty much anything Truss says this is wrong.
Both Ralph Miliband and his partner Marion Kozak were Jewish refugees from the Nazis. Ralph served in the Royal Navy before becoming a distinguished academic and a leading figure in the post-1956 New Left.
Attack on the Milibands are not new and I reproduce a commentary of one in the Daily Mail from 2013
It might be thought that Ralph Miliband, who died in 1994, was a card carrying member of the Communist Party or, alternatively, a Trotskyist.
In fact he was neither. He was a member of the Labour Party, a supporter of Nye Bevan, in the 1950s and recorded that he left ‘around 1960’ when the right-wing leader Gaitskell was Labour leader. There is no indication that he ever joined another political organisation. Rather he belonged to that group, still very much a feature of the left of British politics, who don’t see a great deal of hope that Labour will fundamentally change things, but don’t see an immediate chance of anything further to the left doing so either.
According to the Mail 2nd October 2013 and a writer called Michael Burleigh, while Ralph Miliband did not defend Stalin or the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 [though this admission is in brackets two thirds of the way down an article]he knew people like Eric Hobsbawm who possibly did, or at any rate did not condemn them. There is a name on the left for this technique of argument and it is known as the ‘Stalinist amalgam’. That is to put together actually unrelated pieces of information and by doing so claiming that they are connected.
The Mail also seems to think that because Miliband was a Marxist, and as Russia claimed to be Marxist then he must have been some form of apologist. I know this will be a great effort for Mail journalists but by using something called Google on the interweb the back archive of the Socialist Register which Ralph Miliband edited is available free. In the 1973 edition, the inquisitive journalist will find a book review written by Miliband, Stalin and after, where he not only lays out the reality of the crimes of Stalinism but also demolishes various intellectual attempts to apologise for them.
The reality which the Mail either wanted to ignore or was ignorant of is, that many Marxists were anti-Stalinists, and some faced show trials, the gulag and death in Russia for saying so.
In reality Miliband was associated with the New Left which developed after the crisis in the Communist Party in 1956 and was affiliated with one of its leading journals The New Reasoner which was edited by the socialist historians E P Thompson and John Saville.
The New Reasoner merged with another new left journal Universities and Left Review to form New Left Review in 1960. Miliband wrote some pieces in early issues but left when the new New Leftists around Perry Anderson assumed control arguing that he felt the political direction was uncertain.
At the point Miliband formed with Saville [E P Thompson was also invited but declined] the yearly journal of left-wing comment and analysis, the Socialist Register, published by Merlin. It continues to this day and Miliband was associated with it over four decades, co-writing with Saville many of the Editorials in its early issues.
The second issue in 1965 carried EP Thompson’s seminal essay The Peculiarities of the English which argued amongst other things that the British labour movement had less time for theoretical debates than its European counterparts because it had so ‘bloody much to oppose’ in terms of British imperial activity.
It’s worth noting that all this was part of the broader mainstream left of the 1960s. Indeed Miliband who had written a noteworthy history of the Labour Party, Parliamentary Socialism, published in 1961 set out to prove Thompson wrong by developing part of a British school of Marxist thought. Books such as the State in Capitalist Society [1969] a set text on University courses in my days as an undergraduate underlined his point.
Miliband’s survey of what subjects and issues the Socialist Register had covered published in its 30th anniversary edition in 1994, which appeared only months before his death, indicates the broad range of socialist and Marxist views and debates it carried.
Miliband’s dilemma of 1960, being frustrated with Labour and with the left alternatives to it remained with him to the end. His 1976 essay Moving On, reaffirmed his critique of the Labour Party but acknowledged the weakness of the left beyond its ranks.
In reality Miliband never did affiliate with any of the left-wing groups that developed after 1968.
For the Daily Mail to suggest that he hated Britain was of course absurd. Ed Miliband has recounted to the BBC’s Test Match Special how his father took him to cricket matches in Leeds when a boy [where Ralph Miliband taught for a period] and where he remembered watching Geoffrey Boycott in action.
What the Mail meant of course is that Ralph Miliband was part of a post-1956 Marxist left that it didn’t like at the time and still doesn’t like.
Not only was The Celebrity Traitors compulsive viewing (Review, 30 October), but the two winners donating £80,000 to two refugee charities was the best two fingers to racism possible. Keith Flett Tottenham, London
The news that the winners of Celebrity Traitors had donated their share of the prize money to refugee charities caused predictable outrage amongst the usual suspects (Daily Express)
Liz Truss’s interview in the Sunday Times (1st November 2026) has received a lot of publicity because of her claim that instead of peddling far right conspiracy theories she could simply have agreed that she got it wrong during the 49 days and opted instead for a ‘cushy’ job in the City of London.
The interview is interesting because it summarises a far right world view that is held by numbers of people in the UK and the US and probably elsewhere too.
Truss says she is talking to ‘international allies’ because ‘the Islamo-Communist threat we’re facing here in Britain is not unique’. What this threat is and who is promoting it is left unsaid.
She continues her attack on the Bank of England, the OBR and the Treasury ‘the unelected bureaucrats who hold real power in British society’. Many on the left might agree. However the point was and is that Truss was a Tory PM who is meant to front up those who steward the market capitalist system.
Truss’s view however is that they represent a ‘progressive elite’ who are the ‘Keynesian deep State’. The problem with this conspiracy theory is that if you look at Government policy over the last 15 years neo-liberalism is everywhere and Keynesianism is nowhere.
Boris Johnson ‘stabbed in the back by elements of the Conservative Party’
The Tories, Reform, Kemi Badenoch ‘tinkering’
We can turn briefly to the Preface of Truss’s latest attempt at self justification, Bank Job (2026) to grasp the overarching conspiracy theory at work.
She writes:
In this conspiracy there is no smoke filled room or secret plan(although I can’t rule it out). This is a conspiracy of a governing elite who have prioritised their own welfare and comfort ahead of the people of Britain. It centres on an establishment with a shared worldview, intertwined career paths and vested interests. They rely on the theatre of politics to hide the real decisions and the decision-makers…
Truss is not a serious player currently but were things to lurch further to the right she might be.
I’m not sure what the origin of the ten year plan is, unless its the vaguely social democratic thought that it takes ages to try and reform capitalism even a little bit. The left in general is keen on planning and a planned economy (as opposed to market chaos) but the plan is usually for five years.
