Nottingham Castle – Putting the boot in

The month before Christmas. The City council pull the financial plug on the Nottingham Castle Trust, leaving them without a penny in the kitty and no choice but to liquidate and throw their employees out.
Forty-seven redundancies. Forty-seven Nottingham Castle employees were thrown onto the cobbles.
What a bleak Christmas they must have faced. For them, a good job, with decent prospects, in hard times, turned to dust, to food banks, financial disaster, the dole and humiliation. Most of them had hardly been there long enough to qualify for any decent redundancy payment and they face a desperate new year.
And you know what? Those mouthy sites here on Facebook; Nott’s TUC, Left Lion, Peoples Assembly – they have not even mentioned the redundancies, have expressed no sympathy for the sacked employees, no outrage, no solidarity. Nothing. Yes, those mouthy sites that erupt with indignation at all and every employer who makes cut-backs or sacks workers, or refuses a pay rise, those sites, friends of the workers. Nothing!
They had spent the last year or so gleefully putting the boot into the Castle in support of Panya Banjoko’s malicious campaign, alleging the staff, the trustees, and the Castle itself, are all racist.
The closure of the castle is exactly what they wanted. The employees, according to Panya, were racist, so losing their jobs, huh! They deserved it didn’t they.
They all jumped on the racist bandwagon, brave, and virtuous. They wear their virtue on their sleeves, on their chests, on their placards, and they probably have “up the workers” tattooed on their bums. But they never, for a single moment questioned the veracity of Banjoko’s claims and allegations, made no enquiries, asked no questions, did not ask to see the independent investigation reports, and showed no curiosity whatsoever. They just accepted what Panya Banjoko said, adopted her narrative and put the boot in.
Of course we now all know what the evidence to the independent enquiry found. It’s been widely published and there is a summary in the link below. The number of misleading and untrue claims and allegations in Panya’s narrative are fairly clear for all to see and not worth going over again in any detail. You can read them for yourself in the report.
But the one that stands out is when Banjoko physically chased the young eight-year-old white girl, known to have severe intellectual difficulties, out of the visitors centre and across the castle grounds. The child was in great distress and crying for her Mummy, but so vigorous and aggressive was the chase that a castle security guard felt it necessary to intervene to prevent the child from being grabbed by the chasing Banjoko. It’s all there, in the report. It always was. But the mouthy sites ignored it completely. Instead, they continued to put the boot in and gave us, for almost a year, lectures by Panya the Castle child chaser, on the importance of safeguarding children.

You couldn’t possibly make it up!

Now it may well be that their silence on the redundancies indicates some kind of conscience at spending so long putting the boot in. Or maybe they just don’t want to be seen to gloat, or perhaps Panya and the Castle have become so toxic a subject that they choose to leave it alone. Panya herself rejoiced in the closure and claimed on Twitter that the closure was due to her boycott campaign.

But it wasn’t the boycott that forced its closure. If you just take one event planned for the castle, the sadly cancelled Christmas Fare. It was substantially oversubscribed with almost every independent and corporate enterprise in the East Midlands wanting to exhibit in the event. Not a trace of boycotting. No, it was the financial numbers that did for the castle, not the so-called boycott.

Another site that enjoyed a year of putting the boot into the castle was that of the Museums Association Journal. They used all their professional resources to ensure that the entire heritage industry in Scotland, England and Wales knew that Nottingham Castle was full of unapologetic racists. You would have thought that they, being professional journalists might have asked some investigative questions before putting in the boot. Maybe their journalists missed the “investigative journalism” module at journalism school, or maybe they just ignored all professional ethics and principles while putting in the boot. The questions they needed to ask were not that difficult. Let us try to help them:
“Panya, can we see the independent report please?”
“Panya, where are the recordings you made on your mobile phone?”
“Panya, why didn’t you submit the mobile phone recordings to the independent enquiry? ”
“Have you still got the mobile phone recordings Panya?”
There we are. That wasn’t too difficult, was it? Any old journalist could ask those questions. Except the Museums Association’s journalists didn’t.
And it remains an interesting question does it not. Where are the mobile phone recordings that a number of witnesses to the independent report testify Panya Banjoko and her daughter were making?
The answer, I suggest, is they have been suppressed. In the same way, the independent report evidence was suppressed until it was published on Facebook.
“Suppressed.” That’s a word supposed to ring alarm bells for journalists. But not so at the journal of the Museums Association. But at least they had the grace to mention the redundancies. There may yet be hope that they publish the full evidence!

The Castle employees deserve nothing less.

 

https://bit.ly/3euGfQU