Simon Hattenstone’s excellent piece questioning the retention of the “slave ship” emblem in Manchester’s coat of arms and the badges of the city’s two Premier League football clubs is a classic illustration of how institutional racism operates, with such organisations turning a blind eye to the racism from which they or their members flourished (Abandon ship: does this symbol of slavery shame Manchester and its football clubs?, 19 April).
Graham Stringer MP and the council say the ship is to celebrate “free trade”, notably a trade that principally benefited the wealthier classes in Manchester’s cotton towns. The area’s mill workers suffered terrible conditions and impoverishment, which is why they led the general strike movements in the 19th century. Meanwhile, it is recorded that terrible atrocities were carried out in the British colonies in the name of “free trade”.
The city should not be celebrating “free trade”, but the cotton workers who refused to touch slave-picked cotton in support of their brothers and sisters, the US slaves, during the American civil war. The bee will suffice as a logo for the city.
Hattenstone refers to an earlier campaign for Manchester to remove the ship from its coat of arms, mentioned in a report in the Guardian in 1993, when Stringer led the city council, and says the MP now “tells me it was a campaign led by Militant, the British Trotskyist group, keen to prove that it cared about racism as well as the class struggle”. As a Black man and as an organiser of Manchester Militant, I am proud of the work we did to oppose racism, leading campaigns against police harassment and the fascist National Front. We campaigned for the removal of the ship logo. Stringer’s accusation that our raising these issues was a matter of tokenism is simply not true.
Long after the Militant days, I raised the matter once more with the city council in 2020, when I felt that the Black Lives Matter movement offered the council the opportunity to remove the demeaning logo. They again hid behind the “free trade” response, telling me that the ship “represents international trade and is not a slave trader”.
Dr Phil Frampton
Manchester
• I have read the Guardian’s articles on its founders’ links with slavery with interest and I’m pleased my city is coming to terms with this part of its history. Simon Hattenstone writes further that the city’s two big football clubs should remove the ship from their crests, asking if this symbol of slavery shames us. This is a good question, but first we should acknowledge the hypocrisy of such a gesture. Manchester City is owned by Sheikh Mansour of the United Arab Emirates, where migrant workers are still treated appallingly and large numbers of its population are denied citizenship because they are the “wrong” ethnicity.
Perhaps the ship should stay as a shameful reminder that everything Mancunians did in 1863 to stand with the slaves picking cotton in the US, and later to improve labour laws in the UK, counts for nothing if it gives us football to crow about.
As for Manchester United, we wait to see if the Glazers sell to Qatar, heaping more shame on Manchester. I hope not. I hope the club can one day replace the ship with a bee and retain some pride.
Kathryn Fletcher
Didsbury, Manchester
• This is complex. Many symbols can be interpreted as having some hidden nefarious links. If the ship in question had been directly involved in the slave trade here in Britain, that would be different. And how would changing Manchester’s coat of arms on historic buildings such as the town hall, the university, the corn exchange and so on, be financed?
The city’s main football clubs could no doubt afford to make the change, and indeed they may end up with more in their coffers from sales of new merchandise after changing their logos. But as an Arsenal fan, I’m sure it could be argued that my team’s cannon symbol provokes aggression, hostility and warmongering and should be removed.
Patricia Borlenghi
Manningtree, Essex
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