A London park named for four-time prime minister William Gladstone, one of the most famous premiers of the Victoria era, will be transformed into a “slavery garden” at the behest of the Labour-run local government.
Brent London Borough Council, which is dominated by Labour Party councillors, are paying ethnic minority artists to populate the part with prickly plants from Africa and other areas to “[mirror] the emotions contested history can elicit… something may seem pleasant enough from a distance, but uncomfortable when seen up close”, according to a horticulturist quoted by The Telegraph.
Plans to rename the park to something like ‘Diversity Fields’ or ‘Diane Abbott Park’ — after a far-left black Labour politician who has made questionable statements about white people on multiple occasions — have been dropped, however.
“Will people trying to enjoy this park also be reminded of Gladstone’s achievements? Perhaps a shrubbery in honour of the Third Reform Act? Or is it only slavery they’ll be subliminally lectured on?” remarked the Save Our Statues campaign of the initiative.
Gladstone was, in more historically literate times, considered alongside Sir Winston Churchill as one of the United Kingdom’s greatest leaders, hailed for such initiatives as the Representation of the People Act of 1884 and the introduction of the secret ballot, as well as his fierce denunciation of the Bulgarian Horrors perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks when suppressing an uprising of some of the European peoples they were colonising.
Now, however, leftist academics and activists have tried to link him to slavery — not because he, an abolitionist who regarded slavery as the “foulest crime”, had ever supported it, but because his father purchased sugar plantations, and because, like most every other abolitionist of the time, he believed the best way to put an end to what had been a social norm across the globe for countless generations was to buy out the slave owners.
While it was once considered a point of pride that the British people shouldered massive public debt to purchase the freedom of the slaves — debt they did not finish paying off until 2015 — revisionist leftists have now decided that it was actually a bad thing, and that compensation should have been paid to the slaves instead.
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