Chris

Dawn Butler is making a collective, ethnic, ancestral claim against the English. She's saying that, collectively she and her people, who are separate from the group she's demanding reparations for, are owed a debt, by virtue of their descent. This debt is owed by the descendants of slave owners, collectively - that mongrel English race that the snake Jacob Wormtongue Moggs spoke of. Her claims implies that she knows who the English are - contra Wormtongue - and that she is not one of them. Yet she sits in their parliament, and then, when pressed, when it's pointed out that she is doing this for overseas interests - obviously, as there are far more descendants of enslaved Africans overseas than in Britain - she resorts to handwringing about parliamentary procedure and pretends to be English again. Schrodinger's Englishness, if you will. Everyone else in the West - the Indians, the blacks, the Jews, the Mohammadans - are all playing politics based on collective interests, based on a clear notion of identity, of who is part of the in-group and who is part of the out-group. Only Europeans are burdened with individualism in their politics. This situation is untenable, and it will result in a backlash. It cannot come soon enough, given the speed of demographic change.