#Disunited Nations

[gameofthrones2020]

Books on Understanding English History

To understand the history of England, it is first necessary to know how the kingdom of the English came into beginning with the unification of England in 927 CE by the House of Wessex, ruled England from 927 CE to 1016 CE and then was in power again under

To understand the history of England, it is first necessary to know how the kingdom of the English came into beginning with the unification of England in 927 CE by the House of Wessex, ruled England from 927 CE to 1016 CE and then was in power again under Edward the Confessor from 1041 CE to 1066. The founders of the kingdom of the English were Alfred the Great, king of the West Saxons and…

[thisismenow3]

They want the law to bind us but not protect us and protect them but not bind them

Who is the then in the above? Conservatives, republicans, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Bart O’Kavannaugh and Roberts? Yes. Also any affluent person ever. Seems like we should do something to change that, and move even more quickly to limit the destruction being caused by the named individuals

[zuko-always-lies]

Friendly Reminder

At the end of the 100 years war,

The Northern Water Tribe is still largely isolationist. After the Siege of the North, they tend nothing to aid the war effort and their only change was sending a small expedition to aid the Southern Water Tribe.

The Southern Water Tribe is a tiny, disunited shadow of its former self due to decades of genocide.

The Earth Kingdom is extremely divided, disunited, and devastated by the war. King Kuei has only just been reinstalled on the throne. It will take many years of consolidation before the government can attempt or demand anything outside its borders.

The Air Nomads have been reduced to one person.

The Avatar is the Firelord's best friend.

The Fire Nation is still almost unopposed, and as far as "international relations" goes what the Firelord wants will generally fly. "Zuko being bullied into x" doesn't make much sense.

[transgenderer]

hi miss transgenderer. you’re like the guru for slightly bs ethnic/history vibes on tumblr. so I wanna bounce an idea off you:

i feel like the Germans were to the early modern period what the Greeks were to the late Iron Age. Disunited nationality prone to fighting amongst themselves, created a lot of philosophy and art, politics dominated by complex state/economic alliances. by the 18th century u can say hapsburgs were like the athenians and prussia like the spartans, but that one feels too obvious and more untrue.

i’m not sure if there’s a modern version of this though. closest are either the arabs or latin Americans perhaps.

HMMM i like this concept cluster. i have an urge to be a truther about referring to the HRE as "the germans". the HRE was huge! the area the hapsburg controlled was mostly not modern germany! but i like the HRE-greek connection, they do feel analogous... im not sure what the rome is in this situation. i mean, except for america of course, eventually

[argyrocratie]

turn out Sacher-Masoch recalled an anecdote about Bakunin at the time of the pan-Slavist congress of 1848 and funny enough the scene depicted still manage to be somewhat thematically what Sacher-Masoch is known for:

"The Baroness denied that the goal could be achieved through revolution.

“It was not the republic,” she cried, “that made the ideas of 1789 triumph, it was Napoleon. We need a man who is himself a power, and this man can only be the Tsar”

While she spoke thus with vivacity, as usual, and her large clear eyes shone, she looked, with her parafa and her gold brocade kazabaika trimmed with sable, like one of those intelligent and energetic tsarinas of the old Russia, accustomed to making the neck of any man who approached them a stool for their feet.

This witty woman developed her ideas with great sagacity and in a very brilliant way.

“Before long,” she said, among other things, “the political ideal will definitely be relegated to the background. All nations will no longer have but a single concern: achieving unity. This will result in the formation of large, very powerful States. This aspiration, the strongest because it is the most natural, will push all other interests into the shadows for a long time.

“The struggles of our time, almost all fought in the name of freedom, have little importance; in the very near future these struggles will become purely national struggles.

“The Slavs, like other nations, must aspire to unity and achieve it; but it must be recognized that they are less prepared for it than the Italians and Germans were. A number of small independent nations have been formed within the Slavic race, which will not easily give up their independence.”

“That is perfectly right,” said Bakunin: “‘a union of the Slavic rivers losing themselves in the Russian sea,’ in Pushkin’s sense, would seem desirable neither to the Czechs, nor to the Serbs, nor to the Croats, and it would be energetically refused by Polish. This is precisely why the autocratic government of the Tsar must fall. The only form of government capable of satisfying all parties is a large and free Slavic federation, on the model of the United States of North America, which would include the Hungarians and the Romanians.”

“No! Bakunin,” cried the superb baroness, “you are wrong. We will achieve nothing until we know how to subordinate our political ideal to our national ideal.

“All by the Tsar! nothing without the tsar!”

“You defend the monarchy of the tsars, because you yourself are a great despot,” said Bakunin, smiling and passionately raising his adversary’s little hand to his lips. “It would be an idea to make you sovereign of our pan-Slavist state. I would be the first to throw myself at your feet and make myself your humble slave.”

“Ah! If I were mistress of all these crazy disunited heads,” she cried, “I would unite you all with the knout; because you need the knout, everyone, without exception!”

-Sacher-Masoch, “Choses vécues,” Revue politique et littéraire 25 no. 8(25 août 1888): 250-252. (X)

[mariacallous]

While India’s Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi appear poised to return to power for a third consecutive term—a feat accomplished by a premier only once before in the country’s history—they are much diminished, having failed to secure a parliamentary majority on their own. In his 10 years in power, Modi has never had to rely on coalition partners. The election marks not only the end of single-party control in the Indian Parliament but also the BJP’s having peaked. Coalition governments—the natural order for India’s democracy since the late 1980s, except for the past decade—are back to stay.

The BJP’s supremacy over the past decade was the result of several factors. In Modi, the party had a once-in-a-generation leader whose charisma and communication abilities placed him head and shoulders above the competition in terms of popularity among voters. Religious appeals, welfare programs (especially those aimed at women and the poor), and organizational capabilities that gave the party a superior ground game all helped. So did a ruthlessness in deploying the dark arts of politics, a disunited and weak opposition, and access to oodles of campaign finance.

The BJP’s manifest hegemony appeared to presage its continued dominance of the Indian political landscape well into the future. But from the summit, the only way is down. Of course, the party may stay near its peak for a while and climb down slowly—but that is not a matter of if, but when.

Although robust political competition is a hallmark of democracies, a surprisingly large number have been dominated by a single political party for long periods of time. Examples include Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, the Christian Democrats in Italy, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico, and the Democratic Party in Botswana. India itself was dominated by the Indian National Congress party for many decades, and the communist Left Front ran the state of West Bengal unchallenged for three-and-half decades.

When in power, these dominant parties seemed unassailable—until they were not. In some cases, this happened when economic development and technological change altered the structure of the economy and the relative power of different social groups. The green revolution in India, for example, empowered farmers from middle castes who had long been excluded from the Congress party’s social coalition. Their economic ascendency translated into political power that pushed out the Congress in populous North Indian states. The shift from manufacturing to services and the concomitant decline of unions also undermined a major social base of the dominant left-of-center parties.

In many postcolonial states, the party that led the country to independence enjoyed a special legitimacy. But with each successive generation, societal memories of epochal historical events faded. It took seven decades with the PRI in Mexico and three decades with the African National Congress in South Africa (as last week’s election results demonstrate). India’s Congress party played a pivotal role in the nation’s freedom struggle, but while the halo effect persisted for decades, it inevitably dimmed.

Dominant parties can also fade because of national crises driven by international events—such as an economic shock or a defeat in wars. But for many of them, the longer that they are in power, the more that institutional sclerosis sets in. Call it the law of political entropy. As the French political scientist Maurice Duverger put it in the 1960s, the dominant party “wears itself out in office, it loses its vigor, its arteries harden. … Every domination bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.”

The longer that the BJP was in power, the more that those seeds sprouted within the party. The BJP’s singular strength has been its leader, Narendra Modi. The Congress party also had such a leader in Indira Gandhi, who—like Modi—towered above her contemporaries. The popularity of both leaders far outweighed that of their parties.

But that very strength became their Achilles’ heel as a personality-driven style of party and politics emerged. For the BJP, increasing centralization, declining intraparty democracy, and the cutting-to-size of regional leaders who were not subserviently loyal to national the leader all took their toll. Efforts to engineer defections from opposition parties (through both blandishments and coercion) meant that gradually, the party became a magnet for opportunists rather than those with deep ideological commitments.

Under Modi’s rule, such coercion often took the form of dropping corruption cases against opposition party members who defected to the BJP. But this did not mean that the defectors became less corrupt; a leopard doesn’t change its spots. There’s little wonder, then, that even though the BJP had ridden an anti-corruption wave to power in 2014, preelection polls published in April this year found that more than half of respondents (55 percent) believed that corruption had increased in the past five years. Committed party workers have begun to lose interest as party hoppers brought in for short-term gains crowd them out in coveted positions. A favorite goal of the BJP’s leadership was to create a Congress mukt Bharat (“An India free of the Congress”). Ironically, in attempting to do so, the BJP became the embodiment of that very Congress culture.

If the art of victory is learned in defeat, for the BJP, the opposite is proving true. Each new victory brought a validation of the party’s strategies, whether muzzling critics, coercing opponents, or marginalizing religious minorities. The premium on loyalty increased, and voices of dissent become more quiescent. The initial self-confidence that allowed for risk-taking became an overconfidence spilling over to reckless behavior—exemplified by allegations of India’s intelligence agencies seeking to silence overseas critics in Canada and the United States.

The arrogance meant that the party overlooked three countervailing forces.

First, the manifest reality that no party in India wins with a majority of the votes. For a party to win in India’s first-past-the-post system, it needs a plurality of votes—which requires a fragmented opposition. The more hegemonic that the BJP became, the more authoritarian that it became, putting pressure on opposition parties and their leaders. But instead of weakening them, it brought them together. Nothing concentrates the mind like a fight for survival, and, while imperfect and incomplete, the opposition’s decision to join forces in the so-called INDIA coalition limited vote fragmentation.

Second, while successful political parties embody a set of ideas and ideologies that are yoked to policies and programs, all ideas have their life cycles. Postwar Keynesianism had its day for a quarter-century, and neoliberalism subsequently had its own for about three decades. Both are passé today. Political Islam rode high for around three decades after the Iranian revolution, but its energies have since flagged. In India, the secular socialist idea had a run for nearly a half-century, but its increasing opportunism tripped it up, and it was gradually pushed out as the BJP tapped into the plentiful waters of the anxieties and resentments of the Hindu majority.

But the Hindutva ideology has its limits, too. Even though the BJP did deliver on its promise on constructing a Ram temple on the site of a historic mosque, the expected political payoffs did not materialize. In this election, the BJP failed to win even the constituency where the temple was built. Populism can—and does—secure votes for a while. But India’s complex social mosaic cannot be easily pigeonholed into binary categories.

Third, ideologies do not address the quotidian challenges facing voters. The wellsprings of voter discontent run deep, and addressing them is—and will be—difficult.

The foremost challenge is the economy, which has simply been unable to supply decent jobs in adequate numbers. More and more Indians have formal education credentials but meager skills, a sad testimony to the poor quality of the country’s education system. Rising aspirations are hitting the brick wall of precarious jobs as India continues to struggle to strengthen its manufacturing sector. At some point, the millions of disgruntled youths will find ways to voice their frustrations.

These challenges will be greater given the extraordinary technological changes that are upending labor markets—not just in manufacturing, but also the tech services that have been India’s one categorical success. Even robust growth is unlikely to produce the sort of labor demand that one might have expected in the past. And a febrile politics will be rocked even more in the future, as technological change in the form of artificial intelligence is poised to further political turmoil. Managing this will be hard in the best of circumstances. In a polity where polarization is actively encouraged, it’s hard to be sanguine about where this may lead.

India’s election was held under a searing heat wave, a vivid reminder of the inexorable impacts of climate change, whose afflictions are mounting. Indian agriculture is particularly vulnerable as temperatures climb and rainfall patterns change. A bedraggled urban India will face further pressures as the recent water shortages in India’s booming information technology capital, Bengaluru, illustrate. And this is just the beginning.

These are all exceedingly difficult challenges no matter which political party is in power in India. But for now, the one silver lining is that while commentators and experts have been deeply apprehensive about India’s democracy, its voters clearly seem to be less so. Just ask the BJP.

[howieabel]

"The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavor to keep them disunited. Class-conscious workers, realising that the break-down of all the national barriers by capitalism is inevitable and progressive, are trying to help to enlighten and organise their fellow-workers from the backward countries." - Lenin, "Capitalism and Workers’ Immigration", in Za Pravdu No. 22 (29 October 1913); Collected Works, Vol. 24.

[galerymod]

The Communist Party and its functionaries dominate political life at all levels of the highly centralised "party state". Political opposition movements are suppressed and their representatives prosecuted. Meanwhile, the power of President Xi Jinping, which is accompanied by a heightened cult of personality, has reached a new high.

Well, that would be something for the misanthropic ex-president of the disunited states of america. he as the great leader of the nation with a parliamentary yes-man system.

This would seal the usa's decline as a superpower and make the rise of the XI unstoppable.

First, XI grabs Taiwan while trump professes in his infinite ignorance of history that the welfare of XI is his right and does not affect the economic interests of America.

Thank you for being a friend!

The man who understands dictators and their leaders. What's all this nonsense about discussing culture in democracies when you can do everything better for yourself and the people around you.

[panicinthestudio]

"What is the story behind bonfire night?", Union with David Olusoga, November 5, 2023

Remember, remember the 5th of November, but what are we remembering it for? 🎆 🔥

The future of the Union is today at greater threat than at any time in living memory. In this ambitious four-part, landmark series David Olusoga uncovers the long history of union and disunion, tracing their origins back centuries. The fracture lines of our current division run along the borders between the 'home nations' but we are also disunited by social class and inequality, by England's north-south divide and the historic dominance of London. Our disunity can be told through the historic rise and fall of what are today called 'left-behind towns' and the long history of our rural-urban divide. David’s own personal experience connect him to several regions of the UK, each with their own strong identities. He grew up in a working-class community in the North East of England, a politically independent region with an antipathy towards London. And as a mixed-race child who came Britain in the 1970s, he has seen for himself how complex and nuanced the relationship between the individual and the nations of the UK can be. BBC

[sleepingswift85]

Funny moment when your political views upset the parents to the point they’d throw you out. They believe that somehow Gary Lineker is a bad guy for criticising the uk government essentially for being fascist. And big love to the pundits and commentators and football in general supporting Gary who has been punished by a broadcaster who caved to pressure from the Tory Party and the right wing press. There is a direct parallel that as soon as Hitler became Chancellor of the Weimar Republic he consolidated the media into state control. The Tories are part of a corporate machine that controls most of the media. The media dictates the news. The news is controlled and the UK’s migrant and refugee crisis is a manifestation of a state allowing a problem to get so bad it makes the people rage against these folks arriving and not the state. Folks you are witnessing a death of the Disunited Kingdom. The BBC is now exposed as a government lackey and it’s loss of it’s historically acclaimed sports coverage due to solidarity. Football is a national institution in England, football is bigger than politics. I stand in complete support of what Gary has done. But hatred of minorities is where fascism starts.

[gameofthrones2020]

Peter Zilhen’s Demographics and Geopolitics

This will not be a regular article; it is a conversation I have had about investing and demographics which the reader would find interesting.

This will not be a regular article; it is a conversation I have had about investing and demographics which the reader would find interesting. Disunited Nations I strongly recommend reading Peter Zilhen’s disunited Nations and the end of the world is just the beginning. Countries like China and Russia have massive problems; we could be saying the end of the Russian ethnic group, and the Chinese…

[ingek73]

We didn’t ask for Lady Hussey to resign. But, really, the monarchy must do better on race

Mandu Reid

I witnessed the racist remarks, but blaming one person alone distracts from the depth and breadth of racism in that institution

Published: 19:31 Thursday, 01 December 2022

I generally avoid news about the royals. So it was a real eye-opener to find myself at the centre of a royal story. At a reception on Tuesday to honour those working to end violence against women and girls, I witnessed racist remarks from a member of the royal household directed at my friend and fellow activist, Ngozi Fulani. Lady Hussey’s prolonged interrogation about where Ngozi was really from, what her nationality was and where her people were from, was not – as many people have insisted to me over the past 24 hours – the kind of well-meaning curiosity that all of us experience from time to time (though it’s possible that Hussey believed that it was).

“Hackney” was Ngozi’s answer, but Hussey refused to accept this. Her response implied that Black and brown people couldn’t really be British. It implied that we were trespassing – and it made me reflect on the increasingly hostile environment of this disunited kingdom.

Even so, the media furore feels disproportionate, given the avalanche of huge stories you might expect to be dominating the news cycle. It’s not that this one isn’t serious. Racism always is, which is why I’ve spoken out. But something about this media frenzy feels … off. Even as I write this, interview requests are coming in faster than I can say no to (in one case my refusal was countered with the offer of a huge fee). If you have seen the emergency appeal that the Women’s Equality party launched this week, you will understand how hard that particular refusal was, though it confirmed why my decision had been right in the first place.

The initial calls I received were from journalists not looking for my account, but my corroboration. It took some time to realise that it was the very fact that the incident had been “witnessed” that made it significant, and forced the palace to respond swiftly (and in my view, unsatisfactorily). Unlike when the Duchess of Sussex made her accounts of royal racism, such as the “concerns” that were expressed over how dark her son’s skin might be, the palace wasn’t able to deny or deflect this time. It couldn’t rerun the famous line that “recollections may vary”, because three of us have identical, and identically uncomfortable, recollections of that encounter.

Soon after the first media reports were published, the palace announced that Hussey had resigned. This is a gambit that I have become increasingly familiar with since the Women’s Equality party started campaigning against police misogyny. What I’ve learned is that the “bad apple” narrative is potent not only because it masquerades as taking responsibility without the institution having to do any such thing, but also because it often helps drive a backlash against the “woke brigade” for cancelling yet another innocent. I see that “She’s 83” is now trending on Twitter, imploring us to leave this nice old lady alone, a stance that adds a dash of ageism to the racism that has pervaded much of the commentary.

The funny thing is, neither Ngozi nor I wanted Hussey to receive the grand order of the boot. Ngozi didn’t even name her publicly; it was social media that did this, immediately seizing on the story as another chance to form into polarised rival camps. Instead of stepping down, Hussey should be encouraged to step up, along with senior members of the royal household. This is much bigger than one individual: blaming Hussey risks minimising and distracting from the depth and breadth of racism that is enshrined in an institution that carries the heritage of empire, slavery and inequality (we are their subjects, after all).

Buckingham Palace trumpets its commitment to diversity and inclusion on its website. In a statement on Wednesday, it promised to remind staff of its policies. That’s a big ask when its own annual reports show a lack of diversity among the upper echelons of its staff. The palace’s history is dotted with failures of inclusion. Still, it’s not the worst of the royal courts. Anecdotal evidence suggests that honour falls to Kensington Palace, which didn’t even release this data in its last annual report.

Perhaps a starting point for an institution where staff think it’s OK to touch a Black woman’s hair or question her belonging would be signing up to cultural competence training. I know just the organisation to provide that. Sistah Space, the charity Ngozi runs to support African and Caribbean heritage women affected by domestic and sexual abuse, offers such courses to institutions that don’t know where to begin.

Wouldn’t it be something if Buckingham Palace asked for their help? It would certainly chime with the Queen Consort’s speech at the reception, in which she said that the starting point for responding to survivors of abuse was listening to them and believing them. Perhaps, one day, that principle could extend to Meghan too.

Mandu Reid is leader of the Women’s Equality party

[dag-hammarskjold]

[T]he United Nations is not in any sense a supra-natural authority, it is not difficult for intelligent and well-informed people to accept that statement intellectually. But it seems to be more difficult to base policy and judgenent upon the logical conclusions that should be drawn from this fact. There are so many aspects of the United Nations that contribute to the misleading but persistent mental image of a government. It has a written constitution. Its organs debate and vote in a manner resembling parliamentary institutions on a world scale. Its very name is in a sense deceptive. So there persist tendencies to try to deal with world problems in the United Nations by legislative fiat and to judge its record and its usefulness as if it were a rather ineffectual attempt at world government. And when the Members of the United Nations appear year after year to be disunited in most things, disillusion mounts. For some, faced with the desperate anxieties of our age, this leads to advocacy of strengthening the United Nations by endowing it with genuine powers of world government. I have sympathy for the idealism of such friends, but they are seeking to escape the consequences of history by constitutional magic. Who can look out upon our deeply divided world and conceive it to be possible that such nations as the United Kingdom, United States or the Soviet Union would cede any significant element of its national sovereignty to a common supra-national authority? Others are tempted to go in the opposite direction. Harassed by the necessity to wrestle day after day with intractable problems, with one emergency after another, world organization sometimes seems to be just an added complication rather than a help in finding the answers. So they are inclined to concentrate the policies and programs of the governments in other channels that appear on the surface to be more in accord with political realities. I have sympathy also for this attitude, yet it is as unrealistic in its way as the other. Those who would follow such a course are also attempting to escape the consequence of history. Just as the diversity of the nations makes world government impossible, so the interdependence of the nations has made world organization necessary.

Text of address by Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld at pilgrims dinner, London, 18 March 1954

[mings]

Hey my friend! So sorry for your Brexit woes. In the States we have some wingnuts pushing for Texas to leave the US. (!) It’s like some sort of contagion. Ugh. 😑 Good to know you’re back home and safe.

Good to hear from you! In truth, whilst brexit was the biggest act of self harm in history, it almost certainly boosted the independence argument in Scotland. Many Scots voted to remain in the UK in the 2014 referendum because they fell for the tory lie that it was the best way of ensuring we stayed in the EU. Fast forward to 2016 and suddenly brexit was a reality, despite 62% of Scots voting to remain in the EU.

Worse was to come under Boris Johnson. He did what his far right puppeteers wanted and executed the hardest of hard brexits. In doing so, he threw Scottish exporters under the bus and effectively destroyed our fishing industry. We're not alone; the Northern Ireland protocol that has been so important in keeping the peace there was also tossed onto his bonfire of vanities. Wales is slightly different for lots of reasons, but nonetheless the nationalist spirit is rising there too...

Britain is no longer the UK. It's an international laughing stock and more of a disunited kingdom than I can recall at any time in my life. Many Scots (and I hesitate to say a majority because that would need a referendum) want out from under Westminster rule. If nothing else, the Supreme Court's decision makes it clear that the so-called voluntary union is anything but. Thus Scotland, and indeed each of the devolved territories, are effectively colonies.

Westminster knows it cannot survive without Scotland's enormous fiscal contribution. We generate enough energy - from renewable sources - to power our nation and still have enough to export. The North Sea oil fields in Scottish waters, which the tories asserted in 2014 were exhausted, now miraculously have many more years life in them (handy that, when you're trying to fill the £multi-billion black hole that your last leader created in the space of just a few weeks).

Scotland has hydro power, wind power, timber and water. The latter will become the new oil in the near future. We have tourism and world-renowned whisky. We can revitalise our fishing and seafood industries if we have unfettered access to the European Market.

We're big enough and strong enough. It's time. My personal view is that Scottish Independence has built into an unstoppable movement. Now it's a matter of when and how, not if.

I visited Texas & Louisiana a few years back. Texas in particular was very different to my other experiences in other parts of America. Yes it's a big state and yes it has oil, but secession? In truth I'm not qualified to judge.

And yes, we're back home in the place that I love. It was good to see our daughter and meet our future extended family. It was a genuine pleasure to feel that warmth that I've felt so many times from folks in countries throughout Europe. But there's nothing quite like the Highlands & there really is no place like home.

[ahlulbaytnetworks]

The nation decided to be disunited when they chose someone else over the rightly guided leaders (as). They did that more times than we can count. There is no unity of truth with falsehood. It is as idiotic as saying that day and night could come together. It never will. So do not try to join what has been broken, by compromising your beliefs.

[mariacallous]

I generally avoid news about the royals. So it was a real eye-opener to find myself at the centre of a royal story. At a reception on Tuesday to honour those working to end violence against women and girls, I witnessed racist remarks from a member of the royal household directed at my friend and fellow activist, Ngozi Fulani. Lady Hussey’s prolonged interrogation about where Ngozi was really from, what her nationality was and where her people were from, was not – as many people have insisted to me over the past 24 hours – the kind of well-meaning curiosity that all of us experience from time to time (though it’s possible that Hussey believed that it was).

“Hackney” was Ngozi’s answer, but Hussey refused to accept this. Her response implied that Black and brown people couldn’t really be British. It implied that we were trespassing – and it made me reflect on the increasingly hostile environment of this disunited kingdom.

Even so, the media furore feels disproportionate, given the avalanche of huge stories you might expect to be dominating the news cycle. It’s not that this one isn’t serious. Racism always is, which is why I’ve spoken out. But something about this media frenzy feels … off. Even as I write this, interview requests are coming in faster than I can say no to (in one case my refusal was countered with the offer of a huge fee). If you have seen the emergency appeal that the Women’s Equality party launched this week, you will understand how hard that particular refusal was, though it confirmed why my decision had been right in the first place.

The initial calls I received were from journalists not looking for my account, but my corroboration. It took some time to realise that it was the very fact that the incident had been “witnessed” that made it significant, and forced the palace to respond swiftly (and in my view, unsatisfactorily). Unlike when the Duchess of Sussex made her accounts of royal racism, such as the “concerns” that were expressed over how dark her son’s skin might be, the palace wasn’t able to deny or deflect this time. It couldn’t rerun the famous line that “recollections may vary”, because three of us have identical, and identically uncomfortable, recollections of that encounter.

Soon after the first media reports were published, the palace announced that Hussey had resigned. This is a gambit that I have become increasingly familiar with since the Women’s Equality party started campaigning against police misogyny. What I’ve learned is that the “bad apple” narrative is potent not only because it masquerades as taking responsibility without the institution having to do any such thing, but also because it often helps drive a backlash against the “woke brigade” for cancelling yet another innocent. I see that “She’s 83” is now trending on Twitter, imploring us to leave this nice old lady alone, a stance that adds a dash of ageism to the racism that has pervaded much of the commentary.

The funny thing is, neither Ngozi nor I wanted Hussey to receive the grand order of the boot. Ngozi didn’t even name her publicly; it was social media that did this, immediately seizing on the story as another chance to form into polarised rival camps. Instead of stepping down, Hussey should be encouraged to step up, along with senior members of the royal household. This is much bigger than one individual: blaming Hussey risks minimising and distracting from the depth and breadth of racism that is enshrined in an institution that carries the heritage of empire, slavery and inequality (we are their subjects, after all).

Buckingham Palace trumpets its commitment to diversity and inclusion on its website. In a statement on Wednesday, it promised to remind staff of its policies. That’s a big ask when its own annual reports show a lack of diversity among the upper echelons of its staff. The palace’s history is dotted with failures of inclusion. Still, it’s not the worst of the royal courts. Anecdotal evidence suggests that honour falls to Kensington Palace, which didn’t even release this data in its last annual report.

Perhaps a starting point for an institution where staff think it’s OK to touch a Black woman’s hair or question her belonging would be signing up to cultural competence training. I know just the organisation to provide that. Sistah Space, the charity Ngozi runs to support African and Caribbean heritage women affected by domestic and sexual abuse, offers such courses to institutions that don’t know where to begin.

Wouldn’t it be something if Buckingham Palace asked for their help? It would certainly chime with the Queen Consort’s speech at the reception, in which she said that the starting point for responding to survivors of abuse was listening to them and believing them. Perhaps, one day, that principle could extend to Meghan too.