It is probably best if you do not actually read this post.
“Nourishing Justice” is a report produced by a charity (not the sort of charity that runs on voluntary contributions from the public) called “Eating Better” (Registered Charity No. 1175669). The Executive Director of Eating Better is Sarah Wakefield, the Green candidate for the Makerfield by-election upon which so much hangs. Sarah Wakefield wrote the foreword for the “Nourishing Justice” report.
I found out about the report from a GB News article called “Green candidate in Makerfield by-election wants farming to be ‘decolonised’ with ‘inclusive spaces'”. The idea that British farming needed to be decolonised confused me. Who from, the Romans? I was not convinced that GB News was giving a fair account of Eating Better’s charitable work, so I decided to check for myself. GB News was giving a fair account. “Eating Better” did indeed host a decolonial decision-making workshop called “The Gathering Table” in August 2025, co-facilitated by Diana Garduño Jiménez of a charity called “Nourish Scotland”.
“Nourish Scotland” (Registered Charity No. SC048239) is funded by a similar mixture of state money and grants from philanthropic foundations as “Eating Better”, but with the addition of some money from the Scottish government. To be clear, the organisation “Nourish Scotland” did not produce the Nourishing Justice report. “Nourish Scotland” might also be easily confused with, but is separate from, another body and another report mentioned on page 8 of the Nourishing Justice report, which says,
“The contemporary UK food system generally lacks the ability to apply race, gender, and class analysis to how food systems should change. The Sankofa Report: British Colonialism and the UK Food System delves into the numerous layers of inequalities in the current UK food system, stemming from the legacies of colonialism and exploitation. It highlights issues such as underrepresentation in the sector, food insecurity, lack of access to green space for marginalised communities and to the dominance of western epistemologies (theory of knowledge) in food research. Most importantly, the report emphasises that in order to create meaningful and lasting shifts, we must confront and address the forces that have shaped our present food system.
The “Sankofa Report” to which Nourishing Justice links is the rather grand title given to a fourteen page report on “British Colonialism and the UK food system” written by an intern called Jada Phillips at “Food Matters” (Registered Charity No.1178078). The organisation “Food Matters”, you may be surprised to learn, is a registered “charity” funded by by a mixture of public sector grants, National Lottery money, and most of the same charitable trusts and foundations as fund “Eating Better” and “Nourish Scotland”. The name of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation turns up in all three.
I think. Maybe it was only two out of three, or maybe I was thinking of another charity called Eat Scotland or a trading card game called Charity: The Gathering. Gimme a break, I’ve got three tabs up from the Charity Commission, two Annual Reports, four responses from two different AIs (at least one of which is a lie), and a splitting headache.
It’s easy to get confused between the all these bodies with wholesome-sounding words to do with food and eating in their names, but it is very important that you distinguish between them because otherwise you might think that they are functionally identical bodies whose employees get to eat pretty well by being paid to quote each other by the taxpayer.
We need our own version of Data Republican. Urgently.
Yes. For those that don’t know, DataRepublican is a lady who “employs big data analytics and artificial intelligence tools to trace funding flows, visualize charity graphs, and highlight connections between government allocations and nonprofit entities.”
Since all of these British Food Justice state-funded charities seem to take their inspiration and vocabulary from US politics, even when the match to UK politics and history is extremely poor, we might do well to look across the Atlantic for ideas about how to untangle the web.
Thanks Natalie! No way I could have waded through that mire but someone had to be on point and it was you. I honestly don’t know. A few days ago I spent quite a bit in Manchester’s Chinatown, mainly at the Hang Won Hong shop. Good stuff, good prices. Who is exactly being exploited here? I have no idea. Was my choice of sesame oil overly heteronormative? Am I being colonialist or culturally appropriating by buying Chinese (also Japanese, Korean and Thai) food? Or, God help us!, merely engaging in a mutually beneficial business exchange? They get the money they want. I get the goods I want! Obviously this is evil for some reason known only to the Enlightened.
Anyway… I made an excellent Szechuan soup and the Thai mushroom sauce is utterly ace. It may even have been made by transgender people of colour. Would that make it OK or would that glory be nullified by it being consumed by a middle-aged, middle-class white English heterosexual male?
Thank you for the warning Natalie.
I have high blood pressure, and since a little incident a couple of years ago (when I found myself on the floor at home) I have had a speck in my right eye (stroke? I do not know), so I have to be careful of what I read on watch – to try and avoid going into a rage, but I did prepare myself and looked at the post.
It is the normal mixture of irrational ravings and Marxist doctrine (Classical Marxism at least tried to be a rational set of theories – modern “Critical Theory” Marxism rejects reason totally – it embraces both irrationality and evil – the latter being the conscious effort to do harm) which is destroying what is left of the West.
But this is not just the Green party – these doctrines dominate the education systems of most Western nations, and thus dominate the international establishment.
As for the Makerfield by-election – Reform and Restore are busy cutting each other’s throats and the Conservative Party should NOT have put up a candidate (if I get disciplined for telling the truth so-be-it).
If the pro Western civilization forces, the right, do not unite, then the right will die – the West will die.
This is very simple – yet a lot of important people (in several political parties) do not wish to be told this truth.
Sometimes evil is obvious – for example the present Mayor of New York City (whose evil, a strange, contradictory, mixture of “Critical Theory” modern Marxism and Islam, is so obvious he might as well have horns and a tail – which, I hasten to add, he does NOT). But sometimes those who, in effect (in consequences) serve evil, appear quite normal – even boring. “Andy” Burnham is about as banal as it is possible to be – he appears totally harmless and may even have good intentions, but him as Prime Minister would have evil consequences – even if he does not consciously intend to do harm (as a Mamdani type figure does).
Britain already has little hope of survival (the facts are brutal) – it would be unfortunate to see what little hope remains, further reduced.
Am I the only one that finds the concept of “Nourish Scotland” a bit amusing, given that the Scottish diet is mainly composed of haggis, deep fried mars bars, Irn Bru, and of course that cocaine of all foodstuffs, millionaire shortbread?
Surely if we are really concerned about nourishing Scotland it’d be rather more important to focus on brussel sprouts, brocoli and a slightly smaller portion of chips rather than the color of the skin of the people making it. From what I remember in Scotland many of the restaurants are owned by immigrants. We white people are pretty terrible at making pakora or whatever they make those elephant leg gyros out of.
My youth spent in Glasgow was fed at Glenn’s fish and chip shop (which I am sure used to be owned by Mr Glenn who had much lighter skin than the present owner), an amazing Indian restaurant whose name escapes me for now, but had the advantage of staying open until after the pubs closed, and of course the Boundary Cafe, that used to sell these spring rolls that were so greasy they only tasted good after six pints of 80′ ale. Also, as a graduate of the University of Glasgow, the pubs and restaurants around Byres Road were all truly magnificent, and nary a pale skinned owner was in sight. I used to live above Bert’s bar in Edinburgh (which is now sadly a rather posh wine bar), and Bert had a skin color that seemed likely to match his name. However, the place was surrounded by ethnic food establishments. And, being the decolonizer that I am, I made sure to patronize all of them.
Those were the days I could eat anything and not put on any weight. Truly youth is wasted on the young.
You lot really need to take your country back.
Love him or hate him, Jeremy Clarkson has done a good job of highlighting the problems faced by British farmers with his show Clarkson’s Farm. Now some chuckleheads want to make things more difficult for them. That turned out great for Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and is probably working out just as well in South Africa. I saw something that said the Orange Man is going to allow 10K more white South African farmers emigrate since they were being persecuted. Don’t know if it is true. Wonder if he would let English farmers in to flee the madness?
Echoing bored383, sounds like the UK (and US of course) governments have been colonized by a parasitic life-form, and need to be decolonized.
I have a warped sense of humour so when I read the bit about “underrepresentation in the sector” I immediately thought of the time when minorities were over represented in the agricultural sector. You know. America before 1865 …
Are they advocating for forcing the newly minted British with a better suntan than me to work in the fields to even up the mix? Interested people want to know, you know …
This is really quite fascinating, from my point of view as an amateur foodie and food historian.
If I may offer my left-leaning (not liberal) perspective, I think there’s some issues with how this is being framed, to whit:
“Decolonisation” has it’s roots in countries that were colonised, and how those countries had their own systems (food in this case) destroyed by the colonisers, and had systems imposed on them that were not compatible with their land.
The UK has not been colonised in the same sense – we were the colonisers – and so it’s the wrong framing of issues of potential racism in the UK food/farming system.
Conflating “decolonisation” with “systemic racism” seems to be what has happened here, and I think that this is an enormous problem, because the two things are not the same.
This feels to me like a wishy-washy liberal framing, that probably doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
I’ve skimmed the Sankofa Report, and there’s a lot of factually accurate information in there, with a lot of woolly prescriptions on how to “solve” the (factually accurate) issues.
There’s a segment in there that talks about low access to “culturally appropriate foods” – which is fine, this is probably true. I cook a lot of food from different cultures, and struggle to find the authentic ingredients from my books – it’s factually accurate.
But I also have a decent number of recipe books that focus on pre-20th (or pre-19th) century British food, and an amount of those ingredients are not available to me, either – duck, venison, oyster, lobster etc – without incurring significant costs; the reasons are many and varied, but essentially can be boiled down to the urbanisation of the UK in the 19th Century that was far more rapid than in the rest of Europe (this is more-or-less why our “traditional” food is considered to be so bland and shit)
@NickM
A few years ago, there was a big hoo-hah because a couple of white American young ladies opened up a taco truck (possibly in Portland or similar, I don’t recall exactly). They’d spent some time travelling round Mexico learning how to make tacos/burritos etc from scratch, in the most authentic way that was within their ability, given access to ingredients/equipment.
The “liberals” ripped them apart, because “cultural appropriation”
The actual “left” cheerfully proceeded to rip the liberals apart, because “grow the fuck up, you utter misplaced traffic cones. This is what exchange of ideas means”, and we were fully supportive of the two young lasses and their taco truck.
By which I mean – by all that is holy, crack on with making Thai and Chinese food (and I’ll take a recipe from you for Szechuan soup any day of the week that you have time to offer it)
neonsnake,
I basically made this. I left out the peas, pork and prawns*. I instead used a some vegan “oyster” sauce to fish it up a bit. I also used some red pepper to replace the peas and added black as well as white pepper and some five spice and a hint of ginger and garlic and grated celery and onion. I served with finely sliced cucumber and spring onion. Why the changes? I believe in “layering” flavours. You can go route one with flavour and just bung in a veritable Santiago of chilli but that’s not great hence chillies and black and white pepper. Same for the alliums. That is why onion, celery and garlic. I almost stuck some leek in there but…
You do have to keep the main heat from the white pepper. The chilli and black pepper are only supporting actors here.
The key to any soup is the stock. Start with that. Make your own though this stuff is great.
Bon appetit!
See, not content with doing the Chinese I can even culturally appropriate the French!
*I have never liked pork. Way to fatty and sickly sweet. And as to prawns – I don’t eat bugs. I know they aren’t technically “bugs” but you know what i mean by “bugs”. If I’m not going to eat beetles (though I do have plans for Sir Paul) then I’m not eating sea-beetles.
@NickM
I basically made this. I left out the peas, pork and prawns*.
Isn’t that like saying “I made steak au poivre” but I left out the beef? 😉 Anyway your soup sounds delicious, I’ll have to give it a try, but I’m keeping the sea bugs. Might also be good substituting bacon for the pork, since adding bacon makes everything better. (A local café around here serves ice cream with bacon bits and it is excellent.)
Samizdata — not only political commentary, refreshing debate and unadulterated free speech, but apparently culinary recipes too now!
neonsnake,
After you’ve had your soup a book springs to mind! Rudyard Kipling’s “Plain Tales from The Hills” contains a short story, “Pig” which is about a demented attempt by a Raj official to bring pig farming to India. It doesn’t work out well and ends with someone going, literally, “Doolally”.
Fraser,
Thanks! I know I changed the original to almost “soup stone” levels. I understand where you’re coming from with the prawns but… I just can’t bring myself to eat anything with more than four legs. It’s just a taboo I have. As to the bacon… In principle that could work but you’re already got a quite salty dish so I’d be very careful.
@ NickM
Firstly – I’m going to give full respect to you using the veg Bouillon – I have exactly that one in my cupboard at literal all times.
I make my own stock, more-or-less 90% of the time, but I’m an utter furious proponent of “fed is best”, so for those that don’t have that ability – that bouillon is great.
I make a lot of chicken for various friends who find cooking difficult, for various reasons, so I always have bones/carcasses – I’m myself WFH, so it’s easy enough for me to whack it into the slow cooker at 9am (the slow cooker is my favoured way of making stock) for the day and then freeze it later.
Also: massively good on you for using white pepper. It’s much maligned, but should not be dismissed, right???
Ah, that’s a shame that you don’t like pork (or prawns – I like prawns, but I can be “fussy” about seafood). I understand what you’re saying though, even if it’s something I do like (it’s my “go-to”). Do you feel the same about bacon etc?
Do you have a favoured meat? (I’m clearly not vegan lol, so do crack on)
Like, I have a way of cooking which starts with a big Sunday roast, and then working out the leftovers after…
I’ve had massive success with adding bacon bits into veg and serving them up to the various kids I cook for.
Who knew? (everyone lol)
…Fraser, please go on?
I make my own bacon, but I’m not quite at “making my own ice cream” stage?
I’m intrigued. How would that work?
“Colonisation” is moving to a different country, settling there, and raising descendants. 20% of the population of the UK were born overseas. Who’s doing the colonising?
neonsnake,
Type “How to make ice cream” into Google and there is a lot there. You need whipping cream, condensed milk and a freezer and Robert is suddenly a close relative!
jgh,
Yup. Or if we are to stick to the food theme… How much easier is it to get a kebab in Manchester than fish and chips in Islamabad? This in no way is racist and I do like the genuine diversity of food etc in modern Britain. That’s great! Come here, set up a business and that works then I have no problem with that. And almost inevitably the UK has many migrants from our former “colonies”. What I do have a problem with is people stating that the UK in the C21st is colonizing. No, we are not. We de-colonized very successfully (for the most part) and that was years ago.
It’s a myth like Nuclear Gandhi.
The only food the British “colonizers” forbad people to eat was human flesh.
The idea that the British were bad for local cuisines is, therefore, generally (generally) false.
The great British “Imperialists” were not all good, some of the people employed by the East India Company were dreadful – both for Indians, and for shareholders back in Britain – because they did not care about them either, they cared only for their own ambition – Paul Benfield is a more clear cut case than Warren Hastings – who still has his defenders, although I am NOT one of them.
Men such as Raffles in Singapore and Lord Lugard in Africa did good – not harm. Great good – and a education system (and general establishment) that teaches hatred of them, shows itself to be evil.
As for “decolonize” in relation to Britain and other Western nations – it is often defined as being “anti white” as, in the case of Britain, being about exterminating the “white” population – but that is not fully true, not strictly speaking.
As the true target of the “Critical Theory” Marxists is CAPITALISM – they say “white” or “racist” (which, to them, means the same thing) – but they really mean CAPITALIST.
To them, to the “Critical Theory” or “Woke” Marxists, a black or brown farmer or business owner is “white” because they are “Capitalists” – they have “internalized the ideology of the capitalists” – such supposed “evils” as hard work, getting to work on time, reason – the belief in objective reality and the ability of human reason to find it – find it, not create it. And, of course, private property in the means of production – most importantly in LAND.
That the “Green” candidate comes out with Critical Theory Marxist doctrines should surprise no one – but it is not just the Green candidate, Critical Theory Marxist doctrines saturate the establishment in this country – and many other countries.
Even a few decades ago there were still books in school libraries that made the TRUE point that British settlers in North America prospered more than French settlers because the British settlers had much more freedom (more liberty) than the French settlers – who were under the detailed control of the French government via endless planning and regulations.
Sadly such works are long purged now.
It should also be pointed out that that the British did NOT “colonize” India – they ruled it, as other Empires had done before – they did not “colonize” it.
If someone is really against “colonization” they are saying that Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States should never have been created – as these were areas that actually were “colonized”.
That such a person, someone who is against the creation of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, is an enemy of the British people, and ALSO an enemy of civilization generally, is obvious.
Er, wouldn’t decolonizing British farming actually mean colonizing it?
Just askin’.
@neonsnake
I’m intrigued. How would that work?
Just like adding sprinkles (or as you brits would say hundreds and thousands.) Little chopped up bits of bacon. The contrast between the salty bacon and the sweet creamy ice cream is amazing. Obviously pretty easy to do at home, though I’d get rid of the bacon grease and put it on pretty dry.
BTW, since we are talking food and ice cream, something I have done a number of times is ice cream made with dry ice. Blitz the dry ice into a powder, add standard ice cream ingredients (cream, milk, sugar, and whatever flavors you want) and mix them all together. Then put in the freezer (ironically the last part is to allow the dry ice to boil off). Super creamy ice cream that also is a little bit fizzy. Which is awesome. Careful though to leave it in the freezer for at least an hour — you don’t want to eat a little chunk of dry ice.
h/t to Ragusea, my favorite online chef.
Or maybe decolonizing British farming would mean removing any farmer or farmworker who is not of English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh ethnicity?
This gets confusing very quickly!
Or maybe decolonizing British farming would mean removing any farmer or farmworker who is not of English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh ethnicity?
This sure gets confusing very quickly!
I have actually been wanting to try this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk3JHCaFe8A
Ragusea, dry ice ice cream!
The East India Company should never have been given a monopoly of trade with India – and it should never have been allowed to levy taxes or take land. In Bengal its governance was particularly bad,although Bengal has collapsed into famine many times over the centuries – due to geography and climate, the bad governance of the East India Company should not be excused.
Although, the argument against this is that the French East India Company would have taken over instead.
Oddly enough the famines of the late 1700s, which were (partly) the fault of the East India Company are often ignored today – instead the famine of the 1940s in Bengal is condemned, even though that was NOT the fault of Winston Churchill – it was the fault of the Imperial Japanese Army which was occupying the areas, such as Burma, which sent food to Bengal when the crops failed in Bengal.
The idea that India would have been better off under the French in the 1700s is false – and the idea that India would have been better off under Imperial Japan in the 1940s is absurd.
As such things as the Islamic invasions of India (which slaughtered vast numbers of Indians) showed – the subcontinent tends to fall to Empires, although that does NOT mean it is good that it does.
A strong independent India is in the best interests of the Indians – and, I believe, in the best interests of the world.
I’m imagining cooking it until it’s pretty crispy (US-style streaky, rather than UK-style back bacon), letting it cool, chopping it as fine as possible. I’ve had ice-cream with olive oil and salt before, that was surprisingly good, and I’m guessing this will tick that same “sweet and salty” box. I don’t eat a lot of ice-cream, but I’m thinking I’ll make my next batch of bacon from belly instead of loin, and give it a go.
…and I’ve just realised, I have no idea what dry ice actually is – just not something I’d ever thought about! A touch of Googling needed, methinks.
——
More on-topic – I’ve been reading through the Sankofa report, and I stand by my initial “knee-jerk” thoughts; there’s some observations in there that are almost definitely factually accurate – under-representation of minorities in certain sectors within the food and agriculture industry is almost certainly “true”, although it’s not something I’ve personally ever looked into in.
There’s also something in there about creating World Food Stores – ie. with ingredients that are not commonly available in the UK, but which immigrants would have been used to.
I am certainly supportive of this – I go through phases of learning to cook other cultures’ foodstuffs, and often come up against difficulties in sourcing ingredients. Fresh tomatillos in the UK? pfft. Poblano chillies? Impossible. Okra? Not impossible, but not easy (if anyone fancies correcting me and telling me where to buy fresh poblanos, I welcome it)
But there’s little in the way of recommendations, other than “we should have more representation” – which we certainly should. No-one sensible disagrees with that, because it will mean more exciting ingredients and more exciting food. How to get there? I personally don’t know; I stick to growing in my front and back yard, and a little bit of hydroponics indoors.
But none of this is decolonisation in the way that word is normally used. I understand where they’re trying to come from – that the food systems in the UK are a result of our previous history of colonisation, but it’s the wrong way to approach it (IMO).
As people have drolly noted above, “decolonising” UK farming and the food industry could very well be taken to mean that only people of UK ancestry should be involved, which one presumes was not the point at all.
Whilst I don’t advocate for 100% autarky, I’m very, very much “pro” growing more of our own food in the UK; the shorter the distance between where it’s grown and where it’s consumed the better, basically to insulate us from supply chain disruptions. And there’s amazing technology which allows us to grow food that historically just wouldn’t have been possible – everything from simple greenhouses and cold frames up to hydroponics, vertical farming and so on.
And I’d love to see more permaculture-influenced diversity of foodstuffs, rather than the god-awful mono-cropping that seemed like a good idea at the time, but we now know is harmful in the long run; there’s a lot to learn from other cultures in terms of growing more efficiently (easy example – the “three sisters” method); I’d like to see these addressed rather than the broad-brush approach of changing virtually nothing other than the demographics of the people involved that is seemingly being advocated in the linked articles.
India under the rule of Imperial Japan would have been Hell. It would have made The Rape of Nanjing look like a Sunday School outing…
The weird thing is I have known a lot of folks from the former British colonies and they don;t seem aggrieved about what my ancestors did or didn’t do. This is, it seems to be, bizarre British self-loathing.
Anyway, I’m going to play Civ and possibly make ice cream.
I do wonder where I could get hold of dry ice.
Or what about liquid nitrogen, or even helium? When I was an undergrad most of the physics and maths lectures I went to at Nottingham were in lecture theatre B1 which was directly under the largest helium dilution fridge in Europe. If things had gone Pete Tong you’d have had 100+ students looking like Jack Nicholson at the end of “The Shining”.
I mean, sure. Stamford Raffles had just shy of 500 women shipped to Borneo from Malay to serve as, uh, how can I put this? “Female companionship” for Alexander Hare?
The guy was a pimp and a sex trafficker. He made lots of noise about outlawing slavery for political reasons, whilst continuing it in actuality.
But, yeah – he “did good”, if you’re a utilitarian of the Jeremy Bentham mold, which is what Paul is.
*shrugs*
I’m not; I don’t think that human trafficking is acceptable, no matter whether he also introduced “free trade” (lol) at the same time.
neonsnake,
Are you “starting*”? Paul Marks has made it abundantly clear that he is not a utilitarian of any form.
*A Geordie term meaning to pick a pointless fight for the sheer Hell of it.
“The Struggle for North America” (1969) by Barry Williams, was, I think, the book on the British and French colonies in North America I was thinking of.
As for neonsnake – no I am not a utilitarian. And nor do I believe in slavery, human sacrifice and cannibalism – unlike the forces neonsnake chooses to support.
As I have pointed out before – neonsnake has repeatedly shown that he is an enemy of all that is good, that that his only purpose in being on this site is to provoke – a task he performs well. Witness his support for things he knows to be false – such as the Labour Theory of Value and Ricardo’s theory on land.
Does he have any good left in him “deep down”? I do not know – but for practical purposes one should not count upon it.
For those who really do not know (neonsnake knows very well) – slavery, human sacrifice and cannibalism (and other evils) were what men such as Raffles and Lugard were struggling against.
He says so, and yet – the rationalisations for colonialism he makes are based in “post-hoc” justifications, and that they maximised the wellbeing for the greater number of people affected.
Colonialism was a dark period – no matter what purported benefits (and there were some) to the subjugated nations, it’s still akin to me breaking into your house, doing the washing-up, loading the dishwasher, and telling you “Now say thank you”. One rather suspects that you’d have preferred me to leave you to it, and you’d have dealt with it in your own time.
This isn’t an anti-British or anti-White stance – after all, no-one alive today was involved in it, and so no-one should feel any shame or guilt over it, but a lot of people seem to think that saying “hey, a few hundred years ago, people did some shitty stuff” means “and therefore you should feel bad for it”, when it clearly doesn’t. I certainly feel no shame over what a bunch of people who weren’t me did, especially given that, like, they were long dead before I was even born.
Paul, without referring to Ricardo, tell me what you think I believe in terms of “land”.
(as for whether I have any “good left in me”, I’ll let people who have good and decency in themselves judge me)
Apologism for “Colonialism” is something that any principled libertarian (“right”-lib as well as “left”) immediately dismisses out of hand (Cato, etc) – it breaches literally every libertarian principle that libertarianism is founded on. There’s just no justification for it.
On a practical level, the only relevant “defense” was – everyone else was doing it, so therefore so should we (Portugal started it!) and we’d have been left behind. That’s…okay…but at least it’s honest. We colonised countries for, obviously, many reasons, but largely it was to do with resource extraction (we should have traded instead), cheap labour (that’s brutal exploitation which runs contrary to even the most cursory reading of the NAP), or a sense of “white man’s burden”, which should be dismissed immediately as being the argument of dickheads.
When it comes to people like Raffles – he was a sex trafficker. Not a lot else matters.
Praising him is akin to saying “Yeah, yeah, I know – but ‘Last Train Home’ was a banger of a tune, right?” (I’ll let you google that one) or indeed “Rock N Roll Part 2” was enough to say “yeah, I know he was a wrong’un, but…”
Only an utterly vicious person would choose to attack Raffles – a man whose life was made up of great achievements mixed with horrible personal tragedy.
This goes way beyond politics – someone who would choose to sneer at Raffles is showing what sort of person they themselves are, an utterly vicious person.