22 October 2015
Guano Politik
By Don Urquhart
I had the good fortune recently to spend a couple of days in Bristol. We took the ferry from the Pump House to the SS Great Britain, which is now an admirable museum. Man of the people that I am, I was particularly keen to inspect the steerage quarters and was pleased to find that they were quite decent. Nevertheless from the point of view of modern sensibilities, I found myself wondering how frequently and how efficiently the privies were refreshed. Still it was clearly a humane environment compared to the ships used to convey people from West Africa to the New World, a service provided by Gibbs, Bright & Co., the owners of the SS Great Britain.
It was to the Gibbs family’s country seat, Tyntesfield, that we repaired the next day. The family was long gone, having sold out to the National Trust who had outbid Madonna and Kylie Minogue in 2002. But there were truly delightful portraits of the children and several of the ladies of the house. It transpired that the family fortune came from guano, the excrement deposited by seabirds on the Pacific coast of South America. The Gibbs flotilla made many trips to Peru in the mid-19th Century, returning with the holds full of a substance which was to transform the soil fertility, food production and living standards of Western Europe. A key component of the business model was the low cost of guano mining, costs being kept down by importing from China up to 250,000 slaves, most of whom failed to survive either the sea voyage or the harsh working conditions shovelling guano.
“Jeremy Corbyn to raise China’s human rights record at state banquet” was the Guardian headline. I doubt very much whether Jeremy Corbyn ever had any intention of raising Human Rights issues with the Chinese President at a state banquet, but, once the headline had been published, the mainstream media had it as too juicy a morsel not to exploit. Nevertheless I struggle to see why Jeremy Corbyn would think that discussing human rights with Xi Jinping could achieve anything, or, perhaps even more to the point, why the leader of the world’s largest country would heed the views of a relatively minor politician from a small country half way round the world.
It is truly a fine thing that people upset themselves about wrongs being perpetrated in foreign lands and it is surely true that there are countless monstrous bully boys roaming the Earth. Talk to them by all means; use persuasion on them but at the end of the day get over it. We play sports with them, in their countries and ours; we trade voraciously with the most repellent of administrations and we take vacations cheek by jowl with their torture chambers.
I hate to think what terrible abuses are being visited on Chinese dissidents but then the guano comes to mind and I wonder who we are to coach their current leadership.
