At the request of the Labour-controlled local government, a London park named after four-time Prime Minister William Gladstone, one of the most famous premiers of the Victorian era, will be transformed into a “slavery garden.”
According to a horticulturist quoted by The Telegraph, Brent London Borough Council, which is dominated by Labour Party councillors, is paying ethnic minority artists to populate the part with prickly plants from Africa and other areas to “[mirror] the emotions contested history can elicit… something may seem pleasant enough from a distance, but uncomfortable when seen up close.”
However, plans to rename the park ‘Diversity Fields’ or ‘Diane Abbott Park’ — after a far-left black Labour politician who has made questionable statements about white people on multiple occasions — have been scrapped.
“Will visitors to this park be reminded of Gladstone’s achievements?” Maybe a shrubbery to commemorate the Third Reform Act? Is it only slavery that they will be lectured on subliminally?” said the initiative’s Save Our Statues campaign.
In more historically literate times, Gladstone was regarded as one of the United Kingdom’s greatest leaders, lauded for initiatives such as the Representation of the People Act of 1884 and the introduction of the secret ballot, as well as his vehement condemnation of the Ottoman Turks’ Bulgarian Horrors when suppressing an uprising of some of the European peoples they were colonising.
However, leftist academics and activists have attempted to link him to slavery — not because he, an abolitionist who regarded slavery as the “foulest crime,” ever supported it, but because his father purchased sugar plantations, and because, like most other abolitionists of the time, he believed that buying out slave owners was the best way to end what had been a social norm across the globe for countless generations.
While it was once considered a source of pride that the British people incurred massive public debt to purchase slave freedom — debt that they did not fully repay until 2015 — revisionist leftists now believe that it was actually a bad thing, and that compensation should have been paid to the slaves instead.