Showing posts with label cover-up. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cover-up. Show all posts
Saturday, 8 June 2024
Thursday, 1 June 2023
The backlash: how slavery research came under fire
More and more institutions are commissioning investigations into their historical links to slavery – but the fallout at one Cambridge college suggests these projects are meeting growing resistance writes Samira Shackle in The Guardian
When the historian Nicolas Bell-Romero started a job researching Cambridge University’s past links to transatlantic slavery three years ago, he did not expect to be pilloried in the national press by anonymous dons as “a ‘woke activist’ with an agenda”. Before his work was even published, it would spark a bitter conflict at the university – with accusations of bullying and censorship that were quickly picked up by rightwing papers as a warning about “fanatical” scholars tarnishing Britain’s history.
Bell-Romero, originally from Australia, had recently finished a PhD at Cambridge. He was at the start of his academic career and eager to prove himself. This was the ideal post-doctoral position: a chance to dig into the university’s archives to explore faculty and alumni links to slavery, and whether these links had translated into profit for Cambridge. It was the kind of work that, Bell-Romero said, “seems boring to the layperson” – spending days immersed in dusty archives and logbooks, exploring 18th- and 19th-century financial records. But as a historian, it was thrilling. It offered a chance to make a genuinely fresh contribution to burgeoning research about Britain’s relationship to slavery.
In the spring of 2020, Bell-Romero and another post-doctoral researcher, Sabine Cadeau, began work on the legacies of enslavement inquiry. Cadeau and Bell-Romero had a wide-ranging brief: to examine how the university gained from slavery, through specific financial bequests and gifts, but also to investigate how its scholarship might have reinforced, validated or challenged race-based thinking.
Cambridge was never a centre of industry like Manchester, Liverpool or Bristol, cities in which historic links to slavery are deep and obviously apparent – but as one of the oldest and wealthiest institutions in the country, the university makes an interesting case study for how intimately profits from slavery were entwined with British life. Given how many wealthy people in Britain in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were slaveholders, or invested in the slave economy, it was a reasonable expectation that both faculty and alumni may have benefited financially, and that this may have translated into donations to the university.
In the past decade, universities in the UK and US have commissioned similar research. Top US universities such as Harvard and Georgetown found they had enslaved people and benefited from donations connected to slavery. The first major research effort in the UK, at the University of Glasgow, began in 2018, but soon similar projects launched at Bristol, Edinburgh, Oxford, Manchester and Nottingham. Stephen Mullen, co-author of the Glasgow report, told me that he was surprised not only by the extent of the university’s financial ties to slavery, but by how much that wealth is still funding these institutions.
In their report, Mullen and his co-author Simon Newman established a methodology for working out the difficult question of how the financial value of historic donations and investments might translate into modern money, which produces a range of estimates rather than a single number: in the case of Glasgow, between £16.7m and £198m. In response to the research, the University of Glasgow initiated a “reparative justice” programme, including a £20m partnership with the University of the West Indies and a new centre for slavery studies.
All of this marks a dramatic change in how Britain thinks about slavery, and especially the idea of reparations. For the most part, when Britain has engaged with this history, the tendency has been to focus on the successful campaign for abolition; historians of slavery like to repeat the famous quip that Britain invented the slave trade solely to abolish it.
This wider trend is reflected in Cambridge. As far as the story of slavery and the University of Cambridge goes, perhaps the most well-known fact is that some of Britain’s key abolitionists – William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson – were educated there. But British celebration of the abolition of slavery in the 1800s has tended to elide the awkward question of who the abolitionists were fighting against, and the point that the wealth and economic power generated by slavery did not disappear when the Abolition Act was passed.
“It was interesting to me that there weren’t so many questions about the other side – were slaveholders educated here? Did slaveholders give benefactions? Did students invest in the different slave-trading companies?” Bell-Romero said. “It’s not about smashing what came before, it’s about contributing and building on histories.”
Cambridge consists of the central university and 31 constituent colleges, each of which has its own administration, decision-making powers and budgets. Most of the university’s wealth is situated within colleges, and from the outset, the legacies of enslavement inquiry relied to an extent on colleges granting Bell-Romero and Cadeau access to their archives. This wasn’t always easy. “The entire research experience, even now, remains a constant struggle for archival access, an ongoing political tug of war,” Cadeau told me in late 2022. “There was financial support for the research from the central university, but mixed feelings and outright opposition were both widespread.”
The conflict at Caius seemed to be part of a wider faltering of legacies of slavery research – through overt backlash, or institutions announcing projects with great fanfare but not following through with support and funding. Hilary Beckles, the vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies and the author of Britain’s Black Debt, calls this pattern “research and run” – where universities do the archival work, then say a quick sorry and run from the implications of the findings, leaving the researchers exposed.
The historian Olivette Otele, a scholar of slavery and historical memory who was the first Black woman to be appointed a professor of history in the UK, joined the University of Bristol in 2020, and worked on the university’s own research into its deep connections to the slave trade. When she left just two years later, a colleague in another department tweeted that the university had used Otele “as a human shield to deflect legitimate criticism”. Announcing her departure, Otele wrote on Twitter: “The workload became insane and not compensated by financial reward. I actually burnt out,” adding that colleagues had been “sabotaging my reputation inside and outside the uni.”
As far as anyone could see, Caius had backed away from publishing Bell-Romero’s report after the controversy; Everill, head of the working group, was not sure it would ever be published. But in July, a newspaper submitted a freedom of information request about it. (Newspapers increasingly submit FoIs about academic research on subjects like slavery and empire as universities have become the frontline in the culture war; a controversial Times front page in August claimed that universities were changing syllabuses, even though their own data did not bear this out. Riley recalled one absurd example, where a journalist sent an FoI requesting all emails from academics using the word “woke”. “There were none, because we don’t actually sit there writing ‘I’m a woke historian’. That is insane.”)
The following month, the Caius report was published online, with the proposal for MPhil funding removed. It was not covered anywhere. “Probably because it turns out that wasn’t actually that inflammatory,” Everill said. In a statement to the Guardian, the master of the college, Prof Pippa Rogerson, said: “The report makes uncomfortable reading for all those affiliated to Caius. The College is 675 years old and it is important we acknowledge our complex past.”
In September, Bell-Romero and Cadeau’s much larger Cambridge University legacies of enslavement project was published. It found that Cambridge fellows had been involved in the East India Company and other slave-trading entities, and that the university had directly invested in the South Sea Company. They wrote: “Such financial involvement both helped to facilitate the slave trade and brought very significant financial benefits to Cambridge.” The report was covered by major news outlets, but did not provoke a particularly strong response.
The conflict over the Caius research suggests that these disputes often have little to do with the archival research itself, or its conclusions. In the view of the critics, the research is discredited by its intention to correct past wrongs. Even when the researchers insist that they are not trying to assign blame or guilt, the critics insist in return – not without some justification – that whether or not this is the intention, it is almost always the effect. This is presumably why they disapprove of doing the research to begin with.
Seen this way, it is a standoff that has no hope of resolution. When I spoke to Abulafia, he questioned the point of the research: “Cambridge University and its role in slavery is not, to my mind, as big a question as all sorts of other questions one could argue about the slave trade,” he said. But scholars working on the area argue that this is precisely the point; to understand institutions’ relationships to slavery, whether small or large, and through this to build a fuller picture of the past. “When we do this research, we’re just adding another layer, another perspective,” said Bell-Romero. The critics, of course, see this empirical modesty as disingenuous. But the archival work carries on, all over the country, and the diametrically opposing views on the very premise will inevitably lead to more conflicts.
In late September, Cadeau and Bell-Romero organised an academic conference about reparations, held at the Møller Institute, a starkly modern building west of Cambridge city centre. A few days before, it was covered in the Telegraph, which quoted anonymous sources describing it as “propagandist” and “fanatical” and Abulafia saying: “It’s that sense that it’s going to be one-sided that concerns me.” Cadeau, who is now a lecturer of diaspora history at Soas in London, was unfazed. “What I am most concerned about are legacies of racism. I am concerned with how little this country knows about slavery, even leading historians,” she told me. “I have been more concerned about the implications of how we treat the history of slavery, and whether or not our societies will address the legacies of slavery and racism, and much less concerned about the press.”
In his opening remarks to the conference, the historian Prof Nicholas Guyatt acknowledged the negative coverage, saying: “We’ve had some media attention already and that’s great, I welcome all views and am pleased everyone is here to listen to our fantastic speakers.” Bell-Romero presented a paper on the profits of slavery at Oxbridge. Cadeau spoke about her research into South Sea Company annuities at Cambridge, saying that it was hard to find an older college in Cambridge that doesn’t have links to this funding. No news story about the conference emerged – perhaps because in practice this was a fairly routine academic exercise. People presented papers on their niche areas of research, ran over time and debated.
On the final day of the conference, I sat with Bell-Romero in the lunch hall. He told me that he felt the launch of the Cambridge project had been handled better than the Caius report; the draft had gone to expert readers and the university backed the research it had commissioned. While the academics waited for the next talk to begin, Bell-Romero and a few other scholars working on slavery and reparations discussed the growing backlash to their work in an incredulous and frustrated tone. One British academic said he receives death threats every time he speaks about the case for reparations. After a few minutes of weary commiseration, they stood up from their empty plates and walked back into the lecture theatre.
“If you take pride in the past,” a Latin American researcher said with quiet exasperation before leaving, “then you have to take responsibility, too.”
When the historian Nicolas Bell-Romero started a job researching Cambridge University’s past links to transatlantic slavery three years ago, he did not expect to be pilloried in the national press by anonymous dons as “a ‘woke activist’ with an agenda”. Before his work was even published, it would spark a bitter conflict at the university – with accusations of bullying and censorship that were quickly picked up by rightwing papers as a warning about “fanatical” scholars tarnishing Britain’s history.
Bell-Romero, originally from Australia, had recently finished a PhD at Cambridge. He was at the start of his academic career and eager to prove himself. This was the ideal post-doctoral position: a chance to dig into the university’s archives to explore faculty and alumni links to slavery, and whether these links had translated into profit for Cambridge. It was the kind of work that, Bell-Romero said, “seems boring to the layperson” – spending days immersed in dusty archives and logbooks, exploring 18th- and 19th-century financial records. But as a historian, it was thrilling. It offered a chance to make a genuinely fresh contribution to burgeoning research about Britain’s relationship to slavery.
In the spring of 2020, Bell-Romero and another post-doctoral researcher, Sabine Cadeau, began work on the legacies of enslavement inquiry. Cadeau and Bell-Romero had a wide-ranging brief: to examine how the university gained from slavery, through specific financial bequests and gifts, but also to investigate how its scholarship might have reinforced, validated or challenged race-based thinking.
Cambridge was never a centre of industry like Manchester, Liverpool or Bristol, cities in which historic links to slavery are deep and obviously apparent – but as one of the oldest and wealthiest institutions in the country, the university makes an interesting case study for how intimately profits from slavery were entwined with British life. Given how many wealthy people in Britain in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were slaveholders, or invested in the slave economy, it was a reasonable expectation that both faculty and alumni may have benefited financially, and that this may have translated into donations to the university.
In the past decade, universities in the UK and US have commissioned similar research. Top US universities such as Harvard and Georgetown found they had enslaved people and benefited from donations connected to slavery. The first major research effort in the UK, at the University of Glasgow, began in 2018, but soon similar projects launched at Bristol, Edinburgh, Oxford, Manchester and Nottingham. Stephen Mullen, co-author of the Glasgow report, told me that he was surprised not only by the extent of the university’s financial ties to slavery, but by how much that wealth is still funding these institutions.
In their report, Mullen and his co-author Simon Newman established a methodology for working out the difficult question of how the financial value of historic donations and investments might translate into modern money, which produces a range of estimates rather than a single number: in the case of Glasgow, between £16.7m and £198m. In response to the research, the University of Glasgow initiated a “reparative justice” programme, including a £20m partnership with the University of the West Indies and a new centre for slavery studies.
All of this marks a dramatic change in how Britain thinks about slavery, and especially the idea of reparations. For the most part, when Britain has engaged with this history, the tendency has been to focus on the successful campaign for abolition; historians of slavery like to repeat the famous quip that Britain invented the slave trade solely to abolish it.
This wider trend is reflected in Cambridge. As far as the story of slavery and the University of Cambridge goes, perhaps the most well-known fact is that some of Britain’s key abolitionists – William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson – were educated there. But British celebration of the abolition of slavery in the 1800s has tended to elide the awkward question of who the abolitionists were fighting against, and the point that the wealth and economic power generated by slavery did not disappear when the Abolition Act was passed.
“It was interesting to me that there weren’t so many questions about the other side – were slaveholders educated here? Did slaveholders give benefactions? Did students invest in the different slave-trading companies?” Bell-Romero said. “It’s not about smashing what came before, it’s about contributing and building on histories.”
Cambridge consists of the central university and 31 constituent colleges, each of which has its own administration, decision-making powers and budgets. Most of the university’s wealth is situated within colleges, and from the outset, the legacies of enslavement inquiry relied to an extent on colleges granting Bell-Romero and Cadeau access to their archives. This wasn’t always easy. “The entire research experience, even now, remains a constant struggle for archival access, an ongoing political tug of war,” Cadeau told me in late 2022. “There was financial support for the research from the central university, but mixed feelings and outright opposition were both widespread.”
Gonville and Caius college (centre) at Cambridge University. Photograph: eye35/Alamy
So when Bell-Romero was approached by Gonville and Caius, the college where he had recently completed his PhD, to conduct a separate piece of research into the college’s links to slavery, he was delighted. Caius, as it is commonly known (it’s pronounced “Keys”), was founded in 1348. One of the oldest and wealthiest colleges in Cambridge, it is also seen as one of the most conservative and traditional. The college offered him a year’s contract, working one day a week, meaning he had about 50 days to do the archival research and write the report – a very short time for a broad brief.
As with the university inquiry, the idea was to look at all possible links to slavery. Alongside investigating whether the college held investments in slave-trading entities such as the East India, South Sea and Royal African Companies, he was asked to explore any connections to slavery among alumni, students and faculty. Not only would this be interesting in its own right, but hugely useful for the wider project. He said yes. “I just thought – this is wonderful, unrestricted access to the archive,” he said. “That’s a dream for a historian. It’s as good as it gets.”
But it was at Gonville and Caius that the problems would begin. The reaction to Bell-Romero’s draft report caused a rift among faculty at the college – with some pushing to prevent its publication entirely. According to the critics, the work suggested all white people “carry the taint of original sin” and that it was motivated by an “agenda” to “implicate” the college in slavery.
What happened at the college demonstrates the collision between two different worldviews: one that sees research into the history of slavery as a routine, but vital, academic exercise; and another that sees it as an overtly biased undertaking and a threat to the way historical knowledge is produced. The intensity of this clash sheds some light on why it has proved so difficult to reappraise Britain’s past.
When the Cambridge vice-chancellor Stephen Toope first announced the legacies of enslavement inquiry, he said he wanted the university to “acknowledge its role during that dark phase of human history”, adding: “We cannot change the past, but nor should we seek to hide from it.”
Momentum was building around institutions looking into their links to slavery. Historians working on this area see this as a valuable addition to historic knowledge and a way to understand how the profits of slavery shaped Britain. Many of the richest people in 18th- and 19th-century Britain were involved in the slave trade and the plantation economy. The trade and distribution of goods produced by enslaved people helped fuel Britain’s development.
While enslaved people were mostly overseas, in colonies, out of sight, slavery funded British wealth and institutions from the Bank of England to the Royal Mail. The extent to which modern Britain was shaped by the profits of the transatlantic slave economy was made even clearer with the launch in 2013 of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at University College London. It digitised the records of tens of thousands of people who claimed compensation from the government when colonial slavery was abolished in 1833, making it far easier to see how the wealth created by slavery spread throughout Britain after abolition. “Slave-ownership,” the researchers concluded, “permeated the British elites of the early 19th century and helped form the elites of the 20th century.” (Among others, it showed that David Cameron’s ancestors, and the founders of the Greene King pub chain, had enslaved people.)
But as Bell-Romero would write in his report on Caius, “the legacies of enslavement encompassed far more than the ownership of plantations and investments in the slave trade”. Scholars undertaking this kind of archival research typically look at the myriad ways in which individuals linked to an institution might have profited from slavery – ranging from direct involvement in the trade of enslaved people or the goods they produced, to one-step-removed financial interests such as holding shares in slave-trading entities such as the South Sea or East India Companies.
Bronwen Everill, an expert in the history of slavery and a fellow at Caius, points out “how widespread and mundane all of this was”. Mapping these connections, she says, simply “makes it much harder to hold the belief that Britain suddenly rose to power through its innate qualities; actually, this great wealth is linked to a very specific moment of wealth creation through the dramatic exploitation of African labour.”
This academic interest in forensically quantifying British institutions’ involvement in slavery has been steadily growing for several decades. But in recent years, this has been accompanied by calls for Britain to re-evaluate its imperial history, starting with the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in 2015. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 turbo-charged the debate, and in response, more institutions in the UK commissioned research on their historic links to slavery – including the Bank of England, Lloyd’s, the National Trust, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Guardian.
But as public interest in exploring and quantifying Britain’s historic links to slavery exploded in 2020, so too did a conservative backlash against “wokery”. Critics argue that the whole enterprise of examining historic links to slavery is an exercise in denigrating Britain and seeking out evidence for a foregone conclusion. Debate quickly ceases to be about the research itself – and becomes a proxy for questions of national pride. “What seems to make people really angry is the suggestion of change [in response to this sort of research], or the removal of specific things – statues, names – which is taken as a suggestion that people today should be guilty,” said Natalie Zacek, an academic at the University of Manchester who is writing a book on English universities and slavery. “I’ve never quite gotten to the bottom of that – no one is saying you, today, are a terrible person because you’re white. We’re simply saying there is another story here.”
For the critics of this work, campaigns to remove statues, revise university curricula, or investigate how institutions may have benefited from slavery are all attempts to censure the past. While this debate often plays out in public with emotive articles about “cancellation” and “doing Britain down”, conservative historians emphasise the danger of imposing value judgments on historical events or people. David Abulafia is a life fellow at Caius, and an influential figure in the college. Best known for his acclaimed history of the medieval Mediterranean, in recent years he has become a prominent conservative commentator. (Some of his eye-catching Telegraph columns have argued that “Cambridge is succumbing to the woke virus” and that the British Museum “might as well shut” if it “surrenders the Rosetta Stone”.) When I spoke to Abulafia, he struck a less strident tone. “What worries me is that modern politics is intruding into the way we interpret the past,” he said. “One has somehow to be able to chronicle the past without getting caught up with moralising about the current state of the world.”
Yet the historians working on studies of slavery or imperialism are often bemused by this concern, pointing out that all history is a product of the time in which it is written. “The job of a historian is to uncover the past and try to work out what happened, why it did, and what consequences and effects that had,” said Michael Taylor, a historian of colonial slavery and the British empire. “We’re allowed to focus on and celebrate abolition, but the previous 200 years of slavery are apparently taboo. That doesn’t make any sense.”
Every historian of slavery I spoke to emphasised that their research primarily involves archives and financial records. In their view, the work of many institutions mapping their own historic links to slavery helps to build up a more detailed picture of how Britain was shaped by its relationship with slavery and the slave trade.
Abulafia agreed that history is about “the accumulation of evidence, in as accurate and careful a way as possible”, but argued that “there is a danger of manipulating the past in the interest of current political concerns, one of which might be the idea that the ascendancy of the west has been achieved through a systematic policy of racism”. He questioned the point of tracing “profits from the slave trade that alumni might then have converted into benefactions” since, in the 18th century, using your wealth to fund scholarship might have been seen as virtuous. “It’s that challenge of trying to get one’s head around values, which are so remote from our own,” he said.
Historians of slavery argue that simply establishing these flows of money does not equate to moral judgment. As Taylor says: “This research simply helps us piece together a picture of what Britain was like when slave-trading and slave-holding was legal, which would otherwise not be there.” But critics do not accept this.
On 17 June 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests raged across the country, activists in Cambridge spraypainted the heavy wooden medieval gate that separates Caius from the busy high street it sits on: “Eugenics is genocide. Fisher must fall.” The graffiti referred to a stained-glass window installed in the Caius dining hall in 1989, commemorating the statistician RA Fisher. The window was an abstract design; squares of coloured glass arranged in a Latin Square, an image from the cover of Fisher’s influential 1935 book The Design of Experiments.
Commonly thought of as the most important figure in 20th-century statistics, Fisher was also a prominent eugenicist. He helped to found the Cambridge University Eugenics Society and, after the second world war, wrote letters in support of a Nazi scientist who had worked under Josef Mengele. The window had been controversial for years: a substantial number of students – and some faculty – wanted it to be taken down. The debate was reignited by the graffiti. A Caius student launched an online petition, writing: “Caius students and Fellows eat, converse and celebrate in space that also acts as a commemoration of our racist history.” It gained more than 1,400 signatures.
But there was pushback. Cambridge colleges are like universities within a university; faculty usually work both for their university department, where they deliver lectures, and for their college, where they provide tutorials. Students live at the college for at least part of their degree and typically have much of their teaching there. Despite a wide range of specialisms and political views among the faculty, and a proactive student body, Caius is broadly seen as one of Cambridge’s most conservative colleges, largely due to its vociferous community of life fellows. Someone becomes a life fellow after teaching at Caius for 20 years. Life fellows – who make up about 25% of the total fellowship, similar to the number of female fellows – occupy a strange position in college life; most do not teach any more, but have a room at the college and can eat at the dining hall. One former Caius student described the college as “the most luxurious nursing home in the country”.
As with the university inquiry, the idea was to look at all possible links to slavery. Alongside investigating whether the college held investments in slave-trading entities such as the East India, South Sea and Royal African Companies, he was asked to explore any connections to slavery among alumni, students and faculty. Not only would this be interesting in its own right, but hugely useful for the wider project. He said yes. “I just thought – this is wonderful, unrestricted access to the archive,” he said. “That’s a dream for a historian. It’s as good as it gets.”
But it was at Gonville and Caius that the problems would begin. The reaction to Bell-Romero’s draft report caused a rift among faculty at the college – with some pushing to prevent its publication entirely. According to the critics, the work suggested all white people “carry the taint of original sin” and that it was motivated by an “agenda” to “implicate” the college in slavery.
What happened at the college demonstrates the collision between two different worldviews: one that sees research into the history of slavery as a routine, but vital, academic exercise; and another that sees it as an overtly biased undertaking and a threat to the way historical knowledge is produced. The intensity of this clash sheds some light on why it has proved so difficult to reappraise Britain’s past.
When the Cambridge vice-chancellor Stephen Toope first announced the legacies of enslavement inquiry, he said he wanted the university to “acknowledge its role during that dark phase of human history”, adding: “We cannot change the past, but nor should we seek to hide from it.”
Momentum was building around institutions looking into their links to slavery. Historians working on this area see this as a valuable addition to historic knowledge and a way to understand how the profits of slavery shaped Britain. Many of the richest people in 18th- and 19th-century Britain were involved in the slave trade and the plantation economy. The trade and distribution of goods produced by enslaved people helped fuel Britain’s development.
While enslaved people were mostly overseas, in colonies, out of sight, slavery funded British wealth and institutions from the Bank of England to the Royal Mail. The extent to which modern Britain was shaped by the profits of the transatlantic slave economy was made even clearer with the launch in 2013 of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at University College London. It digitised the records of tens of thousands of people who claimed compensation from the government when colonial slavery was abolished in 1833, making it far easier to see how the wealth created by slavery spread throughout Britain after abolition. “Slave-ownership,” the researchers concluded, “permeated the British elites of the early 19th century and helped form the elites of the 20th century.” (Among others, it showed that David Cameron’s ancestors, and the founders of the Greene King pub chain, had enslaved people.)
But as Bell-Romero would write in his report on Caius, “the legacies of enslavement encompassed far more than the ownership of plantations and investments in the slave trade”. Scholars undertaking this kind of archival research typically look at the myriad ways in which individuals linked to an institution might have profited from slavery – ranging from direct involvement in the trade of enslaved people or the goods they produced, to one-step-removed financial interests such as holding shares in slave-trading entities such as the South Sea or East India Companies.
Bronwen Everill, an expert in the history of slavery and a fellow at Caius, points out “how widespread and mundane all of this was”. Mapping these connections, she says, simply “makes it much harder to hold the belief that Britain suddenly rose to power through its innate qualities; actually, this great wealth is linked to a very specific moment of wealth creation through the dramatic exploitation of African labour.”
This academic interest in forensically quantifying British institutions’ involvement in slavery has been steadily growing for several decades. But in recent years, this has been accompanied by calls for Britain to re-evaluate its imperial history, starting with the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in 2015. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 turbo-charged the debate, and in response, more institutions in the UK commissioned research on their historic links to slavery – including the Bank of England, Lloyd’s, the National Trust, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Guardian.
But as public interest in exploring and quantifying Britain’s historic links to slavery exploded in 2020, so too did a conservative backlash against “wokery”. Critics argue that the whole enterprise of examining historic links to slavery is an exercise in denigrating Britain and seeking out evidence for a foregone conclusion. Debate quickly ceases to be about the research itself – and becomes a proxy for questions of national pride. “What seems to make people really angry is the suggestion of change [in response to this sort of research], or the removal of specific things – statues, names – which is taken as a suggestion that people today should be guilty,” said Natalie Zacek, an academic at the University of Manchester who is writing a book on English universities and slavery. “I’ve never quite gotten to the bottom of that – no one is saying you, today, are a terrible person because you’re white. We’re simply saying there is another story here.”
For the critics of this work, campaigns to remove statues, revise university curricula, or investigate how institutions may have benefited from slavery are all attempts to censure the past. While this debate often plays out in public with emotive articles about “cancellation” and “doing Britain down”, conservative historians emphasise the danger of imposing value judgments on historical events or people. David Abulafia is a life fellow at Caius, and an influential figure in the college. Best known for his acclaimed history of the medieval Mediterranean, in recent years he has become a prominent conservative commentator. (Some of his eye-catching Telegraph columns have argued that “Cambridge is succumbing to the woke virus” and that the British Museum “might as well shut” if it “surrenders the Rosetta Stone”.) When I spoke to Abulafia, he struck a less strident tone. “What worries me is that modern politics is intruding into the way we interpret the past,” he said. “One has somehow to be able to chronicle the past without getting caught up with moralising about the current state of the world.”
Yet the historians working on studies of slavery or imperialism are often bemused by this concern, pointing out that all history is a product of the time in which it is written. “The job of a historian is to uncover the past and try to work out what happened, why it did, and what consequences and effects that had,” said Michael Taylor, a historian of colonial slavery and the British empire. “We’re allowed to focus on and celebrate abolition, but the previous 200 years of slavery are apparently taboo. That doesn’t make any sense.”
Every historian of slavery I spoke to emphasised that their research primarily involves archives and financial records. In their view, the work of many institutions mapping their own historic links to slavery helps to build up a more detailed picture of how Britain was shaped by its relationship with slavery and the slave trade.
Abulafia agreed that history is about “the accumulation of evidence, in as accurate and careful a way as possible”, but argued that “there is a danger of manipulating the past in the interest of current political concerns, one of which might be the idea that the ascendancy of the west has been achieved through a systematic policy of racism”. He questioned the point of tracing “profits from the slave trade that alumni might then have converted into benefactions” since, in the 18th century, using your wealth to fund scholarship might have been seen as virtuous. “It’s that challenge of trying to get one’s head around values, which are so remote from our own,” he said.
Historians of slavery argue that simply establishing these flows of money does not equate to moral judgment. As Taylor says: “This research simply helps us piece together a picture of what Britain was like when slave-trading and slave-holding was legal, which would otherwise not be there.” But critics do not accept this.
On 17 June 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests raged across the country, activists in Cambridge spraypainted the heavy wooden medieval gate that separates Caius from the busy high street it sits on: “Eugenics is genocide. Fisher must fall.” The graffiti referred to a stained-glass window installed in the Caius dining hall in 1989, commemorating the statistician RA Fisher. The window was an abstract design; squares of coloured glass arranged in a Latin Square, an image from the cover of Fisher’s influential 1935 book The Design of Experiments.
Commonly thought of as the most important figure in 20th-century statistics, Fisher was also a prominent eugenicist. He helped to found the Cambridge University Eugenics Society and, after the second world war, wrote letters in support of a Nazi scientist who had worked under Josef Mengele. The window had been controversial for years: a substantial number of students – and some faculty – wanted it to be taken down. The debate was reignited by the graffiti. A Caius student launched an online petition, writing: “Caius students and Fellows eat, converse and celebrate in space that also acts as a commemoration of our racist history.” It gained more than 1,400 signatures.
But there was pushback. Cambridge colleges are like universities within a university; faculty usually work both for their university department, where they deliver lectures, and for their college, where they provide tutorials. Students live at the college for at least part of their degree and typically have much of their teaching there. Despite a wide range of specialisms and political views among the faculty, and a proactive student body, Caius is broadly seen as one of Cambridge’s most conservative colleges, largely due to its vociferous community of life fellows. Someone becomes a life fellow after teaching at Caius for 20 years. Life fellows – who make up about 25% of the total fellowship, similar to the number of female fellows – occupy a strange position in college life; most do not teach any more, but have a room at the college and can eat at the dining hall. One former Caius student described the college as “the most luxurious nursing home in the country”.
Graffiti reading ‘Eugenics is genocide … Fisher must fall’ being cleaned off Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge University in 2020. Photograph: PA Images/Alamy
Many Cambridge colleges have some form of life fellowship for retired professors, but Caius is unusual in that they have full voting rights and can sit on the college council, a small executive body on which staff serve rotating terms. This means they have as much of a say in the running of the college as current faculty. “They functionally run the place,” said Everill. Michael Taylor, the historian, went to Caius as an undergraduate in 2007 and stayed until he finished his PhD in 2014. When he sat as a student representative on the college council, he was struck by the dysfunction of this system. “The sheer indifference to the experience of students was shocking,” he told me. “A few good people were – and are – trying to reform the college, but it’s basically a form of feudal governance.” This has often led to a situation where faculty at Caius are pulling in different directions; one primarily concerned with the preservation of tradition and the good name of the college, and another with student experience and other day-to-day concerns of a modern academic institution.
A number of life fellows had been taught by Fisher and felt that his pioneering work on statistics stood separately to his other views. “It really sparked all hell,” said Vic Gatrell, a historian and life fellow at Caius. Gatrell, in common with many of the working faculty and the students, thought the window should come down. This marked him out among the life fellows, most of whom wanted the window to stay. Gatrell is in his 80s and has worked at Caius since the 1970s. In that time there had been disagreements – “the admission of women was very divisive,” he recalls – but in those 50 years, nothing had provoked such strong emotions. “In all these years, we never inquired into each other’s politics,” he told me. But now, colleagues he’d lived and worked with for decades walked past in the corridor without saying hello, or sat separately in the dining hall. “It was a microcosm of what’s happening in the nation at large,” he said.
In late June 2020, Caius removed the Fisher window. But the dividing lines were there to stay. In a long article for the Critic titled Cancelled by his college, the eminent geneticist, life fellow Anthony Edwards – who had been mentored by Fisher, and had proposed the installation of the window – rejected the allegation that Fisher was racist, or even a leading eugenicist. He decried the fact that “now the college Fisher loved has turned its back on him”. Within college, life fellows spoke of Fisher being cancelled, dishonoured and targeted unfairly by BLM protesters. “The removal of the Fisher window opened a wound that still continues in various ways,” said one research fellow.
It was against this backdrop that Bell-Romero got to work in the Caius archives in the autumn of 2020. The Fisher window had been removed, but bad blood remained. Still, Bell-Romero – who was not based fulltime at the college – was blissfully unaware. He had a specific brief: to examine whether students, alumni, staff or benefactors had links to slavery. Once a week, he went into the archive, housed in a grand 19th-century building next to the lush green lawn of Caius Court. The archive spans the full eight centuries of the college’s life, from medieval estate records to the personal papers of modern alumni and faculty. The research was a low-key pursuit – just Bell-Romero and the college archivist, going through paper records.
As per his brief, he looked widely: “It’s not just about people owning plantations – it’s about small pots of money, small investments people had,” he said. Gradually, he traced a number of connections to slavery, through former students and staff who had investments in slave-holding companies. Previous histories of Caius had identified two sizeable donations to the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the late 18th century. But in the archives, Bell-Romero found that the financial benefits from enslavement outweighed the college’s contribution to abolition.
His draft report was a modest document of about 50 pages. His key finding was that the college once had financial interests in the South Sea Company, an organisation that “sent 64,780 enslaved persons to the Spanish Americas”. These were in the form of annuities and stocks, gained through donations left to the college by alumni. He wrote that through these benefactions “the College’s fate – like so many other educational institutions in Great Britain – became intertwined with the imperial commercial economy, with slavery being one of its most profitable ventures”. Mapping this out, along with details of students from slave-owning families educated at Caius, Bell-Romero concluded that this story was “not singular, but indicative of the longstanding ties of British institutions and individuals to chattel slavery and coerced labour”.
These findings didn’t surprise Bell-Romero. “It was what you’d expect for a rich college that has existed for many hundreds of years,” he said. When he submitted the draft in the autumn of 2021, he did not realise how contentious it would be.
Bronwen Everill was head of the Caius working group on the legacies of enslavement project. Bell-Romero’s report was a draft – it needed editing – but Everill thought it was a solid piece of work with uncontroversial conclusions. “Basically, the finding of this report was – like almost all these institutions – Caius had a little bit of a hand in slavery, but it was not fundamentally based on financing from the slave trade,” she told me. Bell-Romero’s report only included archival research. But Everill and her three colleagues on the working group were expected to come up with suggestions for next steps.
Part of the remit of the Cambridge University inquiry was to consider how these legacies are reflected in the modern day. The most prominent example of this work – at Glasgow University – had led to a substantial reparative package. That project had passed without controversy. But in the intervening years, the political climate had changed. (“Any study now is being scrutinised from the outset, and the credibility and objectivity of academic historians is being questioned by some critics,” Mullen, the Glasgow researcher, told me.)
There are various mechanisms for working out how much historical sums are worth in today’s currency. For his report, Bell-Romero used an academic database called Measuring Worth, created by a group of economic historians to calculate estimates of the “present value” of past assets – which the Glasgow report had also employed. Bell-Romero wrote that “the calculation of historical value is not an exact science – indeed, these figures are at best a rough estimate.” On the basis of the report, the working group proposed that Caius offer funding to two Black Mphil students.
Typically, a drafted piece of research might be assessed and edited by other experts in the field; historians with some knowledge of its particular time period and geography. But the quirks of college life meant that the process at Caius was different. The report was being published on behalf of the college, so in December, the draft report was circulated for feedback to all fellows and life fellows, regardless of their expertise.
In January 2022, responses rolled in. Some highlighted mistakes: confusion over the name of a historical figure, and minor spelling errors. Others questioned the entire motivation for the project. In a lengthy response, Abulafia said that people in the past may have been involved in many things that today seem unsavoury, and asked: “If British people carry the taint of original sin by all those who are white supposedly being complicit in the slave trade, how much more are we complicit in all these activities that still go on around us?” He concluded that the report must “stand back from the past and not make it into a canvas they can slather with the moral wisdom of a particular fashionable ideology”.
A number of life fellows had been taught by Fisher and felt that his pioneering work on statistics stood separately to his other views. “It really sparked all hell,” said Vic Gatrell, a historian and life fellow at Caius. Gatrell, in common with many of the working faculty and the students, thought the window should come down. This marked him out among the life fellows, most of whom wanted the window to stay. Gatrell is in his 80s and has worked at Caius since the 1970s. In that time there had been disagreements – “the admission of women was very divisive,” he recalls – but in those 50 years, nothing had provoked such strong emotions. “In all these years, we never inquired into each other’s politics,” he told me. But now, colleagues he’d lived and worked with for decades walked past in the corridor without saying hello, or sat separately in the dining hall. “It was a microcosm of what’s happening in the nation at large,” he said.
In late June 2020, Caius removed the Fisher window. But the dividing lines were there to stay. In a long article for the Critic titled Cancelled by his college, the eminent geneticist, life fellow Anthony Edwards – who had been mentored by Fisher, and had proposed the installation of the window – rejected the allegation that Fisher was racist, or even a leading eugenicist. He decried the fact that “now the college Fisher loved has turned its back on him”. Within college, life fellows spoke of Fisher being cancelled, dishonoured and targeted unfairly by BLM protesters. “The removal of the Fisher window opened a wound that still continues in various ways,” said one research fellow.
It was against this backdrop that Bell-Romero got to work in the Caius archives in the autumn of 2020. The Fisher window had been removed, but bad blood remained. Still, Bell-Romero – who was not based fulltime at the college – was blissfully unaware. He had a specific brief: to examine whether students, alumni, staff or benefactors had links to slavery. Once a week, he went into the archive, housed in a grand 19th-century building next to the lush green lawn of Caius Court. The archive spans the full eight centuries of the college’s life, from medieval estate records to the personal papers of modern alumni and faculty. The research was a low-key pursuit – just Bell-Romero and the college archivist, going through paper records.
As per his brief, he looked widely: “It’s not just about people owning plantations – it’s about small pots of money, small investments people had,” he said. Gradually, he traced a number of connections to slavery, through former students and staff who had investments in slave-holding companies. Previous histories of Caius had identified two sizeable donations to the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the late 18th century. But in the archives, Bell-Romero found that the financial benefits from enslavement outweighed the college’s contribution to abolition.
His draft report was a modest document of about 50 pages. His key finding was that the college once had financial interests in the South Sea Company, an organisation that “sent 64,780 enslaved persons to the Spanish Americas”. These were in the form of annuities and stocks, gained through donations left to the college by alumni. He wrote that through these benefactions “the College’s fate – like so many other educational institutions in Great Britain – became intertwined with the imperial commercial economy, with slavery being one of its most profitable ventures”. Mapping this out, along with details of students from slave-owning families educated at Caius, Bell-Romero concluded that this story was “not singular, but indicative of the longstanding ties of British institutions and individuals to chattel slavery and coerced labour”.
These findings didn’t surprise Bell-Romero. “It was what you’d expect for a rich college that has existed for many hundreds of years,” he said. When he submitted the draft in the autumn of 2021, he did not realise how contentious it would be.
Bronwen Everill was head of the Caius working group on the legacies of enslavement project. Bell-Romero’s report was a draft – it needed editing – but Everill thought it was a solid piece of work with uncontroversial conclusions. “Basically, the finding of this report was – like almost all these institutions – Caius had a little bit of a hand in slavery, but it was not fundamentally based on financing from the slave trade,” she told me. Bell-Romero’s report only included archival research. But Everill and her three colleagues on the working group were expected to come up with suggestions for next steps.
Part of the remit of the Cambridge University inquiry was to consider how these legacies are reflected in the modern day. The most prominent example of this work – at Glasgow University – had led to a substantial reparative package. That project had passed without controversy. But in the intervening years, the political climate had changed. (“Any study now is being scrutinised from the outset, and the credibility and objectivity of academic historians is being questioned by some critics,” Mullen, the Glasgow researcher, told me.)
There are various mechanisms for working out how much historical sums are worth in today’s currency. For his report, Bell-Romero used an academic database called Measuring Worth, created by a group of economic historians to calculate estimates of the “present value” of past assets – which the Glasgow report had also employed. Bell-Romero wrote that “the calculation of historical value is not an exact science – indeed, these figures are at best a rough estimate.” On the basis of the report, the working group proposed that Caius offer funding to two Black Mphil students.
Typically, a drafted piece of research might be assessed and edited by other experts in the field; historians with some knowledge of its particular time period and geography. But the quirks of college life meant that the process at Caius was different. The report was being published on behalf of the college, so in December, the draft report was circulated for feedback to all fellows and life fellows, regardless of their expertise.
In January 2022, responses rolled in. Some highlighted mistakes: confusion over the name of a historical figure, and minor spelling errors. Others questioned the entire motivation for the project. In a lengthy response, Abulafia said that people in the past may have been involved in many things that today seem unsavoury, and asked: “If British people carry the taint of original sin by all those who are white supposedly being complicit in the slave trade, how much more are we complicit in all these activities that still go on around us?” He concluded that the report must “stand back from the past and not make it into a canvas they can slather with the moral wisdom of a particular fashionable ideology”.
A share certificate for the South Sea Company, in which Gonville and Caius College was found to have had financial interests. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty
Prof Joe Herbert, a life fellow in medicine, wrote that the report “clearly has an agenda: to implicate Caius as much as possible in supporting and benefiting [from] slavery”. He questioned the logic of funding Black MPhil students: “There is an undoubted shortfall of black applicants (not other ethnic groups); but this is not a direct result of slavery 200 years ago, and we absolve ourselves from our responsibility by thinking it is, and offering a solution which is no solution.”
Everill was surprised by the tenor of the responses, and particularly by the fact that the most strident criticism had come from life fellows who were not scholars of Britain or empire. To her, it felt like a fundamental misunderstanding of the project and a recycling of culture-war talking points. (Abulafia suggested the report was “infused with the ideas of critical race theory”.) Many of the people most affronted by the report were the same who had been most defensive of the Fisher window. “There’s a lot of people who read about the culture wars and think they are personally under attack by a woke mob,” Everill said a few months later.
A number of responses queried – in strong terms – the mechanism for working out historical inflation, which the critics argued had produced an implausibly wide range of estimated values, and the reparative suggestion. “They seemed to think we were saying we, today, should be guilty – rather than that the institution made this money, and so the institution should think about distributing this money,” said Everill.
Bell-Romero was frustrated that some of the notes appeared to be responding to points he hadn’t made. “It had nothing to do with what I found; it was just about the political bent of what they thought the research was about,” he said. “The point was never to denigrate the college.”
The college council told the working group they had to respond in particular to Abulafia’s criticisms, because of his high standing as a historian. Together, they drafted a 5,000-word response, accepting some criticisms and disputing others. They wrote: “The report is not admonishing past Caians, or saying that ‘Caians should not have’ done something … The very point is the banality … The report is recording the connections to a system that was widespread throughout British economic life. We are not asking for people to judge the people of the past. We are simply presenting a more complete picture so that we, today, can think about what we want to do with that information.”
Rather than defend the report in front of the college council, Everill thought it would be more productive to hold an open meeting, in the hope of encouraging a discussion rather than a debate. It took place in early March, an opportunity for anyone to ask questions of Bell-Romero and the working group. Bell-Romero expected a big turnout. But only one person turned up: Joe Herbert. According to others present at the meeting, he walked into the room and declared: “This is a terrible report.” That set the tone. Members of the working group said that Herbert, who declined to be interviewed for this story, called history a “crap discipline” and suggested that the low admission rates for Black students at Cambridge were not connected to the history of slavery.
Everill was appalled. At one point, she said, she stood up and said: “No, absolutely not, I will not put up with that kind of tone.” Herbert responded: “Sit down, woman,” adding, “You’re not in charge here.” In a later email to Everill, he acknowledged this, saying: “I told you to shut up because you were shrieking at me. You weren’t attempting to say anything.” (Contacted before publication, Herbert said that “inappropriate language” used at the meeting “was not limited to me”, but denied saying history was a “crap discipline”.)
After the open meeting, Everill was copied on an email thread in which this group of three life fellows continued to attack the report. They did not acknowledge the 5,000-word response, writing: “You never tried to explain anything.” In the emails, another life fellow, the philosopher Jimmy Altham, suggested that Everill may be “dyslexic” because of some typos; Herbert said that “the important thing is that this disastrous report is not published in the college’s name”; and Abulafia replied “I 100% agree”. Everill made a formal complaint of harassment against Altham and Herbert. The complaint against Herbert was upheld; but not against Altham. Herbert was encouraged to apologise, but he did not.
The scholars engaged in the research had fulfilled a narrow brief to examine the college’s financial links to slavery and come up with a proposal for action. But the life fellows who objected seemed to be responding to something larger; the idea that the legacies of slavery might still be shaping our present.
When I spoke with Abulafia, he didn’t want to discuss the specifics of events at Caius, which he described as “a source of division and contention”, but he did talk more broadly about this area of research. “It started with one or two Oxbridge colleges conducting these investigations and by and large, not much came out of it,” he said. “Why are they looking into it? It’s become a sort of fad, if you like. If we want to look at issues to do with the way human beings were being badly oppressed in the early 19th century, we might also want to look at children down the mines in this country. There are horrific stories. I just wish we could recognise that sort of unholy behaviour, which certainly took place in the slave trade, is also taking place on our own soil between white people – if we’re going to make it about a given colour, which I hate doing, actually.” Citing other examples of historic exclusion and oppression, such as child labour, he said: “Let’s tell those stories and not put so many resources into the legacies of slavery. I think we’ve got the basic idea on that now.”
Soon after the disastrous open meeting, the college council suggested that Bell-Romero redraft his report in collaboration with a life fellow in history who was not one of the primary critics – saying he would “know the fellowship tone”. But Bell-Romero was affronted. “It’s censorship, being babysat to write your own piece,” he said. “That’s where I drew the line.” He declined. With no clear plan of action, he thought the report might never be published. He continued with the Cambridge inquiry and tried to forget about it. But that would not be so easy.
In late May, as the Easter term edged towards its end, Tommy Castellani, a second-year languages undergraduate, was sitting in the Caius dining hall when a friend mentioned that his history tutor had been tweeting about a dispute. Castellani had recently started writing news stories for Varsity, the Cambridge student paper, and he wanted to know more. His friend pulled up Everill’s Twitter account. “It is literally my favourite thing, waking up on a lovely bank holiday Sunday to a whole string of emails from angry *life fellows* calling me names. The best.” (She was referring to the “dyslexic” comment.) Castellani started to dig into it.
“I realised this was going to be a big story,” he said. “There’s a culture war in college, and you can see it in the council papers – people feel divided.” He got hold of emails, spoke to Everill and interviewed Bell-Romero, who asked not to be named in the story. In June, Varsity published Castellani’s account of the fallout, including quotes from the life fellows’ emails and details of what was said at the open meeting. Castellani had approached the college for comment on the “racist and sexist” undertones of comments at the open meeting.
But when the Telegraph picked up on the Caius dispute three weeks later, the story had a very different slant. Incorrectly stating that the Caius research had been initiated “in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement” (the college had actually started the process of researching its links to slavery in spring 2019, a year before the protests), the story claimed the report included “incorrect monetary conversions”.
The paper identified Bell-Romero by name as a “woke activist” who had produced “shambolic” work that caused the crisis. Bell-Romero couldn’t access the article at first because of the paywall. When he did, his first response was horror. His second was to laugh. “I’d been struggling to explain to my friends what this had been like, and now I could point to the Telegraph article and say – that’s the tenor of the feedback we received.”
Although the reporter had clearly been briefed by at least one life fellow, the critics remained anonymous, even when quoted at length saying that these “attempts to rewrite history fall at the first hurdle”. Meanwhile Bell-Romero – a precariously employed early-career academic (wrongly described in the article as a “student”) – was named, and his professionalism questioned. A few days later, the Telegraph story was picked up by the Times, which has devoted increasing attention to campus conflicts in recent years.
The work of looking into legacies of slavery or related topics is typically done by early-career researchers. There is a growing concern about the risk of backlash for young academics working on histories of empire or slavery who are singled out in the press. They are left highly exposed, while their critics often have established positions and job security. Charlotte Riley, a lecturer in history at the University of Southampton, described a conversation with a new PhD student looking at empire and railways. “We had to sit him down and say: ‘The Daily Mail might come for you.’”
After the stories came out, Bell-Romero was contacted by a number of other researchers working on topics related to decolonisation and slavery who had been the subject of hit-jobs in the rightwing press. Time and again, researchers I interviewed for this story insisted on answering questions by email rather than speaking on the phone or in person, citing the fear of being misrepresented. “I do worry about a chilling effect,” says Everill. “There are a bunch of these postdocs available at the moment, and people who don’t want to be named and shamed in the national media might decide not to apply.”
Everill was surprised by the tenor of the responses, and particularly by the fact that the most strident criticism had come from life fellows who were not scholars of Britain or empire. To her, it felt like a fundamental misunderstanding of the project and a recycling of culture-war talking points. (Abulafia suggested the report was “infused with the ideas of critical race theory”.) Many of the people most affronted by the report were the same who had been most defensive of the Fisher window. “There’s a lot of people who read about the culture wars and think they are personally under attack by a woke mob,” Everill said a few months later.
A number of responses queried – in strong terms – the mechanism for working out historical inflation, which the critics argued had produced an implausibly wide range of estimated values, and the reparative suggestion. “They seemed to think we were saying we, today, should be guilty – rather than that the institution made this money, and so the institution should think about distributing this money,” said Everill.
Bell-Romero was frustrated that some of the notes appeared to be responding to points he hadn’t made. “It had nothing to do with what I found; it was just about the political bent of what they thought the research was about,” he said. “The point was never to denigrate the college.”
The college council told the working group they had to respond in particular to Abulafia’s criticisms, because of his high standing as a historian. Together, they drafted a 5,000-word response, accepting some criticisms and disputing others. They wrote: “The report is not admonishing past Caians, or saying that ‘Caians should not have’ done something … The very point is the banality … The report is recording the connections to a system that was widespread throughout British economic life. We are not asking for people to judge the people of the past. We are simply presenting a more complete picture so that we, today, can think about what we want to do with that information.”
Rather than defend the report in front of the college council, Everill thought it would be more productive to hold an open meeting, in the hope of encouraging a discussion rather than a debate. It took place in early March, an opportunity for anyone to ask questions of Bell-Romero and the working group. Bell-Romero expected a big turnout. But only one person turned up: Joe Herbert. According to others present at the meeting, he walked into the room and declared: “This is a terrible report.” That set the tone. Members of the working group said that Herbert, who declined to be interviewed for this story, called history a “crap discipline” and suggested that the low admission rates for Black students at Cambridge were not connected to the history of slavery.
Everill was appalled. At one point, she said, she stood up and said: “No, absolutely not, I will not put up with that kind of tone.” Herbert responded: “Sit down, woman,” adding, “You’re not in charge here.” In a later email to Everill, he acknowledged this, saying: “I told you to shut up because you were shrieking at me. You weren’t attempting to say anything.” (Contacted before publication, Herbert said that “inappropriate language” used at the meeting “was not limited to me”, but denied saying history was a “crap discipline”.)
After the open meeting, Everill was copied on an email thread in which this group of three life fellows continued to attack the report. They did not acknowledge the 5,000-word response, writing: “You never tried to explain anything.” In the emails, another life fellow, the philosopher Jimmy Altham, suggested that Everill may be “dyslexic” because of some typos; Herbert said that “the important thing is that this disastrous report is not published in the college’s name”; and Abulafia replied “I 100% agree”. Everill made a formal complaint of harassment against Altham and Herbert. The complaint against Herbert was upheld; but not against Altham. Herbert was encouraged to apologise, but he did not.
The scholars engaged in the research had fulfilled a narrow brief to examine the college’s financial links to slavery and come up with a proposal for action. But the life fellows who objected seemed to be responding to something larger; the idea that the legacies of slavery might still be shaping our present.
When I spoke with Abulafia, he didn’t want to discuss the specifics of events at Caius, which he described as “a source of division and contention”, but he did talk more broadly about this area of research. “It started with one or two Oxbridge colleges conducting these investigations and by and large, not much came out of it,” he said. “Why are they looking into it? It’s become a sort of fad, if you like. If we want to look at issues to do with the way human beings were being badly oppressed in the early 19th century, we might also want to look at children down the mines in this country. There are horrific stories. I just wish we could recognise that sort of unholy behaviour, which certainly took place in the slave trade, is also taking place on our own soil between white people – if we’re going to make it about a given colour, which I hate doing, actually.” Citing other examples of historic exclusion and oppression, such as child labour, he said: “Let’s tell those stories and not put so many resources into the legacies of slavery. I think we’ve got the basic idea on that now.”
Soon after the disastrous open meeting, the college council suggested that Bell-Romero redraft his report in collaboration with a life fellow in history who was not one of the primary critics – saying he would “know the fellowship tone”. But Bell-Romero was affronted. “It’s censorship, being babysat to write your own piece,” he said. “That’s where I drew the line.” He declined. With no clear plan of action, he thought the report might never be published. He continued with the Cambridge inquiry and tried to forget about it. But that would not be so easy.
In late May, as the Easter term edged towards its end, Tommy Castellani, a second-year languages undergraduate, was sitting in the Caius dining hall when a friend mentioned that his history tutor had been tweeting about a dispute. Castellani had recently started writing news stories for Varsity, the Cambridge student paper, and he wanted to know more. His friend pulled up Everill’s Twitter account. “It is literally my favourite thing, waking up on a lovely bank holiday Sunday to a whole string of emails from angry *life fellows* calling me names. The best.” (She was referring to the “dyslexic” comment.) Castellani started to dig into it.
“I realised this was going to be a big story,” he said. “There’s a culture war in college, and you can see it in the council papers – people feel divided.” He got hold of emails, spoke to Everill and interviewed Bell-Romero, who asked not to be named in the story. In June, Varsity published Castellani’s account of the fallout, including quotes from the life fellows’ emails and details of what was said at the open meeting. Castellani had approached the college for comment on the “racist and sexist” undertones of comments at the open meeting.
But when the Telegraph picked up on the Caius dispute three weeks later, the story had a very different slant. Incorrectly stating that the Caius research had been initiated “in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement” (the college had actually started the process of researching its links to slavery in spring 2019, a year before the protests), the story claimed the report included “incorrect monetary conversions”.
The paper identified Bell-Romero by name as a “woke activist” who had produced “shambolic” work that caused the crisis. Bell-Romero couldn’t access the article at first because of the paywall. When he did, his first response was horror. His second was to laugh. “I’d been struggling to explain to my friends what this had been like, and now I could point to the Telegraph article and say – that’s the tenor of the feedback we received.”
Although the reporter had clearly been briefed by at least one life fellow, the critics remained anonymous, even when quoted at length saying that these “attempts to rewrite history fall at the first hurdle”. Meanwhile Bell-Romero – a precariously employed early-career academic (wrongly described in the article as a “student”) – was named, and his professionalism questioned. A few days later, the Telegraph story was picked up by the Times, which has devoted increasing attention to campus conflicts in recent years.
The work of looking into legacies of slavery or related topics is typically done by early-career researchers. There is a growing concern about the risk of backlash for young academics working on histories of empire or slavery who are singled out in the press. They are left highly exposed, while their critics often have established positions and job security. Charlotte Riley, a lecturer in history at the University of Southampton, described a conversation with a new PhD student looking at empire and railways. “We had to sit him down and say: ‘The Daily Mail might come for you.’”
After the stories came out, Bell-Romero was contacted by a number of other researchers working on topics related to decolonisation and slavery who had been the subject of hit-jobs in the rightwing press. Time and again, researchers I interviewed for this story insisted on answering questions by email rather than speaking on the phone or in person, citing the fear of being misrepresented. “I do worry about a chilling effect,” says Everill. “There are a bunch of these postdocs available at the moment, and people who don’t want to be named and shamed in the national media might decide not to apply.”
The conflict at Caius seemed to be part of a wider faltering of legacies of slavery research – through overt backlash, or institutions announcing projects with great fanfare but not following through with support and funding. Hilary Beckles, the vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies and the author of Britain’s Black Debt, calls this pattern “research and run” – where universities do the archival work, then say a quick sorry and run from the implications of the findings, leaving the researchers exposed.
The historian Olivette Otele, a scholar of slavery and historical memory who was the first Black woman to be appointed a professor of history in the UK, joined the University of Bristol in 2020, and worked on the university’s own research into its deep connections to the slave trade. When she left just two years later, a colleague in another department tweeted that the university had used Otele “as a human shield to deflect legitimate criticism”. Announcing her departure, Otele wrote on Twitter: “The workload became insane and not compensated by financial reward. I actually burnt out,” adding that colleagues had been “sabotaging my reputation inside and outside the uni.”
As far as anyone could see, Caius had backed away from publishing Bell-Romero’s report after the controversy; Everill, head of the working group, was not sure it would ever be published. But in July, a newspaper submitted a freedom of information request about it. (Newspapers increasingly submit FoIs about academic research on subjects like slavery and empire as universities have become the frontline in the culture war; a controversial Times front page in August claimed that universities were changing syllabuses, even though their own data did not bear this out. Riley recalled one absurd example, where a journalist sent an FoI requesting all emails from academics using the word “woke”. “There were none, because we don’t actually sit there writing ‘I’m a woke historian’. That is insane.”)
The following month, the Caius report was published online, with the proposal for MPhil funding removed. It was not covered anywhere. “Probably because it turns out that wasn’t actually that inflammatory,” Everill said. In a statement to the Guardian, the master of the college, Prof Pippa Rogerson, said: “The report makes uncomfortable reading for all those affiliated to Caius. The College is 675 years old and it is important we acknowledge our complex past.”
In September, Bell-Romero and Cadeau’s much larger Cambridge University legacies of enslavement project was published. It found that Cambridge fellows had been involved in the East India Company and other slave-trading entities, and that the university had directly invested in the South Sea Company. They wrote: “Such financial involvement both helped to facilitate the slave trade and brought very significant financial benefits to Cambridge.” The report was covered by major news outlets, but did not provoke a particularly strong response.
The conflict over the Caius research suggests that these disputes often have little to do with the archival research itself, or its conclusions. In the view of the critics, the research is discredited by its intention to correct past wrongs. Even when the researchers insist that they are not trying to assign blame or guilt, the critics insist in return – not without some justification – that whether or not this is the intention, it is almost always the effect. This is presumably why they disapprove of doing the research to begin with.
Seen this way, it is a standoff that has no hope of resolution. When I spoke to Abulafia, he questioned the point of the research: “Cambridge University and its role in slavery is not, to my mind, as big a question as all sorts of other questions one could argue about the slave trade,” he said. But scholars working on the area argue that this is precisely the point; to understand institutions’ relationships to slavery, whether small or large, and through this to build a fuller picture of the past. “When we do this research, we’re just adding another layer, another perspective,” said Bell-Romero. The critics, of course, see this empirical modesty as disingenuous. But the archival work carries on, all over the country, and the diametrically opposing views on the very premise will inevitably lead to more conflicts.
In late September, Cadeau and Bell-Romero organised an academic conference about reparations, held at the Møller Institute, a starkly modern building west of Cambridge city centre. A few days before, it was covered in the Telegraph, which quoted anonymous sources describing it as “propagandist” and “fanatical” and Abulafia saying: “It’s that sense that it’s going to be one-sided that concerns me.” Cadeau, who is now a lecturer of diaspora history at Soas in London, was unfazed. “What I am most concerned about are legacies of racism. I am concerned with how little this country knows about slavery, even leading historians,” she told me. “I have been more concerned about the implications of how we treat the history of slavery, and whether or not our societies will address the legacies of slavery and racism, and much less concerned about the press.”
In his opening remarks to the conference, the historian Prof Nicholas Guyatt acknowledged the negative coverage, saying: “We’ve had some media attention already and that’s great, I welcome all views and am pleased everyone is here to listen to our fantastic speakers.” Bell-Romero presented a paper on the profits of slavery at Oxbridge. Cadeau spoke about her research into South Sea Company annuities at Cambridge, saying that it was hard to find an older college in Cambridge that doesn’t have links to this funding. No news story about the conference emerged – perhaps because in practice this was a fairly routine academic exercise. People presented papers on their niche areas of research, ran over time and debated.
On the final day of the conference, I sat with Bell-Romero in the lunch hall. He told me that he felt the launch of the Cambridge project had been handled better than the Caius report; the draft had gone to expert readers and the university backed the research it had commissioned. While the academics waited for the next talk to begin, Bell-Romero and a few other scholars working on slavery and reparations discussed the growing backlash to their work in an incredulous and frustrated tone. One British academic said he receives death threats every time he speaks about the case for reparations. After a few minutes of weary commiseration, they stood up from their empty plates and walked back into the lecture theatre.
“If you take pride in the past,” a Latin American researcher said with quiet exasperation before leaving, “then you have to take responsibility, too.”
Thursday, 2 May 2019
Why we are addicted to conspiracy theories
Outsiders and the disenfranchised have always embraced the existence of wild plots and cover-ups. But now the biggest conspiracy-mongers are in charge writes Anna Merlan in The Guardian
In January 2015, I spent the longest, queasiest week of my life on a cruise ship filled with conspiracy theorists. As our boat rattled toward Mexico and back, I heard about every wild plot, secret plan and dark cover-up imaginable. It was mostly fascinating, occasionally exasperating and the cause of a headache that took months to fade. To my pleasant surprise, given that I was a reporter travelling among a group of deeply suspicious people, I was accused of working for the CIA only once.
The unshakeable certainty possessed by many of the conspiracy theorists sometimes made me want to tear my hair out, how tightly they clung to the strangest and most far-fetched ideas. I was pretty sure they had lost their hold on reality as a result of being permanently and immovably on the fringes of American life. I felt bad for them and, to be honest, a little superior.
“The things that everyone thinks are crazy now, the mainstream will pick up on them,” proclaimed Sean David Morton early in the trip. “Twenty sixteen is going to be one of those pivotal years, not just in human history, but in American history as well.”
Morton is a self-proclaimed psychic and UFO expert, and someone who has made a lot of dubious claims about how to beat government agencies such as the IRS in court. (In 2017, he was sentenced to six years in prison for tax fraud.) I dismissed his predictions about 2016 the way I dismissed a lot of his prophecies and basic insistence about how the world works. Morton and the other conspiracy theorists on the boat were confident of a whole lot of things I found unbelievable, but which have plenty of adherents in the US and abroad.
Some of them asserted that mass shootings such as Sandy Hook are staged by the US government with the help of “crisis actors” as part of a sinister (and evidently delayed) gun-grab. The moon landing was obviously fake (that one didn’t even merit much discussion). The government was covering up not just the link between vaccines and autism but also the cures for cancer and Aids. Everywhere they looked, there was a hidden plot, a secret cabal and, as the gospel of Matthew teaches about salvation, only a narrow gate that leads to the truth.
I chronicled my stressful, occasionally hilarious, unexpectedly enlightening experience onboard the Conspira-Sea Cruise as a reporter for the feminist website Jezebel, and then I tried to forget about it. I had done a kooky trip on a boat, the kind of stunt journalism project every feature writer loves, and it was over. Conspiracy theorists, after all, were a sideshow.
But I began to notice that they were increasingly encroaching on my usual beats, such as politics. In July 2016, I was walking down a clogged, chaotic narrow street in Cleveland, Ohio, where thousands of reporters, pundits, politicians and Donald Trump fans had amassed to attend the Republican national convention. I was there as a reporter and was busy taking pictures of particularly sexist anti-Hillary Clinton merchandise. There was a lot of it around, for sale on the street and proudly displayed on people’s bodies: from TRUMP THAT BITCH badges to white T-shirts reading HILLARY SUCKS, BUT NOT LIKE MONICA.
Some of the attendees were from InfoWars, the mega-empire of suspicion – a radio show, website and vastly profitable store of lifestyle products – founded by Austin, Texas-based host Alex Jones. For many years, Jones was a harmless, nutty radio shock-jock: a guy shouting into a microphone, warning that the government was trying to make everyone gay through covert chemical warfare, by releasing homosexuality agents into the water supply. (“They’re turning the freaking frogs gay!” he famously shouted.)
President Barack Obama, subject of a number of conspiracy theories, not least that he was born in Kenya. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty
Jones also made less adorably kooky claims: that a number of mass shootings and acts of terrorism, such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, were faked by the government; that the CEO of Chobani, the yogurt company, was busy importing “migrant rapists” to work at its Idaho plant; that Hillary Clinton is an actual demon who smells of sulphur, hails from Hell itself and has “personally murdered and chopped up and raped” little children.
Jones and Donald Trump were longtime mutual fans. After announcing his run, candidate Trump made one of his first media appearances on Jones’s show, appearing via Skype from Trump Tower. Jones endorsed him early and often and, in turn, many of the radio host’s favourite talking points turned up in Trump’s speeches. Jones began darkly predicting that the elections would be “rigged” in Clinton’s favour, a claim that Trump quickly made a central tenet of the latter days of his campaign. At the end of September, Jones began predicting that Clinton would be on performance-enhancing drugs of some kind during the presidential debates; by October, Trump was implying that, too, and demanding that Clinton be drug-tested.
Soon after, the US narrowly elected a conspiracy enthusiast as its president, a man who wrongly believes that vaccines cause autism, that global warming is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese “in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive,” as he tweeted in 2012, and who claimed, for attention and political gain, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. One of the first people the president-elect called after his thunderous upset victory was Jones. Then, in a very short time, some of the most wild-eyed conspiracy-mongers in the country were influencing federal policy and taking meetings at the White House.
Here’s the thing: the conspiracy theorists aboard the cruise and in the streets of Cleveland could have warned me that Trump’s election was coming, had I only been willing to listen.
Many of the hardcore conspiracy theorists I sailed with on the Conspira-Sea Cruise weren’t very engaged in politics, given that they believe it’s a fake system designed to give us the illusion of control by our real overlords – the Illuminati, the international bankers or perhaps the giant lizard people. But when they did consider the subject, they loved Trump, even the left-leaning among them who might have once preferred Bernie Sanders.
They recognised the future president as a “truth-teller” in a style that spoke to them and many other Americans. They liked his thoughts about a rigged system and a government working against them, the way it spoke to what they had always believed, and the neat way he was able to peg the enemy with soundbites: the “lying media”, “crooked Hillary”, the bottomless abyss of the Washington “swamp”. They were confident of his victory – if the globalists and the new world order didn’t get in the way, and they certainly would try. Just as Morton said, they were sure that 2016 was going to change everything.
Trump’s fondness for conspiracy continued apace into his presidency: his Twitter account became a megaphone for every dark suspicion he has about the biased media and the rigged government working against him. At one particularly low point he even went so far as to accuse his political opponents of inflating the number of deaths in Puerto Rico caused by Hurricane Maria. His supporters became consumed by the concept of the “deep state”, seized by a conviction that a shadow regime is working hard to undermine the White House. At the same time, Trump brought a raft of conspiracy theorists into his cabinet: among them was secretary of housing and urban development Ben Carson, who suggested that President Obama would declare martial lawand cancel the 2016 elections to remain in power. There was also National Security adviser Michael Flynn (who was quickly fired), notorious for retweeting stories linking Hillary Clinton to child sex trafficking.
With the candidacy and then election of a conspiracy pedlar, conspiratorial thinking leaked from its traditional confines to spread in new, more visible ways across the country. As a result, a fresh wave of conspiracy theories and an obsession with their negative effects engulfed the US. We all worried late in the election season about “fake news”, a term for disinformation that quickly lost all meaning as it was gleefully seized on by the Trump administration to describe any media attention they didn’t like. We fixated on a conspiracy theorist taking the White House, and then we fretted over whether he was a true believer or just a cynical opportunist. And as left-leaning people found themselves unrepresented in government, with the judicial, executive and legislative branches held by the right, they too started to engage more in conspiracy theorising.
The reality is that the US has been a nation gripped by conspiracy for a long time. The Kennedy assassination has been hotly debated for years. The feminist and antiwar movements of the 1960s were, for a time, believed by a not-inconsiderable number of Americans to be part of a communist plot to weaken the country. A majority have believed for decades that the government is hiding what it knows about extraterrestrials. Since the early 1990s, suspicions that the Clintons were running a drug cartel and/or having their enemies murdered were a persistent part of the discourse on the right. And the website WorldNetDaily was pushing birther theories and talk of death panels (the idea, first articulated by Sarah Palin in 2009, that under Obamacare bureaucrats would decide whether the elderly deserved medical care) long before “fake news” became a talking point. Many black Americans have, for years, believed that the CIA flooded poor neighborhoods with drugs such as crack in order to destroy them.
In January 2015, I spent the longest, queasiest week of my life on a cruise ship filled with conspiracy theorists. As our boat rattled toward Mexico and back, I heard about every wild plot, secret plan and dark cover-up imaginable. It was mostly fascinating, occasionally exasperating and the cause of a headache that took months to fade. To my pleasant surprise, given that I was a reporter travelling among a group of deeply suspicious people, I was accused of working for the CIA only once.
The unshakeable certainty possessed by many of the conspiracy theorists sometimes made me want to tear my hair out, how tightly they clung to the strangest and most far-fetched ideas. I was pretty sure they had lost their hold on reality as a result of being permanently and immovably on the fringes of American life. I felt bad for them and, to be honest, a little superior.
“The things that everyone thinks are crazy now, the mainstream will pick up on them,” proclaimed Sean David Morton early in the trip. “Twenty sixteen is going to be one of those pivotal years, not just in human history, but in American history as well.”
Morton is a self-proclaimed psychic and UFO expert, and someone who has made a lot of dubious claims about how to beat government agencies such as the IRS in court. (In 2017, he was sentenced to six years in prison for tax fraud.) I dismissed his predictions about 2016 the way I dismissed a lot of his prophecies and basic insistence about how the world works. Morton and the other conspiracy theorists on the boat were confident of a whole lot of things I found unbelievable, but which have plenty of adherents in the US and abroad.
Some of them asserted that mass shootings such as Sandy Hook are staged by the US government with the help of “crisis actors” as part of a sinister (and evidently delayed) gun-grab. The moon landing was obviously fake (that one didn’t even merit much discussion). The government was covering up not just the link between vaccines and autism but also the cures for cancer and Aids. Everywhere they looked, there was a hidden plot, a secret cabal and, as the gospel of Matthew teaches about salvation, only a narrow gate that leads to the truth.
I chronicled my stressful, occasionally hilarious, unexpectedly enlightening experience onboard the Conspira-Sea Cruise as a reporter for the feminist website Jezebel, and then I tried to forget about it. I had done a kooky trip on a boat, the kind of stunt journalism project every feature writer loves, and it was over. Conspiracy theorists, after all, were a sideshow.
But I began to notice that they were increasingly encroaching on my usual beats, such as politics. In July 2016, I was walking down a clogged, chaotic narrow street in Cleveland, Ohio, where thousands of reporters, pundits, politicians and Donald Trump fans had amassed to attend the Republican national convention. I was there as a reporter and was busy taking pictures of particularly sexist anti-Hillary Clinton merchandise. There was a lot of it around, for sale on the street and proudly displayed on people’s bodies: from TRUMP THAT BITCH badges to white T-shirts reading HILLARY SUCKS, BUT NOT LIKE MONICA.
Some of the attendees were from InfoWars, the mega-empire of suspicion – a radio show, website and vastly profitable store of lifestyle products – founded by Austin, Texas-based host Alex Jones. For many years, Jones was a harmless, nutty radio shock-jock: a guy shouting into a microphone, warning that the government was trying to make everyone gay through covert chemical warfare, by releasing homosexuality agents into the water supply. (“They’re turning the freaking frogs gay!” he famously shouted.)
President Barack Obama, subject of a number of conspiracy theories, not least that he was born in Kenya. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty
Jones also made less adorably kooky claims: that a number of mass shootings and acts of terrorism, such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, were faked by the government; that the CEO of Chobani, the yogurt company, was busy importing “migrant rapists” to work at its Idaho plant; that Hillary Clinton is an actual demon who smells of sulphur, hails from Hell itself and has “personally murdered and chopped up and raped” little children.
Jones and Donald Trump were longtime mutual fans. After announcing his run, candidate Trump made one of his first media appearances on Jones’s show, appearing via Skype from Trump Tower. Jones endorsed him early and often and, in turn, many of the radio host’s favourite talking points turned up in Trump’s speeches. Jones began darkly predicting that the elections would be “rigged” in Clinton’s favour, a claim that Trump quickly made a central tenet of the latter days of his campaign. At the end of September, Jones began predicting that Clinton would be on performance-enhancing drugs of some kind during the presidential debates; by October, Trump was implying that, too, and demanding that Clinton be drug-tested.
Soon after, the US narrowly elected a conspiracy enthusiast as its president, a man who wrongly believes that vaccines cause autism, that global warming is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese “in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive,” as he tweeted in 2012, and who claimed, for attention and political gain, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. One of the first people the president-elect called after his thunderous upset victory was Jones. Then, in a very short time, some of the most wild-eyed conspiracy-mongers in the country were influencing federal policy and taking meetings at the White House.
Here’s the thing: the conspiracy theorists aboard the cruise and in the streets of Cleveland could have warned me that Trump’s election was coming, had I only been willing to listen.
Many of the hardcore conspiracy theorists I sailed with on the Conspira-Sea Cruise weren’t very engaged in politics, given that they believe it’s a fake system designed to give us the illusion of control by our real overlords – the Illuminati, the international bankers or perhaps the giant lizard people. But when they did consider the subject, they loved Trump, even the left-leaning among them who might have once preferred Bernie Sanders.
They recognised the future president as a “truth-teller” in a style that spoke to them and many other Americans. They liked his thoughts about a rigged system and a government working against them, the way it spoke to what they had always believed, and the neat way he was able to peg the enemy with soundbites: the “lying media”, “crooked Hillary”, the bottomless abyss of the Washington “swamp”. They were confident of his victory – if the globalists and the new world order didn’t get in the way, and they certainly would try. Just as Morton said, they were sure that 2016 was going to change everything.
Trump’s fondness for conspiracy continued apace into his presidency: his Twitter account became a megaphone for every dark suspicion he has about the biased media and the rigged government working against him. At one particularly low point he even went so far as to accuse his political opponents of inflating the number of deaths in Puerto Rico caused by Hurricane Maria. His supporters became consumed by the concept of the “deep state”, seized by a conviction that a shadow regime is working hard to undermine the White House. At the same time, Trump brought a raft of conspiracy theorists into his cabinet: among them was secretary of housing and urban development Ben Carson, who suggested that President Obama would declare martial lawand cancel the 2016 elections to remain in power. There was also National Security adviser Michael Flynn (who was quickly fired), notorious for retweeting stories linking Hillary Clinton to child sex trafficking.
With the candidacy and then election of a conspiracy pedlar, conspiratorial thinking leaked from its traditional confines to spread in new, more visible ways across the country. As a result, a fresh wave of conspiracy theories and an obsession with their negative effects engulfed the US. We all worried late in the election season about “fake news”, a term for disinformation that quickly lost all meaning as it was gleefully seized on by the Trump administration to describe any media attention they didn’t like. We fixated on a conspiracy theorist taking the White House, and then we fretted over whether he was a true believer or just a cynical opportunist. And as left-leaning people found themselves unrepresented in government, with the judicial, executive and legislative branches held by the right, they too started to engage more in conspiracy theorising.
The reality is that the US has been a nation gripped by conspiracy for a long time. The Kennedy assassination has been hotly debated for years. The feminist and antiwar movements of the 1960s were, for a time, believed by a not-inconsiderable number of Americans to be part of a communist plot to weaken the country. A majority have believed for decades that the government is hiding what it knows about extraterrestrials. Since the early 1990s, suspicions that the Clintons were running a drug cartel and/or having their enemies murdered were a persistent part of the discourse on the right. And the website WorldNetDaily was pushing birther theories and talk of death panels (the idea, first articulated by Sarah Palin in 2009, that under Obamacare bureaucrats would decide whether the elderly deserved medical care) long before “fake news” became a talking point. Many black Americans have, for years, believed that the CIA flooded poor neighborhoods with drugs such as crack in order to destroy them.
Trump supporters cheering the then Republican presidential nominee in 2016. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty
The Trump era has merely focused our attention back on to something that has reappeared with reliable persistence: the conspiratorial thinking and dark suspicions that have never fully left us. Conspiracy theorising has been part of the American system of governance and culture and thought since its beginnings: as the journalist Jesse Walker writes in his book The United States of Paranoia, early white settlers, including history textbook favourite Cotton Mather, openly speculated that Native Americans were controlled by the devil, and conspiring with him and a horde of related demons to drive them out. Walker also points to the work of the historian Jeffrey Pasley, who found what he called the “myth of the superchief”: the colonist idea that every Native-led resistance or attack was directed by an “Indian mastermind or monarch in control of tens of thousands of warriors”.
The elements of suspicion were present long before the 2016 election, quietly shaping the way large numbers of people see the government, the media and the nature of what’s true and trustworthy.
And for all of our bogus suspicions, there are those that have been given credence by the government itself. We have seen a sizeable number of real conspiracies revealed over the past half century, from Watergate to recently declassified evidence of secret CIA programmes, to the fact that elements within the Russian government really did conspire to interfere with US elections. There is a perpetual tug between conspiracy theorists and actual conspiracies, between things that are genuinely not believable and truths that are so outlandish they can be hard, at first, to believe.
But while conspiracy theories are as old as the US itself, there is something new at work: people who peddle lies and half-truths have come to prominence, fame and power as never before. If the conspiratorial world is a vast ocean, 2016 was clearly the year that Alex Jones – along with other groups, such as anti-immigration extremists, anti-Muslim thinktanks and open neo-Nazis and white supremacists – were able to catch the wave of the Trump presidency and surf to the mainstream shore.
Over and over, I found that the people involved in conspiracy communities weren’t necessarily some mysterious “other”. We are all prone to believing half-truths, forming connections where there are none to be found, or finding importance in political and social events that may not have much significance at all.
I was interested in understanding why this new surge of conspiracism has appeared, knowing that historically, times of tumult and social upheaval tend to lead to a parallel surge in conspiracy thinking. I found some of my answer in our increasingly rigid class structure, one that leaves many people feeling locked into their circumstances and desperate to find someone to blame. I found it in rising disenfranchisement, a feeling many people have that they are shut out of systems of power, pounding furiously at iron doors that will never open to admit them. I found it in the frustratingly opaque US healthcare system, a vanishing social safety net, a political environment that seizes cynically on a renewed distrust of the news media.
Together, these elements helped create a society in which many Americans see millions of snares, laid by a menacing group of enemies, all the more alarming for how difficult they are to identify and pin down.
Let’s pause to attempt to define a conspiracy theory. It is a belief that a small group of people are working in secret against the common good, to create harm, to effect some negative change in society, to seize power for themselves, or to hide some deadly or consequential secret. An actual conspiracy is when a small group of people are working in secret against the common good – and anyone who tells you we can always easily distinguish fictitious plots from real ones probably hasn’t read much history.
Conspiracy theories tend to flourish especially at times of rapid social change, when we are re-evaluating ourselves and, perhaps, facing uncomfortable questions in the process. In 1980, the civil liberties lawyer and author Frank Donner wrote that conspiracism reveals a fundamental insecurity about who Americans want to be versus who they are.
“Especially in times of stress, exaggerated febrile explanations of unwelcome reality come to the surface of American life and attract support,” he wrote. The continual resurgence of conspiracy movements, he claimed, “illuminate[s] a striking contrast between our claims to superiority, indeed our mission as a redeemer nation to bring a new world order, and the extraordinary fragility of our confidence in our institutions”. That contrast, he said, “has led some observers to conclude that we are, subconsciously, quite insecure about the value and permanence of our society”.
In the past few years, medical conspiracies have undergone a resurgence like few other alternative beliefs, and they have a unique power to do harm. Anti-vaccine activists have had a direct hand in creating serious outbreaks of the measles, which they have then argued are hoaxes ginned up by the government to sell more vaccines. There is also evidence that this form of suspicion is being manipulated by malicious outside actors. A 2018 study by researchers at George Washington University found evidence that Russian bot accounts that had been dedicated to sowing various kinds of division during the 2016 election were, two years later, tweeting both pro- and anti-vaccine content, seeking to widen and exploit that divide, too.
Medical conspiracy theories are big, profitable business: an uptick in the belief that the government is hiding a cure for cancer has led people back to buying laetrile, a discredited fake drug popular in the 1970s. Fake medicines for cancer and other grave diseases are peddled by players of all sizes, from large importers to individual retailers. People such as Alex Jones – but not just him – are making multimillion-dollar sales in supplements and quack cures.
At the same time, medical conspiracies aren’t irrational. They are based on frustration with what is seen as the opacity of the medical and pharmaceutical systems. They have taken root in the US, a country with profoundly expensive and dysfunctional healthcare – some adherents take untested cures because they can’t afford the real thing. And there is a long history around the world of doctors giving their approval to innovations – cigarettes, certain levels of radiation, thalidomide, mercury – that turn out to be anything but safe.
Medical conspiracy theories are startlingly widespread. In a study published in 2014, University of Chicago political scientists Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood surveyed 1,351 American adults and found that 37% believe the US Food and Drug Administration is “intentionally suppressing natural cures for cancer because of drug company pressure”.
Meanwhile, 20% agreed that corporations are preventing public health officials from releasing data linking mobile phones to cancer, and another 20% that doctors still want to vaccinate children “even though they know such vaccines to be dangerous”. (Though the study didn’t get into this, many people who feel that way assume doctors do it because they’re in the pockets of Big Vaccine, although vaccines are actually less profitable than many other kinds of medical procedures.)
The Trump era has merely focused our attention back on to something that has reappeared with reliable persistence: the conspiratorial thinking and dark suspicions that have never fully left us. Conspiracy theorising has been part of the American system of governance and culture and thought since its beginnings: as the journalist Jesse Walker writes in his book The United States of Paranoia, early white settlers, including history textbook favourite Cotton Mather, openly speculated that Native Americans were controlled by the devil, and conspiring with him and a horde of related demons to drive them out. Walker also points to the work of the historian Jeffrey Pasley, who found what he called the “myth of the superchief”: the colonist idea that every Native-led resistance or attack was directed by an “Indian mastermind or monarch in control of tens of thousands of warriors”.
The elements of suspicion were present long before the 2016 election, quietly shaping the way large numbers of people see the government, the media and the nature of what’s true and trustworthy.
And for all of our bogus suspicions, there are those that have been given credence by the government itself. We have seen a sizeable number of real conspiracies revealed over the past half century, from Watergate to recently declassified evidence of secret CIA programmes, to the fact that elements within the Russian government really did conspire to interfere with US elections. There is a perpetual tug between conspiracy theorists and actual conspiracies, between things that are genuinely not believable and truths that are so outlandish they can be hard, at first, to believe.
But while conspiracy theories are as old as the US itself, there is something new at work: people who peddle lies and half-truths have come to prominence, fame and power as never before. If the conspiratorial world is a vast ocean, 2016 was clearly the year that Alex Jones – along with other groups, such as anti-immigration extremists, anti-Muslim thinktanks and open neo-Nazis and white supremacists – were able to catch the wave of the Trump presidency and surf to the mainstream shore.
Over and over, I found that the people involved in conspiracy communities weren’t necessarily some mysterious “other”. We are all prone to believing half-truths, forming connections where there are none to be found, or finding importance in political and social events that may not have much significance at all.
I was interested in understanding why this new surge of conspiracism has appeared, knowing that historically, times of tumult and social upheaval tend to lead to a parallel surge in conspiracy thinking. I found some of my answer in our increasingly rigid class structure, one that leaves many people feeling locked into their circumstances and desperate to find someone to blame. I found it in rising disenfranchisement, a feeling many people have that they are shut out of systems of power, pounding furiously at iron doors that will never open to admit them. I found it in the frustratingly opaque US healthcare system, a vanishing social safety net, a political environment that seizes cynically on a renewed distrust of the news media.
Together, these elements helped create a society in which many Americans see millions of snares, laid by a menacing group of enemies, all the more alarming for how difficult they are to identify and pin down.
Let’s pause to attempt to define a conspiracy theory. It is a belief that a small group of people are working in secret against the common good, to create harm, to effect some negative change in society, to seize power for themselves, or to hide some deadly or consequential secret. An actual conspiracy is when a small group of people are working in secret against the common good – and anyone who tells you we can always easily distinguish fictitious plots from real ones probably hasn’t read much history.
Conspiracy theories tend to flourish especially at times of rapid social change, when we are re-evaluating ourselves and, perhaps, facing uncomfortable questions in the process. In 1980, the civil liberties lawyer and author Frank Donner wrote that conspiracism reveals a fundamental insecurity about who Americans want to be versus who they are.
“Especially in times of stress, exaggerated febrile explanations of unwelcome reality come to the surface of American life and attract support,” he wrote. The continual resurgence of conspiracy movements, he claimed, “illuminate[s] a striking contrast between our claims to superiority, indeed our mission as a redeemer nation to bring a new world order, and the extraordinary fragility of our confidence in our institutions”. That contrast, he said, “has led some observers to conclude that we are, subconsciously, quite insecure about the value and permanence of our society”.
In the past few years, medical conspiracies have undergone a resurgence like few other alternative beliefs, and they have a unique power to do harm. Anti-vaccine activists have had a direct hand in creating serious outbreaks of the measles, which they have then argued are hoaxes ginned up by the government to sell more vaccines. There is also evidence that this form of suspicion is being manipulated by malicious outside actors. A 2018 study by researchers at George Washington University found evidence that Russian bot accounts that had been dedicated to sowing various kinds of division during the 2016 election were, two years later, tweeting both pro- and anti-vaccine content, seeking to widen and exploit that divide, too.
Medical conspiracy theories are big, profitable business: an uptick in the belief that the government is hiding a cure for cancer has led people back to buying laetrile, a discredited fake drug popular in the 1970s. Fake medicines for cancer and other grave diseases are peddled by players of all sizes, from large importers to individual retailers. People such as Alex Jones – but not just him – are making multimillion-dollar sales in supplements and quack cures.
At the same time, medical conspiracies aren’t irrational. They are based on frustration with what is seen as the opacity of the medical and pharmaceutical systems. They have taken root in the US, a country with profoundly expensive and dysfunctional healthcare – some adherents take untested cures because they can’t afford the real thing. And there is a long history around the world of doctors giving their approval to innovations – cigarettes, certain levels of radiation, thalidomide, mercury – that turn out to be anything but safe.
Medical conspiracy theories are startlingly widespread. In a study published in 2014, University of Chicago political scientists Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood surveyed 1,351 American adults and found that 37% believe the US Food and Drug Administration is “intentionally suppressing natural cures for cancer because of drug company pressure”.
Meanwhile, 20% agreed that corporations are preventing public health officials from releasing data linking mobile phones to cancer, and another 20% that doctors still want to vaccinate children “even though they know such vaccines to be dangerous”. (Though the study didn’t get into this, many people who feel that way assume doctors do it because they’re in the pockets of Big Vaccine, although vaccines are actually less profitable than many other kinds of medical procedures.)
President John F Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy travelling in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963, moments before his assassination. Photograph: Jim Altgens/AP
Subscribing to those conspiracy theories is linked to specific health behaviours: believers are less likely to get flu jabs or wear sunscreen and more likely to seek alternative treatments. (In a more harmless vein, they are also more likely to buy organic vegetables and avoid GMOs.) They are also less inclined to consult a family doctor, relying instead on friends, family, the internet or celebrity doctors for health advice.
The anti-vaccine movement is the most successful medical conspiracy – persistent, lucrative and perpetually able to net new believers in spite of scientific evidence. It is also emblematic of all such conspiracy theories: people get caught up in them through either grief or desperation, exacerbated by the absence of hard answers and suspicion about whether a large and often coldly impersonal medical system is looking out for their best interests. And an army of hucksters stands ready to catch them and make a buck.
The king of dubious health claims is Alex Jones, whose InfoWars Life Health Store sells a variety of questionable supplements. Most of Jones’s products come from a Houston-based company called the Global Healing Center and are relabelled with the InfoWars logo. Global Healing Center’s CEO, Dr Edward Group, is also Jones’s go-to health expert, regularly appearing on the programme to opine about vaccines (he thinks they are bad) and fungus (the root of all evil – luckily, one of the supplements that Jones and Group sell helps banish it from the body).
Group isn’t a medical doctor but a chiropractor, although his website claims a string of other credentials, such as degrees from MIT and Harvard, where he attended continuing education programmes that are virtually impossible to fail provided you pay the bill on time. Until a few years ago, Group also claimed to have a medical degree from the Joseph LaFortune School of Medicine. The LaFortune School is based in Haiti and is not accredited. That one is no longer on his CV.
Several disgruntled Global Healing Center staff members spoke to me for a 2017 story about Group and Jones’s relationship, claiming that the company earns millions a year while toeing an extremely fine line in making claims for its products. “Global Healing Center pretends to care about FDA and FTC regulation, but at the end of the day, GHC says a lot of things that are “incorrect, totally circumstantial or based on incomplete evidence,” one employee said.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the claims that Jones and Group make about colloidal silver, which Jones sells as Silver Bullet. Colloidal silver is a popular new-age health product, touted as a miraculous antibacterial and antimicrobial agent that is dabbed on the skin. But Group and Jones advocate drinking the stuff. In 2014, Group told the InfoWars audience that he has been doing so for years. “I’ve drank half a gallon of silver, done a 10 parts per million silver, for probably 10 or 15 days,” Group said reassuringly.
Group also claims that the FDA “raided” his office to steal his colloidal silver, because it is too powerful. “It was one of the things that was targeted by the FDA because it was a threat to the pharmaceutical companies and a threat for doctor’s visits because it worked so good in the body.”
Subscribing to those conspiracy theories is linked to specific health behaviours: believers are less likely to get flu jabs or wear sunscreen and more likely to seek alternative treatments. (In a more harmless vein, they are also more likely to buy organic vegetables and avoid GMOs.) They are also less inclined to consult a family doctor, relying instead on friends, family, the internet or celebrity doctors for health advice.
The anti-vaccine movement is the most successful medical conspiracy – persistent, lucrative and perpetually able to net new believers in spite of scientific evidence. It is also emblematic of all such conspiracy theories: people get caught up in them through either grief or desperation, exacerbated by the absence of hard answers and suspicion about whether a large and often coldly impersonal medical system is looking out for their best interests. And an army of hucksters stands ready to catch them and make a buck.
The king of dubious health claims is Alex Jones, whose InfoWars Life Health Store sells a variety of questionable supplements. Most of Jones’s products come from a Houston-based company called the Global Healing Center and are relabelled with the InfoWars logo. Global Healing Center’s CEO, Dr Edward Group, is also Jones’s go-to health expert, regularly appearing on the programme to opine about vaccines (he thinks they are bad) and fungus (the root of all evil – luckily, one of the supplements that Jones and Group sell helps banish it from the body).
Group isn’t a medical doctor but a chiropractor, although his website claims a string of other credentials, such as degrees from MIT and Harvard, where he attended continuing education programmes that are virtually impossible to fail provided you pay the bill on time. Until a few years ago, Group also claimed to have a medical degree from the Joseph LaFortune School of Medicine. The LaFortune School is based in Haiti and is not accredited. That one is no longer on his CV.
Several disgruntled Global Healing Center staff members spoke to me for a 2017 story about Group and Jones’s relationship, claiming that the company earns millions a year while toeing an extremely fine line in making claims for its products. “Global Healing Center pretends to care about FDA and FTC regulation, but at the end of the day, GHC says a lot of things that are “incorrect, totally circumstantial or based on incomplete evidence,” one employee said.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the claims that Jones and Group make about colloidal silver, which Jones sells as Silver Bullet. Colloidal silver is a popular new-age health product, touted as a miraculous antibacterial and antimicrobial agent that is dabbed on the skin. But Group and Jones advocate drinking the stuff. In 2014, Group told the InfoWars audience that he has been doing so for years. “I’ve drank half a gallon of silver, done a 10 parts per million silver, for probably 10 or 15 days,” Group said reassuringly.
Group also claims that the FDA “raided” his office to steal his colloidal silver, because it is too powerful. “It was one of the things that was targeted by the FDA because it was a threat to the pharmaceutical companies and a threat for doctor’s visits because it worked so good in the body.”
Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin on the moon in 1969 – an event contested by many conspiracy theorists. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
Colloidal silver doesn’t, in fact, work so good in the body; you are not supposed to put it there. The Mayo Clinic says silver has “no known purpose in the body” and drinking colloidal silver can cause argyria, a condition that can permanently turn skin, eyes and internal organs an ashen bluish color. (Jones and Group acknowledge on InfoWars that this can happen, but only when people are using silver incorrectly.) Jones and their ilk complain that they are under attack by the media, the government and some shadowy third entities for telling truths too powerful to ignore.
Unusually, medical conspiracy thinking is not solely the province of the far right or the libertarian bluish-from-too-much-silver fringe. The bourgeois hippie left participates, too. The website Quartz published an astonishing story showing that many of the products sold by Jones are identical to thosepeddled by Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s new-age lifestyle website. And there’s David “Avocado” Wolfe, another new-age lifestyle vlogger, who has called vaccine manufacturers “criminal and satanic” and said that chemtrails are real and toxic. (“Chemtrails” are actually contrails, or water vapour from airplanes, which people in the deep end of the conspiracy pool think are clouds of poison gas being showered on the populace to, once again, make us docile and weak.)
It is only fair to note, however, that these people have been made prominent by the internet, but are also rigorously fact-checked because of it. Jones has been subjected to a very thorough investigation of his claims, particularly since the 2016 election, when his friendship with Donald Trump gave him an enormous boost in public attention. Goop is regularly skewered by doctors, including Dr Jen Gunter, a gynaecologist who takes great joy in wryly puncturing the site’s weirder assertions about vaginal health, such as the benefits of jade “yoni” eggs for vaginal toning.
But it is difficult to figure out whether the two sides balance each other out, whether the scrutiny bestowed by the internet is equal to the new set of consumers it potentially introduces to Goop or InfoWars products. And when people follow the advice of the likes of Jones, it may not only be their wasted money at risk. In October 2017, a nonprofit watchdog group, the Center for Environmental Health, independently tested two InfoWars supplements – Caveman True Paleo Formula and Myco-ZX – and found high levels of lead in both. Myco-ZX is meant to rid the body of “harmful organisms”, and it is one of InfoWars’ most heavily marketed products.
“It is not only ironic, but tragic, when we find lead in dietary supplements, since consumers are ingesting the toxic chemical with every sip and swallow,” CEH CEO Michael Green said in a press release.
“These products are supposed to enhance human health and performance,” Green added, “not lead to increased risk of heart attacks and sperm damage.”
Colloidal silver doesn’t, in fact, work so good in the body; you are not supposed to put it there. The Mayo Clinic says silver has “no known purpose in the body” and drinking colloidal silver can cause argyria, a condition that can permanently turn skin, eyes and internal organs an ashen bluish color. (Jones and Group acknowledge on InfoWars that this can happen, but only when people are using silver incorrectly.) Jones and their ilk complain that they are under attack by the media, the government and some shadowy third entities for telling truths too powerful to ignore.
Unusually, medical conspiracy thinking is not solely the province of the far right or the libertarian bluish-from-too-much-silver fringe. The bourgeois hippie left participates, too. The website Quartz published an astonishing story showing that many of the products sold by Jones are identical to thosepeddled by Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s new-age lifestyle website. And there’s David “Avocado” Wolfe, another new-age lifestyle vlogger, who has called vaccine manufacturers “criminal and satanic” and said that chemtrails are real and toxic. (“Chemtrails” are actually contrails, or water vapour from airplanes, which people in the deep end of the conspiracy pool think are clouds of poison gas being showered on the populace to, once again, make us docile and weak.)
It is only fair to note, however, that these people have been made prominent by the internet, but are also rigorously fact-checked because of it. Jones has been subjected to a very thorough investigation of his claims, particularly since the 2016 election, when his friendship with Donald Trump gave him an enormous boost in public attention. Goop is regularly skewered by doctors, including Dr Jen Gunter, a gynaecologist who takes great joy in wryly puncturing the site’s weirder assertions about vaginal health, such as the benefits of jade “yoni” eggs for vaginal toning.
But it is difficult to figure out whether the two sides balance each other out, whether the scrutiny bestowed by the internet is equal to the new set of consumers it potentially introduces to Goop or InfoWars products. And when people follow the advice of the likes of Jones, it may not only be their wasted money at risk. In October 2017, a nonprofit watchdog group, the Center for Environmental Health, independently tested two InfoWars supplements – Caveman True Paleo Formula and Myco-ZX – and found high levels of lead in both. Myco-ZX is meant to rid the body of “harmful organisms”, and it is one of InfoWars’ most heavily marketed products.
“It is not only ironic, but tragic, when we find lead in dietary supplements, since consumers are ingesting the toxic chemical with every sip and swallow,” CEH CEO Michael Green said in a press release.
“These products are supposed to enhance human health and performance,” Green added, “not lead to increased risk of heart attacks and sperm damage.”
Sunday, 19 June 2016
Why failure is the key to flying high
If at first you don’t succeed: Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Photograph: Miramax/Everett/Rex/Shutterstock
Matthew Syed in The Guardian
We want our children to succeed, in school and, perhaps even more importantly, in life. But the paradox is that our children can only truly succeed if they first learn how to fail. Consider the finding that world-class figure skaters fall over more often in practice than low-level figure skaters. At first sight this seems contradictory. Why are the really good skaters falling over the most?
The reason is actually quite simple. Top skaters are constantly challenging themselves in practice, attempting jumps that stretch their limitations. This is why they fall over so often, but it is precisely why they learn so fast. Shizuka Arakawa of Japan estimates that she endured some 20,000 falls as she progressed from a beginner to an Olympic champion.
Lower-level skaters have a quite different approach. They are always attempting jumps they can already do very easily, remaining within their comfort zone. This is why they don’t fall over. In a superficial sense, they look successful, because they are always on their feet. The truth, however, is that by never failing, they never progress.
What is true of skating is also true of life. James Dyson worked through 5,126 failed prototypes for his dual cyclone vacuum before coming up with the design that made his fortune. These failures were essential to the pathway of learning. As Dyson put it: “You can’t develop new technology unless you test new ideas and learn when things go wrong. Failure is essential to invention.”
Even in areas of life where failure is potentially catastrophic, it is still vital to respond positively. In aviation, for example, every aircraft is equipped with two almost-indestructible black boxes: one records the electronic information from the on-board computers and the other records sounds in the cockpit. When there is a crash, these boxes are recovered and analysed so that enlightened changes can be enacted. This means that the same mistake never happens again. It is this constant willingness to learn from failure that means aviation has become one of the world’s safest forms of transportation. Last year the accident rate for major airlines was just one crash for every 8.3 million take-offs.
In healthcare, however, things are very different. Clinicians don’t like to admit to failure, partly because they have healthy egos (particularly the senior doctors) and partly because they fear litigation. The consequence is that instead of learning from failure, healthcare often covers up failure. The direct consequence is that the same mistakes are repeated. According to the Journal of Patient Safety, 400,000 people die every year in American hospitals alone due to preventable error. That is like two jumbo jets crashing every day or 9/11 happening every few days. In the UK, too, the numbers are shocking. Until healthcare learns to respond positively to failure, things will not improve.
But let us return to children. One of the seminal mistakes in education in the 1970s was the attempt to equip children with confidence by giving them lots of successes (setting the bar very low). The consequence was that the self-esteem of kids became bound up with success, and they became unable to take risks and crumpled as soon as they hit a proper challenge.
We need to flip this approach. In a complex world, failure is inevitable. It is those individuals and institutions that have the resilience and flexibility to face up to failure, learn the lessons and adapt which ultimately excel.
Matthew Syed in The Guardian
We want our children to succeed, in school and, perhaps even more importantly, in life. But the paradox is that our children can only truly succeed if they first learn how to fail. Consider the finding that world-class figure skaters fall over more often in practice than low-level figure skaters. At first sight this seems contradictory. Why are the really good skaters falling over the most?
The reason is actually quite simple. Top skaters are constantly challenging themselves in practice, attempting jumps that stretch their limitations. This is why they fall over so often, but it is precisely why they learn so fast. Shizuka Arakawa of Japan estimates that she endured some 20,000 falls as she progressed from a beginner to an Olympic champion.
Lower-level skaters have a quite different approach. They are always attempting jumps they can already do very easily, remaining within their comfort zone. This is why they don’t fall over. In a superficial sense, they look successful, because they are always on their feet. The truth, however, is that by never failing, they never progress.
What is true of skating is also true of life. James Dyson worked through 5,126 failed prototypes for his dual cyclone vacuum before coming up with the design that made his fortune. These failures were essential to the pathway of learning. As Dyson put it: “You can’t develop new technology unless you test new ideas and learn when things go wrong. Failure is essential to invention.”
Even in areas of life where failure is potentially catastrophic, it is still vital to respond positively. In aviation, for example, every aircraft is equipped with two almost-indestructible black boxes: one records the electronic information from the on-board computers and the other records sounds in the cockpit. When there is a crash, these boxes are recovered and analysed so that enlightened changes can be enacted. This means that the same mistake never happens again. It is this constant willingness to learn from failure that means aviation has become one of the world’s safest forms of transportation. Last year the accident rate for major airlines was just one crash for every 8.3 million take-offs.
In healthcare, however, things are very different. Clinicians don’t like to admit to failure, partly because they have healthy egos (particularly the senior doctors) and partly because they fear litigation. The consequence is that instead of learning from failure, healthcare often covers up failure. The direct consequence is that the same mistakes are repeated. According to the Journal of Patient Safety, 400,000 people die every year in American hospitals alone due to preventable error. That is like two jumbo jets crashing every day or 9/11 happening every few days. In the UK, too, the numbers are shocking. Until healthcare learns to respond positively to failure, things will not improve.
But let us return to children. One of the seminal mistakes in education in the 1970s was the attempt to equip children with confidence by giving them lots of successes (setting the bar very low). The consequence was that the self-esteem of kids became bound up with success, and they became unable to take risks and crumpled as soon as they hit a proper challenge.
We need to flip this approach. In a complex world, failure is inevitable. It is those individuals and institutions that have the resilience and flexibility to face up to failure, learn the lessons and adapt which ultimately excel.
Saturday, 9 July 2011
Hacking scandal: is this Britain's Watergate?
By Oliver Wright, Ian Burrell, Martin Hickman, Cahal Milmo and Andrew Grice
Saturday, 9 July 2011
David Cameron was forced to cut Rupert Murdoch and his newspaper empire loose from the heart of government yesterday as he tried to deflect public anger about his failure to tackle the phone-hacking scandal.
Mr Cameron turned on Mr Murdoch's son James, saying there were questions "that need to be answered" about his role during the phone-hacking cover-up, and criticising him for not accepting the resignation of News International's chief executive Rebekah Brooks.
He also admitted that his desire to win support from the company's newspapers had led him to turn "a blind eye" as evidence grew of widespread illegality at the News of the World.
With a newspaper closed, five arrests and more to follow, 4,000 possible victims, a media empire shaken to its foundations and the Prime Minister reeling, the escalating scandal has become a controversy comparable to the US Watergate saga, with ramifications for Downing Street, the media and police.
Last night the media regulator Ofcom announced it would contact police about the conduct of Mr Murdoch's empire in covering up phone-hacking allegations, to determine whether it was a "fit and proper" owner of the broadcaster BSkyB, which Mr Murdoch is attempting to buy outright. He is due to fly into London today to deal with the crisis, according to reports. Shares in the broadcaster fell by eight per cent.
In a day of further dramatic developments it emerged that:
*Police are investigating allegations that a News International (NI) executive deleted millions of emails from an internal archive, in an apparent attempt to obstruct inquiries into phone hacking.
*Andy Coulson was arrested on suspicion of bribing police officers and conspiracy to phone hack, and Clive Goodman, the NOTW's former royal correspondent, was held in a dawn raid on suspicion of bribing police officers. Both were bailed. A 63-year-old man, thought to be a private investigator, was also arrested in Surrey.
*Mr Cameron's most senior officials were warned before the last election about connections between Mr Coulson and Jonathan Rees, a private investigator paid up to £150,000 a year to illegally trawl for personal information. But Mr Cameron appointed Mr Coulson as his director of communications.
*A judge-led public inquiry will take place to investigate phone hacking. Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch are prepared to give evidence on phone hacking under oath.
*Ms Brooks was stripped of control of NI's internal investigation and faced calls for her resignation from the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
*Wapping sources warned of worse phone-hacking revelations to come.
At a Downing Street press conference, Mr Cameron defended his decision to appoint Mr Coulson but admitted his relationship with senior members of the Murdoch empire had been too close.
"The deeper truth is this... because party leaders were so keen to win the support of newspapers we turned a blind eye to the need to sort this issue, get on top of the bad practices, to change the way our newspapers are regulated," he said. "I want to deal with it."
Mr Cameron said he now thought it was wrong to keep Ms Brooks at the company: "It has been reported that she offered her resignation over this and in this situation, I would have taken it."
Mr Cameron was also asked whether James Murdoch remained a fit and proper person to run a large company, following his admission yesterday that he personally approved out-of-court payments in a way which he now accepted was wrong. The Prime Minister replied: "I read the statement yesterday. I think it raises lots of questions that need to be answered and these processes that are under way are going to have to answer those questions."
Mr Cameron announced two inquires: one to deal with phone hacking and the failure of the police to properly investigate it, and another into press regulation. He said it was clear that the Press Complaints Commission had failed and the second inquiry would bringing forward proposals for an independent body.
Asked what enquiries he had made before employing Andy Coulson, the Prime Minister said: "Obviously I sought assurances, I received assurances. I commissioned a company to do a basic background check."
But the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said Mr Cameron was still failing to restore confidence in the Government's handling of the scandal: "This is a Prime Minister who clearly still doesn't get it. He is ploughing on regardless on BSkyB. He failed to apologise for the catastrophic mistake of bringing Andy Coulson into the heart of government.
"His wholly unconvincing answers of what he knew and when he knew it about Mr Coulson's activities undermine his ability to lead the change Britain needs."
Asked if Mrs Brooks should consider her position, Mr Clegg told The Independent: "Yes. The whole senior management has to ask how it could have presided over this without appearing to know what was going on. Someone somewhere higher up the food chain needs to be held to account. You can't just ask journalists, secretaries, photographers and low-paid office workers to carry the can for a failure, on James Murdoch's own admission, of corporate governance."
Watergate Parallels
The Watergate and phone-hacking scandals had small beginnings – a break-in at a hotel, and a single "rogue" reporter and private detective. The News of the World scandal is not just about phone hacking. It is also about statements made to Parliament, personally to David Cameron, and in a court of law which – as James Murdoch has now admitted – were not true. As with Watergate, which brought down Richard Nixon's presidency, the cover-up could have bigger implications than the original offence.
Mr Cameron turned on Mr Murdoch's son James, saying there were questions "that need to be answered" about his role during the phone-hacking cover-up, and criticising him for not accepting the resignation of News International's chief executive Rebekah Brooks.
He also admitted that his desire to win support from the company's newspapers had led him to turn "a blind eye" as evidence grew of widespread illegality at the News of the World.
With a newspaper closed, five arrests and more to follow, 4,000 possible victims, a media empire shaken to its foundations and the Prime Minister reeling, the escalating scandal has become a controversy comparable to the US Watergate saga, with ramifications for Downing Street, the media and police.
Last night the media regulator Ofcom announced it would contact police about the conduct of Mr Murdoch's empire in covering up phone-hacking allegations, to determine whether it was a "fit and proper" owner of the broadcaster BSkyB, which Mr Murdoch is attempting to buy outright. He is due to fly into London today to deal with the crisis, according to reports. Shares in the broadcaster fell by eight per cent.
In a day of further dramatic developments it emerged that:
*Police are investigating allegations that a News International (NI) executive deleted millions of emails from an internal archive, in an apparent attempt to obstruct inquiries into phone hacking.
*Andy Coulson was arrested on suspicion of bribing police officers and conspiracy to phone hack, and Clive Goodman, the NOTW's former royal correspondent, was held in a dawn raid on suspicion of bribing police officers. Both were bailed. A 63-year-old man, thought to be a private investigator, was also arrested in Surrey.
*Mr Cameron's most senior officials were warned before the last election about connections between Mr Coulson and Jonathan Rees, a private investigator paid up to £150,000 a year to illegally trawl for personal information. But Mr Cameron appointed Mr Coulson as his director of communications.
*A judge-led public inquiry will take place to investigate phone hacking. Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch are prepared to give evidence on phone hacking under oath.
*Ms Brooks was stripped of control of NI's internal investigation and faced calls for her resignation from the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
*Wapping sources warned of worse phone-hacking revelations to come.
At a Downing Street press conference, Mr Cameron defended his decision to appoint Mr Coulson but admitted his relationship with senior members of the Murdoch empire had been too close.
"The deeper truth is this... because party leaders were so keen to win the support of newspapers we turned a blind eye to the need to sort this issue, get on top of the bad practices, to change the way our newspapers are regulated," he said. "I want to deal with it."
Mr Cameron said he now thought it was wrong to keep Ms Brooks at the company: "It has been reported that she offered her resignation over this and in this situation, I would have taken it."
Mr Cameron was also asked whether James Murdoch remained a fit and proper person to run a large company, following his admission yesterday that he personally approved out-of-court payments in a way which he now accepted was wrong. The Prime Minister replied: "I read the statement yesterday. I think it raises lots of questions that need to be answered and these processes that are under way are going to have to answer those questions."
Mr Cameron announced two inquires: one to deal with phone hacking and the failure of the police to properly investigate it, and another into press regulation. He said it was clear that the Press Complaints Commission had failed and the second inquiry would bringing forward proposals for an independent body.
Asked what enquiries he had made before employing Andy Coulson, the Prime Minister said: "Obviously I sought assurances, I received assurances. I commissioned a company to do a basic background check."
But the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said Mr Cameron was still failing to restore confidence in the Government's handling of the scandal: "This is a Prime Minister who clearly still doesn't get it. He is ploughing on regardless on BSkyB. He failed to apologise for the catastrophic mistake of bringing Andy Coulson into the heart of government.
"His wholly unconvincing answers of what he knew and when he knew it about Mr Coulson's activities undermine his ability to lead the change Britain needs."
Asked if Mrs Brooks should consider her position, Mr Clegg told The Independent: "Yes. The whole senior management has to ask how it could have presided over this without appearing to know what was going on. Someone somewhere higher up the food chain needs to be held to account. You can't just ask journalists, secretaries, photographers and low-paid office workers to carry the can for a failure, on James Murdoch's own admission, of corporate governance."
Watergate Parallels
The Watergate and phone-hacking scandals had small beginnings – a break-in at a hotel, and a single "rogue" reporter and private detective. The News of the World scandal is not just about phone hacking. It is also about statements made to Parliament, personally to David Cameron, and in a court of law which – as James Murdoch has now admitted – were not true. As with Watergate, which brought down Richard Nixon's presidency, the cover-up could have bigger implications than the original offence.
Phone hacking: how News of the World's story unravelled
Tabloid's publisher aggressively denied scandal – until the latest revelations
- guardian.co.uk,
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larger | smaller
News of the World will print its last ever edition on Sunday July 10, 2011 – the phone-hacking scandal has forced the tabloid's closure. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images
It was a strategy of cover-up, quarter-admission, and foot dragging that took years to unravel – beginning with the first court case brought in the wake of jailing of the News of the World's former royal editor Clive Goodman and the newspaper's £100,000-a-year private investigator Glenn Mulcaire.
At the trial it emerged that five others had their phones or messages hacked into – none of whom were members of the Royal family, subjects of Goodman's work – but prominent individuals Simon Hughes, Elle Macpherson, Max Clifford, football agent Sky Andrew and Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballer's Association.
Nevertheless, News International chose to gloss over the glaring contradiction of a court case that prompted the resignation of Andy Coulson, as editor, taking the "ultimate sacrifice" for activities he said he was unaware of.
In March 2007, the company's then executive chairman Les Hinton was clear that the hacking scandal was narrow in scope. Giving evidence to MPs on the culture media and sport select committee Hinton said, when asked if Goodman was the only person who knew about phone hacking, he replied that "I believe he was the only person" who was aware of the practice and "I believe absolutely that Andy did not have knowledge of what was going on".
Despite that, though, it was Gordon Taylor's legal team pursued a court case on his behalf. News International offered Taylor £250,000 to quietly settle the case, but he fought on and as his lawyers obtained evidence from Mulcaire's notebooks and tapes seized by the Metropolitan Police, there was early evidence that hacking practice may have spread wider.
Mark Lewis, who was Taylor's solicitor, recalls that it was shortly after the legal team obtained a tape of Mulcaire talking to another journalist (a tape later leaked to the New York Times), that the company's lawyer Tom Crone offered to settle at a higher price.
This time Taylor won a massive £700,000 out-of-court settlement. Crucially, though, News International wanted it to remain confidential – which Taylor had little choice but to agree to, given the amount of money on offer.
Documents relating to the case were sealed, and the matter would never have become public until the existence of the settlement – signed off by James Murdoch on the recommendation of News of the World editor Colin Myler and Crone – was revealed in July 2009 by the Guardian.
That Guardian's report was accompanied by the revelation that private investigators had hacked into "two or three thousand" mobile phones – and the suggestion that MPs from all three parties and cabinet ministers, including former deputy prime minister John Prescott and ex-culture secretary Tessa Jowell, were among the targets.
Two days later, News International responded late on a Friday afternoon with an aggressive denial, authored it is believed by Crone, with some help from Myler, and corporate communications head Matthew Anderson. It concluded there was no evidence to support the contention that "News of the World or its journalists have instructed private investigators or other third parties to access the voicemails of any individuals" or that "there was systemic corporate illegality by News International to suppress evidence".
In reaching the conclusion, News International had two seeming allies. John Yates, the assistant commissioner at the Met, refused to reopen the original investigation into phone hacking, saying that "potential targets may have run into hundreds of people, but our inquiries showed that they only used the tactic against a far smaller number of individuals".
Meanwhile, the regulator also chose to take News International's evidence at face value, concluding in its own enquiry in November 2009 it had "seen no new evidence to suggest that the practice of phone message tapping was undertaken by others beyond Goodman and Mulcaire, or evidence that News of the World executives knew about Goodman and Mulcaire's activities".
Not everybody was so convinced. A growing number of angry celebrities and politicians began to initiate their own lawsuits in the belief their phones had been hacked. Legal actions gathered momentum in 2010, but News International fought every step of the way, while the Met was slow to share evidence with the claimants and key witnesses like Glenn Mulcaire refused to testify.
It was not until December 2010 that Sienna Miller's legal action that alleged that hacking was almost certainly initiated by at least one other journalist – Ian Edmondson, then still employed by the Sunday tabloid.
Even then some appeared in denial. In October 2010, Rupert Murdoch, speaking at News Corp's annual meeting, said "there was one incident more than five years ago" before taking aim at the Guardian. "If anything was to come to light, and we have challenged those people who have made allegations to provide evidence … we would take immediate action".
Andy Coulson, by now working in Number 10 for David Cameron, said as recently as December of last year in the Tommy Sheridan perjury trial that: "I don't accept there was a culture of phone hacking at the News of the World.".
It was not until 2011 – some say at the urging of former Daily Telegraph editor and News International's group general manager Will Lewis – that News International began gradually to soften its stance. Edmondson was dismissed, as it appeared that some of the newspaper's upper-middle ranks could also be under threat.
The company stopped contesting the civil cases in April, reaching a £100,000 settlement with Sienna Miller, although that meant News International would avoid the embarassment of court cases were all sorts of additional evidence could have emerged.
However, it was not until the Met chose to reopen the criminal enquiry after five years of refusal, handing the job to deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers rather than John Yates, that News Corp had to admit more.
With the police trawling over 11,000 pages of notes, suddenly officers found allegations that the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler had been targeted by the newspaper, prompting James Murdoch to concede on Thursday that unnamed "wrongdoers turned a good newsroom bad" and that "this was not fully understood or adequately pursued" by those in charge.
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