[Flag 1/2] Moving On? Barbados recently became a Republic. The Queen is no longer Head of State. The recent royal visit highlighted similar debates in Jamaica. The Jamaican prime minister publicly said that his country would be "moving on".
"I know that this tour has brought into even sharper focus questions about the past and the future." [Duke of Cambridge]
[Flag 3/4] The basis to move forward positively? It is the 75th Anniversary of Partition and the creation of India and Pakistan. Kavita Puri stresses the need to enable people to tell their stories
"If colonialism and immigration are to be understood, there is a need to embrace such oral histories or we will never know the truth about Partition, nor have the basis to move forward positively."
[Flag 5/6] First Nation Peoples. What can we learn from the debates that led up to the $40-billion child welfare deal with Canada's First Nation people? In this Guardian article Tara Sutton asks ...
"Why did it take the discovery of the children's remains for Canada to finally believe that it committed genocide?"
Writing for the Elephant Times from Australia:
Phil Glendenning AM – Black Lives Matter and always should have ...
"When the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove in January 1788, Australia had a population of up to a million indigenous people whose presence stretched back for over 60,000 years. By 1900 that number had dropped to less than 100,000, prompting the Australian Human Rights Commission to describe what had happened to the Aboriginal people since colonisation as genocide."
Joy Schultz - Belonging to the Commonwealth ...
"As a fifth generation Australian and an ardent republican, I think that Australia will remain in the Commonwealth when we inevitably replace the British monarch with our own Head of State. Such is the admiration for the Queen, this will not happen for now."
See ET 2.5 Supplement - Australian perspective
There are also mainstream issues to debate about Britain's future role in the world [and the Commonwealth]; about the role of monarchy and how that might change as more Commonwealth countries become Republics; about social issues such as racism within our society.
Photo: Union Black flag by artist Chris Ofili was flown over Tate Britain during the exhibition of Caribbean-British art called Life Between Islands. .
These questions highlight the scope of potential issues ...
