A rare and wonderful interview with Princess Anne

[MrsMaxDeWinter]

A rare interview with the wonderful Princess Anne.

Pragmatic, straight-forward, and very moving, especially when she talks about what lockdown meant for elderly people.

I don't agree with her on the monarchy's links to slavery, but I really like her.

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Maybe she actually believes this? I agree with it and I am neither wealthy, powerful nor suffer lack of empathy.

@Flappingtarps The slave trade is taught in schools, and most adults in the UK are well aware of it. Apologies have been made many times. This country pays millions in overseas aids, many to countries like Jamaica which were affected by the slave trade. Some artefacts have been returned and more will follow but museums throughout the world are involved. So I think most of your boxes there are ticked. We can't do much more, so concentrating on modern slavery makes far more sense.

@polkadotdalmation She may very well believe it. Did I say she didn't believe it?

No you didn't say she didn't believe it, but you did imply her wealth and power made her immune to feeling empathy. Pretty insulting to a woman you do not know.

@polkadotdalmation Wealth and power don't make you immune from experiencing empathy. But in this case, her words make it clear she doesn't. And if she feels I've insulted her-I am perfectly content with that!

She doesn't know you (and never will), from Adam.

Would you prefer they were paid taxpayers money?

Not that it's ever going to happen but why does it have to be one or the other?

There's a middle ground that doesn't involve endlessly trading off connection to be had. Even the York daughters have managed it after a fashion.

@polkadotdalmation "She doesn't know you (and never will), from Adam"
Crushed, I am. Crushed.

And just like that. Right there. You incapsulated everything that the British school system taught about slavery. Everything. All of it.

No wonder you did not mention the millions that were paid to slave owners. A debt we just finished paying off as recently as 2015. We took out this loan in 1833. £20M back then, would be valued in billions around now.

Meantime, we began foreign aid in giving haphazard peanuts in the 1920s/30s. But formally the pledge only started in 1970. 0.7% GNI for a number of countries.
The amount has been decreasing over the years. By a lot. We even stopped giving India aid in 2015

So you should be! You are as insignificant as a speck of dandruff.

That's honestly not a personal insult, just an attempt at humour. Something these threads often lack. You can report it is you like though 😂😂😂

@notanotheroneagain So how does that make anything better? We know their were massive injustices, horrendous actions and huge inequalities...but it was a different era. Nothing anyone will ever say or do will recompense the enslaved peoples, so it makes sense to stop it happening now, and show lessons were learned.

As a genuine question. Did the African slavers who actually captured these people who were enslaved and sell them to the white slavers, also receive compensation? Hopefully not, but you do realise they played a major part in the trade? And the sailors of the British navy who died attempting to release slaves from Spanish ships and other nations who continued the trade, long after we banned it?

In attempting to crystallise an argument this complex into a single narrative, you are refusing to see the whole picture.

I dont remember learning about the slave trade at school but when I was at school it was the mid 70s so perhaps it was not done very much then. I do not even remember having a lessond about sex education back then. However, my parents told me all I needed to know about sex education so i did not need to learn it from school

Yes and by cherry picking a few aspects in a feeble attempt to make Britain look less culpable, you are doing the same!

While British sailors were releasing slaves from Spanish ships, wealth accumulated from the slave trade continued to fuel investments in shipbuilding, banking, insurance and arms.

Even abolitionist bankers held mortgages and other financial assets secured on plantation estates.

So yes the it’s a complex picture alright and the UK does itself no favours at all constantly dismissing and minimising its involvement and saying “yes, but …”. Princess Anne should know better.

And the subject of slavery was certainly not taught in schools in the 70s. In fact back then, I remember in the Midlands anyway, there being a particularly entrenched and unpleasant racism that was overt wherever you went: school, the football pitch, in shops and on public transport. Contemporaries of mine very much suffered from it.

And later on in the 70s, cheap labour textile sweat shops in Leicester continued to form part of our racialised capitalism.

I would love to have details of all these schools in the 1970s ( or even the 80s,90s and 20s) that dealt in depth with all aspects of the slave trade.

Princess Anne seems to work hard, but I feel that her (and her children's) reputations are partly PR. I've had reservations about her ever since reading about her issues with dogs.
Princess Anne’s dogs only obey her and the incidents with the queen’s are relatively minor compared to the incidents with Anne’s.
During a dinner party, the servants were expected the clear up a large turd left by her dog Dotty (was she not housetrained properly too?). She, like Andrew and Charles, has had teddy bear issues-
when the Royal Collection restored a childhood toy that had been ripped by her dog she refused to pay the £500 bill, paying £200 and leaving the Royal Collection to pay the rest. Dotty’s mother, Florence, bit a maid, Ruby Brooker, who was ‘persuaded’ not to take matters further. Then Dotty bit two boys in Windsor Great Park – a seven-year-old on the back, arm and leg, and the other on the collarbone and leg. She pleaded guilty to letting her dog run out of control and was ordered to pay to the parents. They were angry as the maximum was a £5000 fine with the dog being destroyed, and felt, quite rightly, that Dotty was a danger to society. The Queen’s animal psychologist, Roger Mumford, claimed in court that a pack mentality that can lead to wariness of any outsider had led to the incident. If this is true – I don’t have the knowledge to confirm – then surely that still made Dotty a threat , so why was it not grounds to destroy Dotty? Maybe because the mentality could be reversed through training, but one wonders if the pack mentality evidence was true for Dotty or just another example of rules bent for royalty. Anne was ordered to keep Dotty on a lead until she had been to appropriate obedience classes, but Hoey says there’s no record of her complying. (why couldn’t Princess Anne, with her ample resources and dog world connections have had her dogs trained properly in the first place? The killing fo the Queen’s corgi took place before the boys were bitten, so surely she should have been extra careful to keep Dotty on a leash and retrain her?)
The case made her the first royal to have a criminal record

It happened a long time ago and she may well be sorry now but it seems an egregious example of royalty conferring exemption from the usual treatment.