Tate Britain has become very political and I cannot claim disapproval.

I chose today to look at the earliest paintings in the collection, mostly portraits of the great and the good who had benefitted from Empire, commerce and the slave trade. Not to forget those kind gentlemen who enclosed what had previously been common land open to all, for their own sole benefit and delectation.

Nowhere is there a finer place to admire human greed and the violence and persistence which has gone into acquiring great fortunes throughout human history.

Happily the Tate now points this out at every available opportunity.  That the smug bastards who spent a fortune getting themselves and their ghastly families immortalised on canvas had become Washed by doing down the Unwashed. Usually with great violence.

For me, it has got beyond the stage of feeling mildly guilty for being marginally “Washed”.

I remember my puzzlement when I learned that a former member of my venerable and expensive private school had ditched his title and become plain old Tony Benn. I now undersdtandt the man rather better and can appreciate his conerns.

The painting above is The Whig Junto, painted in 1710 by John James Baker.

About which the Tate opines:

“This portrait shows the leaders of the political Whig party. A Black servant appears behind the gathered guests. Britain was profiting from the increasing trade of enslaved people from West Africa. Most of the Black servants who worked in British households were enslaved. They were seen by the white British elite as symbols of their wealth and often depicted in paintings to reflect this. “

Well, quite.

The social and political commentary is to be found on almost every single painting and in commentaries on every gallery wall.

They do rant on a bit, but it has to be said. We humans live in a society which is and always has been rotten to the core.

All our modern politically correct tropery can be found here at the dear old Tate: “Black Identity and Art”, “Disability and Art”, “Queer Lives and Art”. Bless, well someone has to say it.

As a youth and scion of a then rather wealthy manufacturing family, my earliest obsession was with money. Once much of the wealth dissipated, I became even more anxious and became an investment banker.

Somewhere along the line I saw through it all. I think it was the truly awful Margaret Thatcher who woke me. Something seemed badly wrong with a world governed by “competition” rather than “cooperation”. A world where the “market” was going to set the world to rights. Even if the consequence was misery and poverty for anybody stupid enough not to be up to it.

Was I ever a Tory? No, I don’t think I was. Too concerned that the likes of Rees Mogg will turn into Oswald Mosely. Or worse.

Have I ever voted Labour like the illustrious Tony Benn? No, because with a posh accent I would be sent to the Gulag or Guillotine once the Cultural Revolution swept through the land in a post-Mao viral blast.

Who would I vote for then? A wise philosopher king perhaps (no, not Jug Ears), the Reverend Septimus Harding maybe.

Failing which, out of desperation, the Green Party. Who will doubtless prove as venal and awful as all the competition.

Maybe I won’t vote – after all no-one seems keen on the ultra radical overhaul our entire planet needs.

Jesus of Nazareth had it just about right but the silly fellow never did come back to sort it all out.

So in the absence of any real hope of improvement, I will bury my head in the sand. I will carry on living my mildly privileged life in my own small and modest fashion. I will draft a few more algorithms to trade crypto and recognise I am never going to save the world or amount to much.

But I will carry on visiting the Tate and see what they manage to come up with next. Non binary genders must surely be on their list somewhere? After all, the BBC says there are 11 of them. Or is it 64?