The Book of Trespass
My sticky notes from The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes:
Something to memorise and tell people when they defend colonialism:
When the British left India, they had drained its GDP from 27 per cent to 3 per cent. It estimated that up to twenty-nine million Indians died of famine, murder and organised genocide under the colonial regime. It is estimated that 3.1 million Africans were transported to the British colonies as slaves, of which 400,000 never arrived, lost to malnutrition, disease or the sea.
On borders:
When Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, declared in 2016, that "borders are the worst invention ever made by politicians, the then Prime Minister Theresa May dismissed the comment. The notion that borders were bad wasn't quite so hard to stomach as the idea that they were invented. Neoliberalism needs to believe in the inherent legitimacy of borders because, with such a binary perspective, you need certainty as to where your loyalties end. But the fixed borders of nation states have always been plastic contrivances, echoes of the ebb and flow of the politics that creates them.
On migration:
The real barrier to migration is not walls but the technology that legitimises them: words.
In what way is the country full? In England, the urban landscape accounts for almost 11 per cent of the landmass, and most of that is open space -- roads and parks. Of the 2.27 per cent of urban zones that are actually built on, many homes are themselves empty. In England there are 216,000 empty houses, enough to accommodate the inhabitants of the Calais Jungle forty-three times over. And, if we're honest, [landowner] Mr Drax and I know for a fact where we can find eleven square miles of empty land: behind his slave wall in Dorset.
If England is full, it is full of space. And the walls that hide it.
On English Nationalism:
while right-wing newspapers and politicians are usually adept at avoiding overt nationalistic sentiment, they can't help themselves when it comes to that dog-whistle sentiment: family values.
Nationalism suits the landowning classes because it gives people a sense of ownership without them actually owning anything at all.
On the wagged dog:
Today the national crisis that grips the land is not Brexit. It is the spell that binds 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of the waterways in England from public use. If England really wants to take back control, it should take it from the anachronistic system of ownership that has left so many of its people dispossessed of their rights.
On magic:
the threat of the alternative story is what downgrades a doxa to an orthodoxy.
Gandalf is a magician, a wizard and a witch because he is a storyteller, a weaver of alternative stories that threaten the established narrative
Because Harry and Meaghan had just moved in here, I expected armed security, tripwires, anti-aircraft guns, but there's nothing, just those words on the sign that spell the land: "Trespass on this site is a criminal offence." And the silent expectation of compliance.