Labour's Obsession with Gambling – And its not just the ...

I hope this thread allows everyone in this thread contribute positively, with opinions and facts, and not be afraid to voice out something that this sub isn’t too favourable on. I have asked the mods to remove votes for comments to allow discussion and not get the hive mind to start upvoting/downvoting whenever something is set.
 
Warning this is going to be a big, meaty, thread entailing a lot of points, some not included because of how long it is – so if you have no patience to read, don’t voice your opinion just because you feel like contributing.
 
*I was trying to write a basic view in how our democracy works but I realised it was too complicated to add it as an addition to what is going to be a hefty piece already so I compromised. I might make a separate thread for how things work within our democracy but I think it might be too much for a sub dedicated to economic thought and theories.
 
Also do note my main sources are the parties individual manifestos and the BBC, I choose the BBC over other new sites because I think it takes the most unbiased position it can for all three parties. And in regards to some of the vagueness of policies, it's either because it's vague on purpose as I have found nothing concrete to add onto or they have not yet released information to the public. And yes, I didn't have the time to perfectly align positions that are similar or different in a side by side comparison, I will fix this in the coming days but for now I wanted to make sure everything important was included.
 
(Let me just say how annoying it is to go through countless pages of just bullshit, nothing but pandering and pointing fingers and rarely highlighting a god damn policy… 80-120 pages of this urghhhh)
 
To check the state of our economy click here.
 
Now without further ado, let’s begin.
Economy and Business
 

Labour	Conservatives	Liberal Democrats
Click above to see how much revenue they predict they’ll get from these changes.	Click above to see how muc-oh? They don’t have any of the calculations for the public to see their policy effects? How strange, I wonder why...	Well would you look at that, Lib Dems also put their costs up for all the pledges they made.
Bring the railways back into public ownership as franchises expire	Increase the personal allowance to £12,500 and the higher rate to £50,000 by 2020	£100bn package of additional infrastructure investment
Regain control of energy supply networks through the alteration of operator license conditions, and transition to a publicly owned, decentralised energy system	Keep pledge to ensure residents can veto high increases in council tax via a referendum	Boost the economy with a major programme of capital investment
Replace water system with a network of regional publicly-owned water companies	Improve HMRC's capabilities to clamp down on smuggling, including improving policing of borders as UK leaves EU	Eliminate the deficit on day-to-day spending by 2020 to control the national debt, and then borrowing only to invest
Reverse the privatisation of Royal Mail "at the earliest opportunity"	Reduce online VAT fraud	Install hyperfast, fibre-optic broadband across the UK
Create at least one publicly-owned energy company in every region of the UK, with public control of the transmission and distribution grids.	Spend more on research and development	Additional funding to bring more private investment into renewable energy
Income tax rate 45p on earnings of £80,000 and above	Ensure industry and businesses have access to reliable, cheap and clean power	Raise employee national insurance threshold to the income tax threshold, while protecting low earners' ability to accrue pension and benefit entitlements
Income tax rate of 50p to be reintroduced on earnings above £123,000	Deliver road, rail, airports and broadband that businesses need.	Ensure those with the highest incomes and wealth are making a fair contribution
Boost wages of 5.7m people earning less than minimum wage to £10 an hour by 2020	Increase the amount levied on firms employing migrant workers	Reverse cuts to corporation tax from 20% to 17%, capital gains tax, marriage allowance
Create a National Transformation Fund that will invest £250bn over 10 years in upgrading the economy	Listed companies will have to publish ratio of executive pay to broader UK workforce pay	Raise inheritance tax threshold
Deliver universal superfast broadband availability by 2022	Maintain pledge to cut corporation tax to 17% by 2020	Action on corporate tax evasion and avoidance
A National Investment Bank as part of a plan to provide £250bn of lending power over the next decade for infrastructure	Reform business rates, with more frequent revaluations	Reforming corporation tax to develop a system that benefits the smallest
Scrap quarterly reporting for businesses with a turnover of under £85,000.	Simplify the tax system	Expand the activities of the state-owned British Business Bank
Corporation tax to increase: (21% 2018-2019)(24% 2019-2020)(26% 2020-2021)	Regulate more efficiently, saving £9bn through the Red Tape Challenge and the One-In-Two-Out Rule	Create a new 'start-up allowance' for new businesses
Corporation tax for profits below £300,000: (20% 2018-2019)(21% 2019-2021) *For some reason someone didn’t check their numbers and apparently 2019-2020 is unknown – which I assume it means that it applies to the second increase rate.	Legislate for tougher regulation of tax advisory firms	Review business rates
An end to zero-hours contracts to guarantee workers a "number of hours each week"	Update the rules that govern mergers and takeovers	Protect the science budget, including the recent £2bn increase, by raising it at least in line with inflation
‘Balancing the Books’	Ensure foreign ownership of companies controlling important infrastructure does not undermine British security or essential services	Stamp out abuse of zero-hours contracts
Meet the OECD target of 3% of GDP spent on R&D by 2030	Legislate to make executive pay packages subject to strict annual votes by shareholders	Encourage employers to promote employee ownership
Separation of investment and retail banking	Consider a ban on companies which cold call people to encourage them to make false personal injury claims	Champion the Northern Powerhouse and Midlands Engine initiatives
Breaking up RBS and create local public banks.	Reduce insurance costs by "cracking down on exaggerated and fraudulent" whiplash claims.	40% of board members being women in FTSE 350 companies.
Introduce an Excessive Pay Levy on companies with staff on very high pay *The Excessive Pay Levy is a payroll tax, it basically charges employers for paying exceptionally high rates to individuals.
Switching from RPI to CPI indexation
Develop a version similar to the Australian system of binding arbitration and fines for persistent late-payers for the private and public sectors.

 
Worker Rights
 

Labour	Conservatives	Liberal Democrats
Introduce four extra public holidays each year to mark national patron saints' days	Increase the National Living Wage to 60% of median earnings by 2020	Encourage the creation and widespread adoption of a ‘good employer’ kitemark covering areas such as paying a living wage, avoiding unpaid internships and using name-blind recruitment to make it easier for customers and investors to exercise choice and influence.
Maximum pay ratios of 20:1 to be rolled out in public sector	Ensure people working in the 'gig' economy are properly protected	Establish an independent review to consult on how to set a genuine Living Wage across all sectors. We will pay this Living Wage in all central government departments and their agencies, and encourage other public sector employers to do likewise.
Ban unpaid internships	Change the law to ensure listed companies nominate a director from the workforce, create a formal employee advisory council or assign specific responsibility for employee representation to a designated non-executive director	Extend transparency requirements on larger employers to include publishing the number of people paid less than the Living Wage and the ratio between top and median pay.
"Clamp down on bogus self-employment" and extend rights of employees to all workers - including shared parental pay	Introduce a right for employees to request information relating to the future direction of the company.	Modernise employment rights to make them fit for the age of the ‘gig’ economy, looking to build on the forthcoming Taylor Report
Guarantee trade unions a right to access workplaces		Strengthen enforcement of employment rights, including by bringing together relevant enforcement agencies and scrapping employment tribunal fees.
End the public sector pay cap		Strengthen worker participation in decision-making, including staff representation on remuneration committees, and the right for employees of a listed company to be represented on the board. We will change company law to permit a German-style two-tier board structure to include employees.
Repeal the Trade Union Act and roll out sectoral collective bargaining, whereby industries can negotiate agreement as a whole		Reform fiduciary duty and company purpose rules to ensure that other considerations, such as employee welfare, environmental standards, community benefit and ethical practice can be fully included in decisions made by directors and fund managers.
Enforce all workers' rights to trade union representation at work		Reduce the reporting requirement for disclosure of shareholdings to 1% in order to increase transparency over who owns stakes in the biggest companies.
Use public spending power to drive up standards, including only awarding public contracts to companies which recognise trade unions		Require binding and public votes of board members on executive pay policies.
Give all workers equal rights from day one, whether part-time or full-time, temporary or permanent
Shifting the burden of proof, so the law assumes a worker is an employee unless the employer can prove otherwise.

 
Education
 

Labour	Conservatives	Liberal Democrats
Reintroduce maintenance grants for university students and abolish university tuition fees	Pump an extra £4bn into schools by 2022	Invest nearly £7bn extra in education
A National Education Service for England to incorporate all forms of education	Scrap free school lunches for infants in England, but offer free breakfasts across the primary years	Triple the Early Years Pupil Premium to £1,000
Overhaul existing childcare system and extend 30 hours of free childcare to all two year olds	No school will have its budget cut as a result of the new funding formula	Oppose new selective schools and give local authorities control over admissions and new schools
Promise to reduce class sizes to "less than 30" for five, six, and seven-year-olds	At least 100 new free schools a year	Raise the quality of early years provision
Devolve responsibility for skills to city regions or devolved administrations	End ban on grammar schools - conditions would include allowing pupils to join at "other ages as well as eleven"	End the 1% cap on teachers' pay rises
Free school meals for all primary school children, paid for by removing the VAT exemption on private school fees.	Ask universities and independent schools to help run state schools	Guarantee all state school teachers are fully qualified or working towards qualified teacher status from January 2019
	A specialist maths school to be opened in every major city in England due to new funding arrangements	Introduce a professional development entitlement of 25 hours per year for all teachers, rising to 50 hours by 2025
	Every 11-year-old expected to know their times tables off by heart	Tackle unnecessary teacher workloads
	If universities want to charge maximum tuition fees, they will be required to "become involved" in academy sponsorship or the founding of free schools	Reforming Ofsted inspections
	Introduce T-Levels	Scrap the planned expansion of grammar schools
	Change the rules to allow the establishment of new Roman Catholic schools	Ensure that identification and support for special educational needs and disabilities takes place as early as possible
	New faith schools will now have to prove parents of other faiths and none would be prepared to send their children to that school	Protect the availability of arts and creative subjects in the curriculum
	Work to build up the investment funds of universities across the UK.	Improve the quality of vocational education, including skills for entrepreneurship and self-employment, and improve careers advice and links with employers
		Challenge gender stereotyping and early sexualisation
		Reinstate university maintenance grants for the poorest students
		Double the number of businesses that hire apprentices.

 
BREXIT
 

Labour	Conservatives	Liberal Democrats
Accept the EU referendum result and "build a close new relationship with the EU" prioritising jobs and and workers' rights	Exit the European single market and customs union but seek a "deep and special partnership" including comprehensive free trade and customs agreement	Second referendum on Brexit deal
Guarantee the rights of EU nationals living in the UK and work to "secure reciprocal rights" for UK citizens elsewhere in the EU	Vote in both Houses of Parliament on "final agreement" for Brexit	Press for the UK to unilaterally guarantee the rights of EU nationals in the UK
A "meaningful" role for Parliament throughout Brexit negotiations	Assess whether to continue with specific European programmes and it "will be reasonable that we make a contribution" to the ones which continue	Urge same rights for UK citizens living in European Union countries
Scrap Conservatives' Brexit White Paper and replace with "fresh negotiating priorities" with strong emphasis on retaining the benefits of the single market and customs union	Agree terms of future partnership with EU alongside withdrawal, both within the two years allowed under Article 50	Membership of the single market and customs union
Reject no deal as a viable option and if needs be negotiate transitional arrangements "to avoid a cliff-edge for the UK economy"	Convert EU law into UK law and later allow parliament to pass legislation to "amend, repeal or improve" any piece of this	Protect freedom of movement and EU schemes which increase opportunities for young people
Keep EU-derived laws on workers' rights, equality, consumer rights and environmental protections	Remain signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights for the next parliament	Defend social rights such as maternity leave
Maintain UK's leading research role by seeking to stay part of Horizon 2020 and its successor programmes	Repeal or replace the Human Rights Act "while the process of Brexit is under way" ruled out, although consideration will be given to the UK's "human rights legal framework" when Brexit concludes	Maintain EU environmental standards and cooperation for law enforcement and justice
Seek to maintain membership of European organisations which offer benefits to the UK such as Euratom and the European Medicines Agency	Reduce and control immigration from Europe after Brexit	Retain City of London's rights in EU financial markets
Will not allow Brexit to be used as an excuse to undercut UK farmers and flood Britain's food chain with cheap and inferior produce.	Seek to replicate all existing EU free trade agreements	Campaign against any reduction in investment in UK universities
	Support the ratification of trade agreements entered into during our EU membership	Retain European Health Insurance Card, reduced roaming charges and pet passports
	Introduce a Trade Bill in the next parliament	Protect the rights of the people of Gibraltar.
	Create a network of Her Majesty's Trade Commissioners to head nine new regional overseas posts
	Reconvene the Board of Trade to increase exports from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as England.

 
Health and Social Care
 

Labour	Conservatives	Liberal Democrats
Deliver safe staffing levels and reduce waiting lists	Real terms increases in NHS spending reaching £8bn extra per year by 2022/23	1p in the pound on income tax to raise £6bn for NHS and social care services
End hospital car parking charges	A new GP contract and changes to the contract for hospital consultants	Transform mental health care and waiting times
One million people will be taken off NHS waiting lists by "guaranteeing access to treatment within 18 weeks"	Retain the 95% four hour A&E target	Limit the amount elderly people have to pay for social care
Scrap NHS pay cap	Require foreign workers and overseas students to pay more to cover the cost of NHS care.	Guarantee the rights of all NHS and social care service staff who are EU nationals to stay in the UK
NHS will receive more than £30bn in extra funding over the next parliament		End the public sector pay freeze for NHS workers
Mental health budgets will be ring-fenced, and Labour will ensure all children in secondary schools have access to a counselling service.		Reinstate student nurse bursaries
		Protect NHS whistle-blowers
		Produce a national workforce strategy to prevent shortage of GPs, hospital doctors, nurses and other NHS staff
		Increase access to mental health talking therapies
		Examine the case for introducing a dedicated service for children and young people based on the Australian 'headspace' model
		Early mental health support for pregnant women, new mothers and those who have experienced miscarriage or stillbirth
		Fast-track exceptional graduates into children's social work and encourage high-achieving graduates to pursue a career in mental health social work
		Tackle stigma against mental ill-health
		Ensure that LGBT+ inclusive mental health services receive funding and support
		Raise the amount people earn before losing Carer's Allowance from £110 to £150 a week
		Promote easier access to GPs and prevent practice closures
		HIV prevention available on the NHS
		Tackle childhood obesity
		Develop a just settlement for haemophiliacs who were given contaminated blood.

 
Social Security and Pensions
 

Labour	Conservatives	Liberal Democrats
Cuts to bereavement support payment will be scrapped, as will the bedroom tax and the "punitive sanctions regime"	Scrapping the triple-lock on the state pension after 2020, replacing it with a "double lock", rising with earnings or inflation - but no longer 2.5%	Maintain the 'triple lock' of increasing the state pension each year.
Reinstate housing benefit for under-21s	Means test winter fuel payments to pensioners	Withdraw eligibility for the Winter Fuel Payment from pensioners who pay tax at the higher rate (40%).
Guarantee state pension triple lock, as well as the winter fuel allowance and free bus passes	Tighten the rules against pension abuse and increase punishment for those caught mismanaging pension schemes	We will retain the free bus pass for all pensioners
"Rejects" proposal to increase state pension age further	Give the pensions regulator powers to issue punitive fines for those found to have wilfully left a pension scheme under-resourced and if necessary, powers similar to those held by the Insolvency Service to disqualify relevant company directors	Introducing a single rate of tax relief for pensions, which would be designed to be simpler and fairer and would be set more generously than the current 20% basic rate relief
A commitment to "protect the pensions of UK citizens living overseas in the EU or further afield".	Consider new criminal offence for company directors who put at risk the ability of a pension scheme to meet its obligations.

 
Families and Communities
 

Labour	Conservatives	Liberal Democrats
30 hours free childcare to be extended to two-year-olds and "some" to one-year-olds	Introduce a "breathing space" scheme to help those in serious debt be protected from further interest, charges and enforcement action for up to six weeks.	Extend free childcare to all two-year-olds and to the children of working families from the end of paid parental leave
An end to the so-called "rape clause" - part of the policy of restricting child tax credits to the first two children in a family. It means mothers who have a third child as a result of rape can be exempted, but would have to provide evidence in order to do so		An additional month's paid paternity leave
A review into reforming council tax and business rates, in favour of options such as a land value tax		Introduce a new Young Person's Bus Discount Card for 16-21 year olds, giving a two-thirds discount on bus travel
A national review of local pubs to examine the causes for their large-scale demise, as well as establishing a joint taskforce that will consider future sustainability.		30 hours' free childcare a week for all parents in England with children aged from two to four years
		Take 13,000 children out of poverty by letting both parents earn before their Universal Credit is cut
		Reverse cuts to work allowances in universal credit and housing benefit for 18-21 year olds - increase jobseeker's allowance and universal credit for 18-24
		Uprate working-age benefits at least in line with inflation
		Abandon the two-child policy on family benefits and abolish the 'rape clause'
		Reverse cuts to employment support allowance to those in the work-related activity group
		Increase local housing allowance (LHA) in line with average rents in an area
		Scrap the 'bedroom tax' and the work capability assessment

 
Migration
 

Labour	Conservatives	Liberal Democrats
Labour will not "scapegoat migrants" and will not set a cap on immigration, describing targets as "bogus"	Commitment to "bear down on immigration from outside the EU" across all visa routes	Vote against attempts to scrap the Human Rights Act or withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights
International students will not be included in immigration numbers, but the party will crack down on "fake colleges".	Immigration cut to under 100,000	Offer safe and legal routes to the UK for refugees - offering sanctuary to 50,000 Syrian refugees over five years
Labour believes in the "reasonable management of migration" but "will not make false promises on immigration numbers".	Students expected to leave the country at the end of their course unless they meet new "higher" requirements allowing them to stay	Reopen the Dubs scheme to take 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children from Europe.
	Overseas students to remain in the immigration statistics.

 
Energy and Environment
 

Labour	Conservatives	Liberal Democrats
Ensure that 60% of the UK's energy comes from zero-carbon or renewable sources by 2030	UK should have the lowest energy costs in Europe, both for households and businesses	Ensure that four million properties receive insulation retrofits by 2022, prioritising fuel-poor households
A ban on fracking	Establish an industrial energy efficiency scheme to help large companies install measures to cut their energy use and their bills	Prevent 40,000 deaths a year with Air Quality Plan to reduce air pollution
Nuclear power "will continue to be part of the UK energy supply"	Smart meters offered to every household and business by the end of 2020	Ensure British farming remains competitive
Introduce an immediate emergency energy price cap to ensure the average dual fuel household energy bill remains below £1,000 per year	Make it easier to switch energy providers and introduce a "safeguard tariff cap"	A diesel scrappage scheme, and a ban on the sale of diesel cars and small vans in the UK by 2025
Maintaining access to the EU's internal energy market and retaining access to nuclear research programme Euratom will be a priority in Brexit negotiations.	Independent review into the cost of energy to ensure UK energy costs are as low as possible, while ensuring a reliable supply and meeting 2050 carbon reduction objective	Extend ultra-low-emission zones to 10 more towns and cities
	Against more large-scale onshore wind power for England, but maintain position as a global leader in offshore wind and development of wind projects in the remote islands of Scotland, where they directly benefit local communities	Run all private hire vehicles and diesel buses licensed to operate in urban areas on ultra-low-emission or zero-emission fuels within five years
	Develop the shale industry in Britain	Pass a Zero-Carbon Britain Act to set targets to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2040 and to zero by 2050
	Non-fracking drilling treated as permitted development	Aim to generate 60% of electricity from renewables by 2030
	Set up a new shale environmental regulator	Support investment in energy storage, smart grid technology, hydrogen technologies, offshore wind, and tidal power
	Change proposed shale wealth fund so greater percentage of tax revenues from shale gas directly benefit the communities that host the extraction sites.	Oppose 'fracking'
		Establish a £2bn flood-prevention fund
		Increase the amount of accessible green space
		Suspend the use of neonicotinoids until proven that their use in agriculture does not harm bees or other pollinators
		Increase maximum sentence for animal cruelty from six months to five years, and a ban on caged hens
		Clamp down on illegal pet imports
		Reform agricultural subsidies
		Pass a Zero-Waste Act
		£2bn to ensure the provision of high-speed broadband across the rural UK
		£2bn Rural Services Fund to co-locate council offices, post offices, children's centres, libraries and visiting healthcare professionals.

 
Transport
 

Labour	Conservatives	Liberal Democrats
Extend high speed rail link HS2 to Scotland	Review rail ticketing to remove "complexity and perverse" pricing, with a passenger ombudsman introduced	Investment in road and rail infrastructure, continued commitment to HS2, Crossrail 2 and rail electrification
Build a new Brighton main line for the SouthEast	Minimum service levels agreed with train companies and staff during times of industrial action. A pledge to make this mandatory if a deal cannot be reached voluntarily	Take over the running of Southern Rail and Govia Thameslink
Build Crossrail 2 - to run north-south through London between Hertfordshire and Surrey - "to ensure our capital continues to prosper"	Focus on creating extra capacity on the railways to ease overcrowding, bring new lines and stations, and improve existing routes - including for freight	Invest capital in major transport improvements and infrastructure
Recognise the need for additional airport capacity in the South East	Continue investment in High Speed 2, Northern Powerhouse Rail and the expansion of Heathrow Airport, while ensuring these projects develop the skills and careers of British workers	Oppose expansion of Heathrow, Stansted or Gatwick and any new airport in the Thames Estuary - instead focus on improving existing regional airports such as Birmingham and Manchester.
	Almost every car and van to be zero-emission by 2050 with £600m investment by 2020 to help achieve it.

 
Housing
 

Labour	Conservatives	Liberal Democrats
Build over one million more homes, with at least half for social rent	Halve rough sleeping over the course of the next parliament and eliminate it by 2027	Build 300,000 homes a year by 2022, including half a million affordable and energy-efficient homes
Homeowners will be offered interest free loans to improve their properties	Meet 2015 commitment to deliver a million homes by the end of 2020 and half a million more by the end of 2022	£5bn of initial capital for a new British Housing and Infrastructure Development Bank
Guarantee help to buy funding until 2027 and give locals buying their first home "first dibs on new homes built in their area"	Build better houses to match the quality of previous generations	Green Buildings Act to ensure every home in England reaches at least an energy rating of Band C by 2035
Legislate to ban letting agency fees for tenants, and look at giving the Mayor of London power to give London renters "additional security"	Support for high-quality, high-density housing like mansion blocks, mews houses and terraced streets	Ensure at least four million homes are made highly energy efficient (Band C) by 2022, with priority given to fuel-poor households
Make 4,000 additional homes available for rough sleepers to end homelessness.	160,000 houses built on government land	Restore the zero-carbon standard for new homes
	Maintain the existing strong protections on designated land like the Green Belt, National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty	Create at least 10 new garden cities in England
	Continue £2.5bn flood defence programme to protect 300,000 existing homes by 2021.	End the voluntary right to buy pilots that sell off housing association homes and the associated high value asset levy
		Enable local authorities to levy up to 200% council tax on second homes and 'buy to leave empty' investments from overseas
		Enforce housebuilding on unwanted public sector land
		Penalise excessive land-banking when builders with planning permission have failed to build after three years.

 
Defence
 

Labour	Conservatives	Liberal Democrats
Support the renewal of the Trident submarine system	Spend at least 2% of GDP on defence and increase the budget by at least 0.5% above inflation in every year of the new parliament	Spend 2% of GDP on defence
Work with international partners and the UN on multilateral disarmament "to create a nuclear-free world"	Pledge to "maintain" the overall size of the armed forces	Spend 0.7% of gross national income on aid
Commit to the Nato benchmark of spending at least 2% of GDP on defence	Retain the Trident continuous-at-sea nuclear deterrent	Suspending arms sales to Saudi Arabia
Will have a complete strategic defence and security review	Better compensation for injured personnel and the families of those killed in combat.	Recruit STEM graduates to be armed forces engineers, providing 'golden handshakes' of up to £10,000
Insulate the homes of disabled veterans for free.		Work to lead international nuclear disarmament efforts
		Provide free further or higher education for anyone who has served in the armed forces for 12 years or more.

 
Drugs and Policing
 

Labour	Conservatives	Liberal Democrats
Recruit an additional 10,000 police officers to work on community beats	Create a "national infrastructure police force", which brings together the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, the Ministry of Defence Police and British Transport Police	Bring in a legal, regulated market for cannabis
	Serious Fraud Office to be incorporated into the National Crime Agency	Introduce limits on potency and permit cannabis to be sold through licensed to over-18s
	£1bn to modernise the prison estate	End imprisonment for possession of illegal drugs for personal use
	Legislation to make changes in police practices if "stop and search does not become more targeted and stop to arrest ratios do not improve"	Reducing the proliferation of betting shops and cap maximum bets on fixed odds betting terminals at one time to £2
	Legislate if progress not made to reduce the "disproportionate use of force" against black, Asian and ethnic minority people in prison, young offender institutions and secure mental health units.	£300m for community policing in England and Wales
		Require all front-line officers to wear body cameras on duty
		Replace police and Crime commissioners with police boards made up of local councillors.

 
Hope this thread gains a lot of traction from people so we can have valid discussion on these policies in regards to neoliberalism and other -isms.
 
If you feel like I missed something, or there are mistakes, then PM me so I can fix it :)
 
Enjoy!

I started this series with UNITY, then went to AC1, AC2, Brotherhood, Revelations, AC3, then Rogue. Now Black Flag. Previously I covered Rogue, and I mentioned that I considered that game to be the most inaccessible in the series. On the other hand, BLACK FLAG is probably the most accessible game of the entire series. A good chunk of the people who bought it did so for being a pirate game, or a Pirate GTA game, or as the Pirates of the Caribbean game that captured some of the adventure of the first film. The main character isn't a part of any secret society until the very end of the game.
BLACK FLAG is also a game that has gotten commentary about its historical recreation and details, from Robert Rath at The Escapist and from Bob Whitaker at History Respawned, Luke Plunkett at Kotaku. So there isn't too much original to say that hasn't already been said there, and said better. In addition, Black Flag's developers drew from historical sources like the original book on pirates (A General History of the Robberies and Murderers of the Most Notorious Pyrates) and Colin Woodard's Republic of Pirates. With that out of the way let's start:
MAIN CAMPAIGN
Setting: The Caribbean in the period of the so-called Golden Age of Piracy, or British Piracy at any rate. Specifically Jamaica, Bahamas, Bermuda, Cuba, with small sequences in the Yucatan, Charlestown North Carolina, and the coast of Brazil, and the island of Principe in Africa.
Pop Culture View: The Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and in games, Monkey Island, Sid Meier's Pirates, a bunch of other classic movies like Captain Blood, Anne of the Indies. The developers also cited Peter Weir's Master of Commander: The Far Side of the World as an inspiration (mostly for its more accurate recreation of ship combat than the pirates stuff).
​
Sequence 1-2 [1715]
This part introduces four historical figures (Stede Bonnet, Governor Laureano de Torres y Ayala, Woodes Rogers, Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts). We also see the 1715 Sinking of the Treasure Fleet by a hurricane. In terms of dates and place of activity it all checks out. We meet Stede Bonnet in 1715, when he was, as the game shows a legal businessman with no criminal record. Unlike other pirates, Stede didn't need to go to piracy apparently, and was some kind of thrill-seeker. To be honest, given how badly Stede Bonnet's end turned out, I don't know why the game idealizes and sentimentalizes his friendship with Edward Kenway. As we see, Edward is the one who encourages him to join the pirates and idealizes it, which kind of makes him complicit and morally culpable in Stede's eventual death.
We meet Governor Torres and Woodes Rogers in Havana, Cuba. Torres is a highly obscure figure who seems to have been a footnote in history. Unlike what the game tells us later, there is no evidence whatsoever for Torres being opposed to slavery in any fashion. In fact, according to one university paper, from 2013 (the same year this game came out so it might not have been available to the developers), Torres actually returned runaway slaves fleeing English territory back to their masters. Black Flag tried to introduce the idea of Templars being against slavery even if most of its members are aristocrats in Spain, England, and New York. On the other hand, Woodes Rogers being a slaveowner and slavetrader is totally accurate. Less accurate is the somewhat boring and bland personality Rogers puts on in the game, when he was actually a pretty dashing figure. He also did have a scar on his face. Torres and Rogers being associates and pals falls in with the secret society motif so that's fine.
Then we come to the 1715 Spanish Treasure Fleet sinking. Year is correct. It did sink in a hurricane. The map places the sinking between Havana and the North of the map, which is Florida, and that is also correct. Since I gave ROGUE a yelling for its poor representation of natural disasters I suppose it's only fair that I criticize Black Flag for not showing a hurricane appropriately. But then again Black Flag doesn't have any weather machines nor does it say that devices causes hurricanes. So that's that. After that, Edward becomes captain of the Jackdaw. One thing that I wished we saw, is Edward actually being elected to be Captain. Because pirate ships elected their leaders. In the game it's implied and understated but we don't see it happen. Likewise it wasn't always the case that the captain is the same as the helmsman.
We also meet the Sage, later revealed to be Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts. Absolutely nothing is known of his early life, so the idea of him being a Lovecraftian reincarnation of a predecessor god, is neither here nor there, and is possibly the most creative infusion of science-fiction/conspiracy with history. I like the idea of a Sage being against both the Assassins and Templars, and it's a pity UNITY destroyed that concept with its Templar Sage.
​
Sequence 3-8 Blackbeard, Vane and the Nassau Flying Gang [1715-1718]
We come to Nassau in the period of the pirate republic. We see Edward "Blackbeard" Thatch, Benjamin Hornigold, later we see Charles Vane, then "Calico" Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny (as a waitress), and James Kidd/Mary Reade. The bit about Blackbeard's name having multiple spelling variations with Thatch possibly being closest to the real one is recent research and is plausible. Charles Vane being a little more violent than the rest is correct. Mary Reade's earliest life is not known but she is recorded to have posed as a dude, so that's right, and James Kidd being her alias is quite common with a number of pirates in that time. So plausible.
Laurens Prins was a real-life Dutch Pirate turned legitimate slavetrader. His mission and assassination didn't happen according to the game but he did come into conflict with some Nassau Pirates. We also see Governor Torres phrase his objection to slavery which we addressed above as a huge stretch. This mission conveys the central theme about the game's portrayal of piracy. Namely that piracy was prosecuted by the same government(s) and society that saw slavery as legal. Basically the Spanish, British, and other European Empires were bigger plunderers and looters than these pirates could ever hope to have been. The problem with any story about the pirates is that the audience secretly and vicariously roots for the pirates. The same with gangsters and other crime stories. We are fascinated by these rogues, desperadoes and so on. But most pirate stories have a good pirate and a bad pirate. The good pirate rarely does any actual pirate work. Jack Sparrow in the Pirate movies is obvious since most of the story is about him trying to get back his ship and involved in some supernatural stuff rather than actually robbing people. In Black Flag, even the good pirates absolutely rob people. Edward Kenway robs and loots and kills a lot of British and Spanish sailors, and one of the ways the story gets us on board with this, is highlighting slavery. The fact that Edward Kenway's first mate Adewale is a former slave and since he's the one who gleefully brings up robbing English ships (on account of what the database says is because of his kidnapping as a child by English slavers), we don't actually feel too guilty. Now the idea of making pirates some kind of retroactive anti-colonial or anti-imperial thing is seductive and even Disney's Pirates movies do that, the third one especially had the final battle being this big ship battle between pirates of multiple countries fighting the British Movie. The reality is of course sketchy and the idea of using slavery/abolition as some kind of D&D-esque morality alignment as it's used in Black Flag and other AC games is arguably less about condemning oppression and more about making you feel better about some white dudes in the 1700s.
A good example is how the game makes Hornigold a racist (i.e. in the implicit "you let your First Mate carry a gun" kind) and Blackbeard someone who accepts Adewale. Hornigold later becomes a Templar and him being a racist makes you feel better about killing him. Charles Vane later unleashes fire on a slave ship and Rackham talks about selling Adewale. Based solely on their opposition to slavery, we see Edward Kenway, Blackbeard, and Mary Reade as the "good pirates" since they treat Adewale as an equal and so on. Edward and Mary Reade also assassinate the slaver Laurens Prins. On the other hand we see Governor Torres opposing slavery in his conversation with Prins and I mentioned above that this is more out of a desire to make the Templars "complex" and "gray" than say anything real about the time. This kind of idea is similar to the musical Hamilton which also tries to get audiences to sympathize with one Founding Father as a good guy, namely Hamilton, while seeing Jefferson and Burr as "bad guys" when in real-life there is more evidence of Hamilton trading slaves than doing anything concrete to oppose it. Rogue and AC3 likewise whitewashes the involvement of Christopher Gist and William Johnson as slaveowners. There's absolutely no way the Templars can be about control and power and oppose slavery in any meaningful way in the 1700s.
To get back to the pirates. In real-life it's true that about 25-30% of all pirates were escaped slaves. And some ships had it up to 98% runaway crew. But accounts suggest that pirates often claimed to own their black crewman, either to provide legal cover and status, i.e. prevent them from being arrested as runaways and returned to plantations (charitable impression) or as a way to exploit and keep them bound to one captain (pragmatic and cynical impression). Blackbeard is noted to have bought and sold slaves, but he also allowed some to serve as crewmen. The game doesn't mention this but the Queen Anne's Revenge was originally a French slave ship La concorde (on which more later), and Blackbeard recruited some of the slaves there as his crew, but others were left behind. In general pirates preferred slaves born in the West Indies itself who knew European languages and other skills, and generally didn't give a damn about Africans brought home from Africa as slave labour. In other words, Edward and Adewale's kind of egalitarian friendship while not unlikely, would be rare, and when coming in colonial society, Edward would have had to pass Adewale as his slave given how the setting and society worked. And of course Adewale's status as a slave with long years of bondage in the Caribbean who learned many European languages would of course be easier for the pirates to get along with rather than someone from Africa and so on. In either case, it's certainly valid to claim that for runaway slaves, piracy was better than slavery, and piracy was definitely disruptive to the Atlantic Slave Trade, and to the game's credit, the pirates are never presented as any revolutionaries and so on. They are shown to be out for themselves, and their freedom first. But the subtext of Black Flag with its separation of good and bad pirates and so on, does tend to give people the idea that more of one kind could have made a difference.
We also know now that Blackbeard never killed anyone. In the game in one cutscene he kills someone but claims he does it rarely, so Ubisoft hedged its bets. Blackbeard's siege of Charlestown trying to get medicines, and then his death is fair. Although the game doesn't show him being decapitated and having his head mounted on the ship which feels like a waste of a M-Rated Pirate game. Charles Vane's conflict with Jack Rackham is a little unfair to Calico Jack. There wasn't a real mutiny. Jack outvoted Vane, and Vane got a sloop and a small crew of loyalists. Vane and his Sloop continued to pirate until he was caught in a hurricane, and crashed on an island separate from his crew before being picked up by the English.
Sequence 9-13: Hornigold's Doom, Black Bart's Rise and Fall, Ending [1718-1722]
When Rogers comes to the Bahamas and dissolves the short-lived "pirate republic", we see Hornigold accepting the pardon and becoming a pirate hunter. That did happen. And Hornigold did crash on New Providence where he went missing. So that part is fair. But again Hornigold is aligned with Woodes Rogers a slaveowner over Torres' objections, a "Bad Templar" and a "Bad Pirate".
Black Bart taking his costume from that of his fallen captain Howell Davis is accurate, and the cool speech he gives on being elected captain is a rephrasing of a real one he's recorded to have said in General History. Him taking a Portuguese Man o'War and converting it into Royal Fortune is accurate as is his idea of trying to impose rules and disciplines on his pirates. So he's cool as a character but I am disappointed with how soft-pedalled Black Bart is in this game. Bart's pirate activity was far more violent than others. He sunk a slave ship killing 80 on board and we don't see that in the game itself. It's also weird that the game ends with Torres' death than Black Bart even if he is for all intents the main villain of this story. We see Mary Reade and Anne Bonny pleading their bellies and that happened. I kind of wished we saw Rackham before his death led to his execution if only to hear Anne Bonny giving him one of the all-time great insults, "If you fought like a man you wouldn't have to die like a dog". Mary Reade dying and Anne Bonny disappearing from the records i.e. becoming part of Edward's crew and then maybe an associate of the Assassins happened.
Governor Torres did die in 1722 which the game fictionalizes into a fight in some dead god's bond villain lair which is okay I guess. It's a cool story and I love the ending. I can't be the only one disappointed that Edward finally became an Assassin, I liked him better as a pirate before he got religion, metaphorically speaking. Then the game ends and unlike many of the tavern songs, sea shanties and others, The Parting Glass is an historically apt folk song dated to the 1650s-1660s. The lyric "Since it falls on my lot that I should rise and you should not" is especially moving in conveying that mix of survivor's guilt and sympathy we have for these characters, which I think is easily the best supporting cast in all of the ACawa games.
SIDE MISSIONS/GAMEPLAY/OPEN WORLD
The main narrative side missions are the Templar Hunt missions which gives you that armor in Du Casse's mansion. The mission with Anto, the Assassin leader of Kingston Jamaica deals with the Maroons. The Maroons of Jamaica were runaway slaves who joined and mixed with the native population to form an indigenous community, and in a series of wars with the English settlers, they forced treaties that guaranteed their freedom well before the 1833 abolition of slavery in all English colonies. The problem is that the First Maroon War happened in the 1730s so seeing the activity and agitation here is a little anachronistic but definitely runaway slaves were a big deal and a common enough occurrence. Anto being a Maroon and Assassin seems slightly weird since the Maroons were famously isolationist. They were fighting for their freedom and rights but certainly weren't out to free all the slaves of Jamaica, leave alone the Caribbean. Which of course does not in any way discredit or dishonor their struggle, their achievement and so on.
As commentators below and elsewhere have noted, the gameplay for BLACK FLAG where you more or less have to dominate the open world ocean, taking out sea forts, fighting battles with British and Spanish ships, and then destroying and capturing ships wasn't how pirates rolled. Pirates were stealth experts, and they operated by sneak attacks, and they avoided violence or tried to minimize it if only because a sunken ship provided smaller booty and an intact vessel was a way to sub-franchise your fleet. The pirates in real-life with rare exceptions didn't fight and loot the Royal Navies either. They mostly attacked merchant ships, sloops, schooners and others. They also attacked and targeted slave ships. The biggest pirate attack and greatest heist of all time was Henry Avery's brutal attack on the Mughal trading vessel Ganj-i-Sawai en route to Mecca, full of civilians, and Avery and his crew tortured, raped, and murdered them before looting and then disappearing. As mentioned above, Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge was a repurposed slave ship. The same was true of other pirate ships at the time. So this is another way the game slants towards pirates as an anti-imperialist force within the gameplay, and while Edward is still a robbing and killing pirate as opposed to a faux-pirate like Sparrow, him not robbing merchants and others does feel like a cheat and a letdown. It also gives the impression that slavery and colonialism was something done by the navy and not something participated by merchants and other commerce types. When that's what happened although many of these were honest merchants not involved in immoral stuff. What I say is true also of GTA, guilty of the same stuff, but any game where you play a criminal which doesn't have you robbing innocent and honest people, as per their time, doesn't say anything meaningful about criminal behaviour and why audiences are fascinated by it.
Personally I feel that this is also a weakness of open-world gameplay and GTA-style rags-to-riches progression because applied to pirates it can give a distorted picture. Pirates weren't mob-bosses. They never had any means to convert illegal money into legal money. They spent their cash, they rarely saved and invested, and being that they were hostes humanis gestes (i.e. Outlaw who could be killed without trial or if brought to trial sentenced without defense), that meant they were damned. However in an open-world game, having to navigate an ocean with a multi-star rating and keeping on the downlow from beginning to end, would be repetitive, and punishing to gamers and also discourage exploration of the map, even if that is how pirates actually operated and lived, constantly at risk, cautious, and moving and sailing out of sight. The particular way Edward Kenway operates as pirate, i.e. taking out forts, replacing old commanders with his own, ensuring secure ports-of-call, which ends up encouraging an acquisitive monopolistic spirit among gamers is actually closer to how the British East India Company operated in Western and Eastern India, especially around the Bay of Bengal as documented in Jon E. Wilson's The Chaos of Empire.
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS
- Until Black Flag, no mainstream pirate story in any medium addressed slavery, neither mentioning its existence, nor its presence. In the Disney Pirates films, we have Keira Knightley who is a daughter of a British governor and lives in a mansion. That social background by itself confirms that she had the life of a Southern Belle plantation owner with slaves for servants, slaves tilling her fields and so on. But in the movie her servants are white and European. We also see Orlando Bloom as a blacksmith and he's shown as some kind of feudal villager transplanted to the New World in love with the posh girl, and yearning for someone out of his class, but new world white settlers were rarely so romantic or cute. Someone like Bloom's character would save up, hope to buy his shop, and maybe some slaves to cut labour costs and so on. Sid Meier's Pirates likewise never once addressed slavery in any of its text-heavy descriptions. And Sid Meier's other Civilization games have been criticized for presenting a rosy view of civilization development and advancement, plucking stuff from multiple eras without dealing with their baggage. So while Black Flag isn't free of romanticism and some amount of sentiment, it deserves credit for simply putting pirates in that context, and acknowledging that it's a foundation for the entire system of imperialism built by Europe.
- The Assassin Order in Black Flag is led by a Mayan guy Ah Tabai, and they as a whole have no interest in the pirate stuff and mostly ally with natives and other indigenous people. Since the game has you play Edward who is a non-Assassin, this allows the game to simply glance and present the Mayan and other tribal peoples without actually dealing with them. Black Flag has the advantage of narrow focus, i.e. looking at events from the view of Edward Kenway and his journey, and being that Edward is an asshole (like Altair) for most of the game, the game does convey a sense of there being more to the Caribbean than Edward's own story. That's rare for an open world to do but Black Flag does it.
- I talked previously about how Rogue scants class, accent, and ethnic issues. Black Flag in its main story touches on it in more accurate detail. In the beginning when Edward is posing as Walpole among Torres and Rogers, he adopts a plummy accent but drops to a more common register with Stede Bonnet and among his pirates peers. Later there's the hilarious bit where he dresses as that Italian diplomat, who is a total spoof of Ezio (voiced by the same actor doing the same accent), and he again affects a bad Italian accent. The epilogue of Black Flag, that cinematic after the credits in London, has Edward speaking in RP (received pronunciation) to an English guy who tries to chat up his daughter, while when talking to Kid!Haytham he uses words like "posh gig" and a more common register. This stuff is something that should be a gameplay open world mechanic rather than in cutscenes, especially when you are about "blending" in and so on. I will say that Black Flag has the best dialogue in the AC games by far and one reason for that it is the use of accents to convey detail and so on.
- I wish we had more about the accent and class issue with Adewale because as mentioned above, pirates preferred slaves who had the same West Indian background and knew European languages, and I wish there was some tension or guilt with him knowing that he was preferred to other slaves because he could talk to the white man. His friendship with Edward Kenway is one of the best parts of the game but like all friendships it has to have tensions and grudges, and that could have been explored. We don't see this dealt with in FREEDOM CRY either, where there doesn't seem much tension between the slaves brought in from Africa and him. In the middle of Black Flag, Adewale seems more into the idealization of Nassau than Kenway, which is not something that entirely works, but it's still acceptable.
- One big problem is the Anglocentrism. We have the Spanish character Governor Torres, we have the Frenchman Julien du Casse (who looks like a French John Marston), the Dutch trader Laurens Prins but we don't get a sense of Spanish Pirates, Portuguese Pirates, and especially French pirates. The French pirates were the original boucaniers. They were also involved in Nassau, and Olivier Levasseur aka "La buse" (The Buzzard), was pretty active in that time and place. He also operated with Captain Howell Davis, Black Bart's leader and so on. I kind of wish we had more of a mix, such as for instance Edward Kenway's crew having Spanish, French, and other sailors. We should also see sailors from around the world, including lascar sailors from India who served in pirate crew. Early in development the idea was to make Crew into full characters rather than just Adewale, so we see that missing here.
- The Caribbean and its islands are way bigger than what the game conveys. I especially like the fact that we can circumnavigate the coast of Cuba in the open-world in a time (at fast sail) in less than 10 minutes. The fact that Cuba is the largest island in South America, the 17th largest in the world, and easily the biggest landmass in the Caribbean (and bigger than Ireland and Sri-Lanka for sake of general comparison) somehow doesn't quite come across. But the environment and open-world ocean is attractive and spellbinding. I wish we had more heat effects though because sailing for a great deal of time in the open world in the hot sun doesn't strike me as being realistic. We have three cities (Havana, Nassau, Kingston) and some small towns, and some large islands (such as Providence) that have large separate maps. Nassau is a shantytown in the pirate era, barely a city. Kingston being that it's an English colonial city resembles the New World settlements of AC3 and Rogue. Havana looks a little more grand, and feels like an European city with Spanish style architecture. I have no idea how accurate this recreation this. The story largely takes place on the oceans and as such these cities and the inner-life feels remote. Kingston seems to have more slave plantations than Havana does however, but slavery definitely did exist in Cuba and indeed its history has a lot of slave uprisings. I don't know if it's out of some motivation for revisionism (i.e. the Anti-Spanish bias in English accounts known as "black legend"), but the overemphasis on slavery among the English, and the downplaying of it with the Spanish either in open-world or the character of Governor Torres, seems to go a bit more in the other direction in my reckoning.
CONCLUSION
Black Flag along with AC1 is the best game of the series. And of the two, Black Flag is the better historical recreation of the period and as such is the most successful historical fiction of all the games. It's a game made with confidence but it also has modesty, i.e. the impression isn't that Black Flag is the definitive pirate story but simply putting forth an idea for how to think about pirates differently than how it did before. It provides a new set of questions and it finally makes pirates into something other than Punch and Judy figures. Who thought that Blackbeard could be a three-dimensional character again after spending so many decades as a Halloween costume?
So from British Pirates to British Gangsters in SYNDICATE next time. And more to say about accent and blending mechanics there (and the lack thereof).
SOURCES:

1. Robert Rath:- http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/criticalintel/10703-A-Piracy-Primer-for-Assassin-s-Creed-IV-Black-Flag.3- http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/criticalintel/10855-Living-the-Pirate-Life-in-Assassin-s-Creed-IV.3
2. Bob Whitaker, History Respawned:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C9h3p5Efa4&t=1241s (Black Flag with Bryan Glass, a historian who specializes in pirate history from ancient to the modern)- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwJzj9g5HNI (A video that talks about Freedom Cry and Liberation, but also touches on the issues of the Caribbean in Black Flag, mainly the downplaying of the French presence).
3. Luke Plunkett from Kotaku:https://kotaku.com/assassins-creed-ivs-sea-shanties-are-a-treasure-1486865100(About the anachronism of the sea shanties and tavern songs)
4. The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down. Colin Woodard. 400 pages. Mariner Books; First edition. June 30, 2008.
5. The General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates. Captain Charles Johnson. Wikisource. Public Domain Link: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_General_History_of_the_Robberies_and_Murders_of_the_most_notorious_Pyrates
6. Interethnic Relations and Settlement on the Spanish Florida Frontier, 1668-1763. Diana Reigelsperger. Dissertation at the University of Florida. 2013. "The presence of St. Augustine as a refuge for runaway slaves soon became a sore spot inthe relations between the English and the Spanish in the Southeast. Quiroga y Losada’s successor, Don Laureano de Torres y Ayala, actually returned some runaway slaves to Carolina agents. The traditional interpretation has been that tensions were too high between the English and the Spanish, and keeping the runaways would contribute further to the provocation. Hoffman has recently suggested that the governor’s primary concern was actually that the English might make a habit of allowing the slaves to slip away in order to make inflated claims for them against the Spanish treasury. Either way, the policy of sanctuary had its limitations.44 D"http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UFE0045788/00001

I started this series with UNITY, then went to AC1, AC2, Brotherhood, Revelations, AC3 and Rogue. Now it's Black Flag.
Previously when I covered Rogue, and I mentioned that I considered that game to be the most inaccessible in the series. On the other hand, BLACK FLAG is probably the most accessible game of the entire series. A good chunk of the people who bought it did so for being a pirate game, or a Pirate GTA game, or as the Pirates of the Caribbean game that captured some of the adventure of the first film. The main character isn't a part of any secret society until the very end of the game.
BLACK FLAG is also a game that has gotten commentary about its historical recreation and details, from Robert Rath at The Escapist and from Bob Whitaker at History Respawned, Luke Plunkett at Kotaku. So there isn't too much original to say that hasn't already been said there, and said better. In addition, Black Flag's developers drew from historical sources like the original book on pirates (A General History of the Robberies and Murderers of the Most Notorious Pyrates)and Colin Woodard's Republic of Pirates. With that out of the way let's start:
MAIN CAMPAIGN
Setting: The Caribbean in the period of the so-called Golden Age of Piracy, or British Piracy at any rate. Specifically Jamaica, Bahamas, Bermuda, Cuba, with small sequences in the Yucatan, Charlestown North Carolina, and the coast of Brazil, and the island of Principe in Africa.
Pop Culture View: The Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and in games, Monkey Island, Sid Meier's Pirates, a bunch of other classic movies like Captain Blood, Anne of the Indies. The developers also cited Peter Weir's Master of Commander: The Far Side of the World as an inspiration (mostly for its more accurate recreation of ship combat than the pirates stuff).
Sequence 1-2 [1715]
This part introduces four historical figures (Stede Bonnet, Governor Laureano de Torres y Ayala, Woodes Rogers, Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts). We also see the 1715 Sinking of the Treasure Fleet by a hurricane. In terms of dates and place of activity it all checks out. We meet Stede Bonnet in 1715, when he was, as the game shows a legal businessman with no criminal record. Unlike other pirates, Stede didn't need to go to piracy apparently, and was some kind of thrill-seeker. To be honest, given how badly Stede Bonnet's end turned out, I don't know why the game idealizes and sentimentalizes his friendship with Edward Kenway. As we see, Edward is the one who encourages him to join the pirates and idealizes it, which kind of makes him complicit and morally culpable in Stede's eventual death.
We meet Governor Torres and Woodes Rogers in Havana, Cuba. Torres is a highly obscure figure who seems to have been a footnote in history. Unlike what the game tells us later, there is no evidence whatsoever for Torres being opposed to slavery in any fashion. In fact, according to one university paper, from 2013 (the same year this game came out so it might not have been available to the developers), Torres actually returned runaway slaves fleeing English territory back to their masters. Black Flag tried to introduce the idea of Templars being against slavery even if most of its members are aristocrats in Spain, England, and New York. On the other hand, Woodes Rogers being a slaveowner and slavetrader is totally accurate. Less accurate is the somewhat boring and bland personality Rogers puts on in the game, when he was actually a pretty dashing figure. He also did have a scar on his face. Torres and Rogers being associates and pals falls in with the secret society motif so that's fine.
Then we come to the 1715 Spanish Treasure Fleet sinking. Year is correct. It did sink in a hurricane. The map places the sinking between Havana and the North of the map, which is Florida, and that is also correct. Since I gave ROGUE a yelling for its poor representation of natural disasters I suppose it's only fair that I criticize Black Flag for not showing a hurricane appropriately. But then again Black Flag doesn't have any weather machines nor does it say that devices causes hurricanes. So that's that. After that, Edward becomes captain of the Jackdaw. One thing that I wished we saw, is Edward actually being elected to be Captain. Because pirate ships elected their leaders. In the game it's implied and understated but we don't see it happen. Likewise it wasn't always the case that the captain is the same as the helmsman.
We also meet the Sage, later revealed to be Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts. Absolutely nothing is known of his early life, so the idea of him being a Lovecraftian reincarnation of a predecessor god, is neither here nor there, and is possibly the most creative infusion of science-fiction/conspiracy with history. I like the idea of a Sage being against both the Assassins and Templars, and it's a pity UNITY destroyed that concept with its Templar Sage.
Sequence 3-8 Blackbeard, Vane and the Nassau Flying Gang [1715-1718]
We come to Nassau in the period of the pirate republic. We see Edward "Blackbeard" Thatch, Benjamin Hornigold, later we see Charles Vane, then "Calico" Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny (as a waitress), and James Kidd/Mary Reade. The bit about Blackbeard's name having multiple spelling variations with Thatch possibly being closest to the real one is recent research and is plausible. Charles Vane being a little more violent than the rest is correct. Mary Reade's earliest life is not known but she is recorded to have posed as a dude, so that's right, and James Kidd being her alias is quite common with a number of pirates in that time. So plausible.
Laurens Prins was a real-life Dutch Pirate turned legitimate slavetrader. His mission and assassination didn't happen according to the game but he did come into conflict with some Nassau Pirates. We also see Governor Torres phrase his objection to slavery which we addressed above as a huge stretch. This mission conveys the central theme about the game's portrayal of piracy. Namely that piracy was prosecuted by the same government(s) and society that saw slavery as legal. Basically the Spanish, British, and other European Empires were bigger plunderers and looters than these pirates could ever hope to have been. The problem with any story about the pirates is that the audience secretly and vicariously roots for the pirates. The same with gangsters and other crime stories. We are fascinated by these rogues, desperadoes and so on. But most pirate stories have a good pirate and a bad pirate. The good pirate rarely does any actual pirate work. Jack Sparrow in the Pirate movies is obvious since most of the story is about him trying to get back his ship and involved in some supernatural stuff rather than actually robbing people. In Black Flag, even the good pirates absolutely rob people. Edward Kenway robs and loots and kills a lot of British and Spanish sailors, and one of the ways the story gets us on board with this, is highlighting slavery. The fact that Edward Kenway's first mate Adewale is a former slave and since he's the one who gleefully brings up robbing English ships (on account of what the database says is because of his kidnapping as a child by English slavers), we don't actually feel too guilty. Now the idea of making pirates some kind of retroactive anti-colonial or anti-imperial thing is seductive and even Disney's Pirates movies do that, the third one especially had the final battle being this big ship battle between pirates of multiple countries fighting the British Movie. The reality is of course sketchy and the idea of using slavery/abolition as some kind of D&D-esque morality alignment as it's used in Black Flag and other AC games is arguably less about condemning oppression and more about making you feel better about some white dudes in the 1700s.
A good example is how the game makes Hornigold a racist (i.e. in the implicit "you let your First Mate carry a gun" kind) and Blackbeard someone who accepts Adewale. Hornigold later becomes a Templar and him being a racist makes you feel better about killing him. Charles Vane later unleashes fire on a slave ship and Rackham talks about selling Adewale. Based solely on their opposition to slavery, we see Edward Kenway, Blackbeard, and Mary Reade as the "good pirates" since they treat Adewale as an equal and so on. Edward and Mary Reade also assassinate the slaver Laurens Prins. On the other hand we see Governor Torres opposing slavery in his conversation with Prins and I mentioned above that this is more out of a desire to make the Templars "complex" and "gray" than say anything real about the time. This kind of idea is similar to the musical Hamilton which also tries to get audiences to sympathize with one Founding Father as a good guy, namely Hamilton, while seeing Jefferson and Burr as "bad guys" when in real-life there is more evidence of Hamilton trading slaves than doing anything concrete to oppose it. Rogue and AC3 likewise whitewashes the involvement of Christopher Gist and William Johnson as slaveowners. There's absolutely no way the Templars can be about control and power and oppose slavery in any meaningful way in the 1700s.
To get back to the pirates. In real-life it's true that about 25-30% of all pirates were escaped slaves. And some ships had it up to 98% runaway crew. But accounts suggest that pirates often claimed to own their black crewman, either to provide legal cover and status, i.e. prevent them from being arrested as runaways and returned to plantations (charitable impression) or as a way to exploit and keep them bound to one captain (pragmatic and cynical impression). Blackbeard is noted to have bought and sold slaves, but he also allowed some to serve as crewmen. The game doesn't mention this but the Queen Anne's Revenge was originally a French slave ship La concorde (on which more later), and Blackbeard recruited some of the slaves there as his crew, but others were left behind. In general pirates preferred slaves born in the West Indies itself who knew European languages and other skills, and generally didn't give a damn about Africans brought home from Africa as slave labour. In other words, Edward and Adewale's kind of egalitarian friendship while not unlikely, would be rare, and when coming in colonial society, Edward would have had to pass Adewale as his slave given how the setting and society worked. And of course Adewale's status as a slave with long years of bondage in the Caribbean who learned many European languages would of course be easier for the pirates to get along with rather than someone from Africa and so on. In either case, it's certainly valid to claim that for runaway slaves, piracy was better than slavery, and piracy was definitely disruptive to the Atlantic Slave Trade, and to the game's credit, the pirates are never presented as any revolutionaries and so on. They are shown to be out for themselves, and their freedom first. But the subtext of Black Flag with its separation of good and bad pirates and so on, does tend to give people the idea that more of one kind could have made a difference.
We also know now that Blackbeard never killed anyone. In the game in one cutscene he kills someone but claims he does it rarely, so Ubisoft hedged its bets. Blackbeard's siege of Charlestown trying to get medicines, and then his death is fair. Although the game doesn't show him being decapitated and having his head mounted on the ship which feels like a waste of a M-Rated Pirate game. Charles Vane's conflict with Jack Rackham is a little unfair to Calico Jack. There wasn't a real mutiny. Jack outvoted Vane, and Vane got a sloop and a small crew of loyalists. Vane and his Sloop continued to pirate until he was caught in a hurricane, and crashed on an island separate from his crew before being picked up by the English.
Sequence 9-13: Hornigold's Doom, Black Bart's Rise and Fall, Ending [1718-1722]
When Rogers comes to the Bahamas and dissolves the short-lived "pirate republic", we see Hornigold accepting the pardon and becoming a pirate hunter. That did happen. And Hornigold did crash on New Providence where he went missing. So that part is fair. But again Hornigold is aligned with Woodes Rogers a slaveowner over Torres' objections, a "Bad Templar" and a "Bad Pirate".
Black Bart taking his costume from that of his fallen captain Howell Davis is accurate, and the cool speech he gives on being elected captain is a rephrasing of a real one he's recorded to have said in General History. Him taking a Portuguese Man o'War and converting it into Royal Fortune is accurate as is his idea of trying to impose rules and disciplines on his pirates. So he's cool as a character but I am disappointed with how soft-pedalled Black Bart is in this game. Bart's pirate activity was far more violent than others. He sunk a slave ship killing 80 on board and we don't see that in the game itself. It's also weird that the game ends with Torres' death than Black Bart even if he is for all intents the main villain of this story. We see Mary Reade and Anne Bonny pleading their bellies and that happened. I kind of wished we saw Rackham before his death led to his execution if only to hear Anne Bonny giving him one of the all-time great insults, "If you fought like a man you wouldn't have to die like a dog". Mary Reade dying and Anne Bonny disappearing from the records i.e. becoming part of Edward's crew and then maybe an associate of the Assassins happened.
Governor Torres did die in 1722 which the game fictionalizes into a fight in some dead god's bond villain lair which is okay I guess. It's a cool story and I love the ending. I can't be the only one disappointed that Edward finally became an Assassin, I liked him better as a pirate before he got religion, metaphorically speaking. Then the game ends and unlike many of the tavern songs, sea shanties and others, The Parting Glass is an historically apt folk song dated to the 1650s-1660s. The lyric "Since it falls on my lot that I should rise and you should not" is especially moving in conveying that mix of survivor's guilt and sympathy we have for these characters, which I think is easily the best supporting cast in all of the ACawa games.
SIDE MISSIONS/GAMEPLAY/OPEN WORLD
The main narrative side missions are the Templar Hunt missions which gives you that armor in Du Casse's mansion. The mission with Anto, the Assassin leader of Kingston Jamaica deals with the Maroons. The Maroons of Jamaica were runaway slaves who joined and mixed with the native population to form an indigenous community, and in a series of wars with the English settlers, they forced treaties that guaranteed their freedom well before the 1833 abolition of slavery in all English colonies. The problem is that the First Maroon War happened in the 1730s so seeing the activity and agitation here is a little anachronistic but definitely runaway slaves were a big deal and a common enough occurrence. Anto being a Maroon and Assassin seems slightly weird since the Maroons were famously isolationist. They were fighting for their freedom and rights but certainly weren't out to free all the slaves of Jamaica, leave alone the Caribbean. Which of course does not in any way discredit or dishonor their struggle, their achievement and so on.
As commentators below and elsewhere have noted, the gameplay for BLACK FLAG where you more or less have to dominate the open world ocean, taking out sea forts, fighting battles with British and Spanish ships, and then destroying and capturing ships wasn't how pirates rolled. Pirates were stealth experts, and they operated by sneak attacks, and they avoided violence or tried to minimize it if only because a sunken ship provided smaller booty and an intact vessel was a way to sub-franchise your fleet. The pirates in real-life with rare exceptions didn't fight and loot the Royal Navies either. They mostly attacked merchant ships, sloops, schooners and others. They also attacked and targeted slave ships. The biggest pirate attack and greatest heist of all time was Henry Avery's brutal attack on the Mughal trading vessel Ganj-i-Sawai en route to Mecca, full of civilians, and Avery and his crew tortured, raped, and murdered them before looting and then disappearing. As mentioned above, Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge was a repurposed slave ship. The same was true of other pirate ships at the time. So this is another way the game slants towards pirates as an anti-imperialist force within the gameplay, and while Edward is still a robbing and killing pirate as opposed to a faux-pirate like Sparrow, him not robbing merchants and others does feel like a cheat and a letdown. It also gives the impression that slavery and colonialism was something done by the navy and not something participated by merchants and other commerce types. When that's what happened although many of these were honest merchants not involved in immoral stuff. What I say is true also of GTA, guilty of the same stuff, but any game where you play a criminal which doesn't have you robbing innocent and honest people, as per their time, doesn't say anything meaningful about criminal behaviour and why audiences are fascinated by it.
Personally I feel that this is also a weakness of open-world gameplay and GTA-style rags-to-riches progression because applied to pirates it can give a distorted picture. Pirates weren't mob-bosses. They never had any means to convert illegal money into legal money. They spent their cash, they rarely saved and invested, and being that they were hostes humanis gestes (i.e. Outlaw who could be killed without trial or if brought to trial sentenced without defense), that meant they were damned. However in an open-world game, having to navigate an ocean with a multi-star rating and keeping on the downlow from beginning to end, would be repetitive, and punishing to gamers and also discourage exploration of the map, even if that is how pirates actually operated and lived, constantly at risk, cautious, and moving and sailing out of sight. The particular way Edward Kenway operates as pirate, i.e. taking out forts, replacing old commanders with his own, ensuring secure ports-of-call, which ends up encouraging an acquisitive monopolistic spirit among gamers is actually closer to how the British East India Company operated in Western and Eastern India, especially around the Bay of Bengal as documented in Jon E. Wilson's The Chaos of Empire.
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS
- Until Black Flag, no mainstream pirate story in any medium addressed slavery, neither mentioning its existence, nor its presence. In the Disney Pirates films, we have Keira Knightley who is a daughter of a British governor and lives in a mansion. That social background by itself confirms that she had the life of a Southern Belle plantation owner with slaves for servants, slaves tilling her fields and so on. But in the movie her servants are white and European. We also see Orlando Bloom as a blacksmith and he's shown as some kind of feudal villager transplanted to the New World in love with the posh girl, and yearning for someone out of his class, but new world white settlers were rarely so romantic or cute. Someone like Bloom's character would save up, hope to buy his shop, and maybe some slaves to cut labour costs and so on. Sid Meier's Pirates likewise never once addressed slavery in any of its text-heavy descriptions.And Sid Meier's other Civilization games have been criticized for presenting a rosy view of civilization development and advancement, plucking stuff from multiple eras without dealing with their baggage. So while Black Flag isn't free of romanticism and some amount of sentiment, it deserves credit for simply putting pirates in that context, and acknowledging that it's a foundation for the entire system of imperialism built by Europe.
- The Assassin Order in Black Flag is led by a Mayan guy Ah Tabai, and they as a whole have no interest in the pirate stuff and mostly ally with natives and other indigenous people. Since the game has you play Edward who is a non-Assassin, this allows the game to simply glance and present the Mayan and other tribal peoples without actually dealing with them. Black Flag has the advantage of narrow focus, i.e. looking at events from the view of Edward Kenway and his journey, and being that Edward is an asshole (like Altair) for most of the game, the game does convey a sense of there being more to the Caribbean than Edward's own story. That's rare for an open world to do but Black Flag does it.
- I talked previously about how Rogue scants class, accent, and ethnic issues. Black Flag in its main story touches on it in more accurate detail. In the beginning when Edward is posing as Walpole among Torres and Rogers, he adopts a plummy accent but drops to a more common register with Stede Bonnet and among his pirates peers. Later there's the hilarious bit where he dresses as that Italian diplomat, who is a total spoof of Ezio (voiced by the same actor doing the same accent), and he again affects a bad Italian accent. The epilogue of Black Flag, that cinematic after the credits in London, has Edward speaking in RP (received pronunciation) to an English guy who tries to chat up his daughter, while when talking to Kid!Haytham he uses words like "posh gig" and a more common register. This stuff is something that should be a gameplay open world mechanic rather than in cutscenes, especially when you are about "blending" in and so on. I will say that Black Flag has the best dialogue in the AC games by far and one reason for that it is the use of accents to convey detail and so on.
- I wish we had more about the accent and class issue with Adewale because as mentioned above, pirates preferred slaves who had the same West Indian background and knew European languages, and I wish there was some tension or guilt with him knowing that he was preferred to other slaves because he could talk to the white man. His friendship with Edward Kenway is one of the best parts of the game but like all friendships it has to have tensions and grudges, and that could have been explored. We don't see this dealt with in FREEDOM CRY either, where there doesn't seem much tension between the slaves brought in from Africa and him. In the middle of Black Flag, Adewale seems more into the idealization of Nassau than Kenway, which is not something that entirely works, but it's still acceptable.
- One big problem is the Anglocentrism. We have the Spanish character Governor Torres, we have the Frenchman Julien du Casse (who looks like a French John Marston), the Dutch trader Laurens Prins but we don't get a sense of Spanish Pirates, Portuguese Pirates, and especially French pirates. The French pirates were the original boucaniers. They were also involved in Nassau, and Olivier Levasseur aka "La buse" (The Buzzard), was pretty active in that time and place. He also operated with Captain Howell Davis, Black Bart's leader and so on. I kind of wish we had more of a mix, such as for instance Edward Kenway's crew having Spanish, French, and other sailors. We should also see sailors from around the world, including lascar sailors from India who served in pirate crew. Early in development the idea was to make Crew into full characters rather than just Adewale, so we see that missing here.
- The Caribbean and its islands are way bigger than what the game conveys. I especially like the fact that we can circumnavigate the coast of Cuba in the open-world in a time (at fast sail) in less than 10 minutes. The fact that Cuba is the largest island in South America, the 17th largest in the world, and easily the biggest landmass in the Caribbean (and bigger than Ireland and Sri-Lanka for sake of general comparison) somehow doesn't quite come across. But the environment and open-world ocean is attractive and spellbinding. I wish we had more heat effects though because sailing for a great deal of time in the open world in the hot sun doesn't strike me as being realistic. We have three cities (Havana, Nassau, Kingston) and some small towns, and some large islands (such as Providence) that have large separate maps. Nassau is a shantytown in the pirate era, barely a city. Kingston being that it's an English colonial city resembles the New World settlements of AC3 and Rogue. Havana looks a little more grand, and feels like an European city with Spanish style architecture. I have no idea how accurate this recreation this. The story largely takes place on the oceans and as such these cities and the inner-life feels remote. Kingston seems to have more slave plantations than Havana does however, but slavery definitely did exist in Cuba and indeed its history has a lot of slave uprisings. I don't know if it's out of some motivation for revisionism (i.e. the Anti-Spanish bias in English accounts known as "black legend"), but the overemphasis on slavery among the English, and the downplaying of it with the Spanish either in open-world or the character of Governor Torres, seems to go a bit more in the other direction in my reckoning.
CONCLUSION
Black Flag along with AC1 is the best game of the series. And of the two, Black Flag is the better historical recreation of the period and as such is the most successful historical fiction of all the games. It's a game made with confidence but it also has modesty, i.e. the impression isn't that Black Flag is the definitive pirate story but simply putting forth an idea for how to think about pirates differently than how it did before. It provides a new set of questions and it finally makes pirates into something other than Punch and Judy figures. Who thought that Blackbeard could be a three-dimensional character again after spending so many decades as a Halloween costume?
So from British Pirates to British Gangsters in SYNDICATE next time. And more to say about accent and blending mechanics there (and the lack thereof).
SOURCES:

1. Robert Rath:- http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/criticalintel/10703-A-Piracy-Primer-for-Assassin-s-Creed-IV-Black-Flag.3- http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/criticalintel/10855-Living-the-Pirate-Life-in-Assassin-s-Creed-IV.3
2. Bob Whitaker, History Respawned:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C9h3p5Efa4&t=1241s (Black Flag with Bryan Glass, a historian who specializes in pirate history from ancient to the modern)- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwJzj9g5HNI (A video that talks about Freedom Cry and Liberation, but also touches on the issues of the Caribbean in Black Flag, mainly the downplaying of the French presence).
3. Luke Plunkett from Kotaku:https://kotaku.com/assassins-creed-ivs-sea-shanties-are-a-treasure-1486865100(About the anachronism of the sea shanties and tavern songs)
4. The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down. Colin Woodard. 400 pages. Mariner Books; First edition. June 30, 2008.
5. The General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates. Captain Charles Johnson. Wikisource. Public Domain Link: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_General_History_of_the_Robberies_and_Murders_of_the_most_notorious_Pyrates
6. Interethnic Relations and Settlement on the Spanish Florida Frontier, 1668-1763. Diana Reigelsperger. Dissertation at the University of Florida. 2013. "The presence of St. Augustine as a refuge for runaway slaves soon became a sore spot inthe relations between the English and the Spanish in the Southeast. Quiroga y Losada’s successor, Don Laureano de Torres y Ayala, actually returned some runaway slaves to Carolina agents. The traditional interpretation has been that tensions were too high between the English and the Spanish, and keeping the runaways would contribute further to the provocation. Hoffman has recently suggested that the governor’s primary concern was actually that the English might make a habit of allowing the slaves to slip away in order to make inflated claims for them against the Spanish treasury. Either way, the policy of sanctuary had its limitations.44 D"http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UFE0045788/00001

Period: 363.81 days

	Submissions	Comments
Total	1000	55898
Rate (per day)	2.75	152.75
Unique Redditors	413	3355
Combined Score	138929	1037724

Top Submitters' Top Submissions

1. 24640 points, 143 submissions: scienceisarealthing
   
   1. On the state of feminism in 2018 (477 points, 30 comments)
   2. Janelle Monáe labelled problematic for daring to spread positivity about vaginas (404 points, 89 comments)
   3. A former stripper on how liberal/ leftist men want "enthusiastic consent" (401 points, 88 comments)
   4. The Onion dishing out some radical feminism 101! (400 points, 19 comments)
   5. "When I hear how 'sex work is women's rights,' that's pimp shit." (390 points, 117 comments)
   6. Sex industry survivor Rachel Moran destroys libfem hypocrisy (363 points, 95 comments)
   7. "you left out penises and testicles on the female genitalia" (340 points, 69 comments)
   8. "Shut up and listen to transwomen!!" (322 points, 42 comments)
   9. "Contraception, abortion, and any other issues related to pregnancy and childbirth are not 'women's issues.'" (321 points, 13 comments)
   10. Why are men so slutty nowadays? (313 points, 35 comments)
2. 3522 points, 25 submissions: foolishtimbit
   
   1. Telling women not to weamake art of female anatomy because “trans women don’t have vaginas” is like telling a UNI student not to wear a sweatshirt with their school’s logo on it because “some people don’t go to that school”. (271 points, 47 comments)
   2. Why do transgender people always say “I was assigned female/male at birth”, like you weren’t “Assigned” anything. The doctor looked at your genitals and determined which SEX you are. (238 points, 74 comments)
   3. Curb Your Women’s March (219 points, 52 comments)
   4. The self objectification of female pop starts (218 points, 15 comments)
   5. Pretty Much (204 points, 10 comments)
   6. Anyways could kweer™️ activists please stop giving transwomen all the credit for LGBT rights? (164 points, 51 comments)
   7. Not to sound mean but I couldn’t care less about those women who are happy go lucky sex workers (162 points, 57 comments)
   8. These people think they’re slick gaslighting us. (159 points, 62 comments)
   9. (Liberal) Feminists really need to stop overusing the word “Empowering” (142 points, 56 comments)
   10. Liberal Feminists: “We need to SUPPORT sex workers™️ uwu!!!” Sex Worker: “I was traumatized and abused by the sex industry.” Liberal Feminists: “Stay away from me u evil #SWERF!! >:(“ (132 points, 6 comments)
3. 3485 points, 30 submissions: FeminamRadicalis
   
   1. Trans activism is excusing & advocating violence against women, and it’s time to speak up | Meghan Murphy (178 points, 11 comments)
   2. "If trans activists truly cared about feminism, they would respect women's spaces" by Meghan Murphy (151 points, 20 comments)
   3. Masked transactivists tried to violently force their way into JamJarBristol to shut down the #WeNeedToTalk event. | Magdalen Berns (150 points, 52 comments)
   4. Mumsnet is organizing a boycott of Marks & Spencer because they allow males in the female changing rooms (142 points, 29 comments)
   5. Four Black lesbians were killed in one week, and the media still isn't paying attention (137 points, 37 comments)
   6. Coming out as a radical feminist is like living in the Handmaid's Tale and trying to figure out who else is in the resistance. (136 points, 129 comments)
   7. Why is [liberal] feminism so quiet about Muslim women who refuse to wear the hijab? (130 points, 229 comments)
   8. Contestants for Miss Peru 2018 Turned the Pageant Into a Protest Against Femicide (129 points, 16 comments)
   9. TERF Wars (124 points, 24 comments)
   10. Porn Has Fueled A 400% Rise In Child-On-Child Assaults In the UK (118 points, 64 comments)
4. 2438 points, 14 submissions: sharky024
   
   1. India Rules Sex With a Child Bride Is Always Rape in a Massive Win for Girls’ Rights (495 points, 26 comments)
   2. Have anyone noticed how trans women make the news for succeeding in politics, business, and sports, while trans men make the news for... having babies? (259 points, 19 comments)
   3. Name the problem. (210 points, 34 comments)
   4. Men KNOW (190 points, 38 comments)
   5. Was Marx a terf? (176 points, 24 comments)
   6. A helpful chart for those that equate radfems to conservatives. (167 points, 138 comments)
   7. The message that students being kind and hanging out with the loner could have stopped a mass shooting is DANGEROUS (153 points, 59 comments)
   8. Study finds incidents of voyeurism at Target nearly tripled since imposure of "inclusive" bathroom policies (148 points, 41 comments)
   9. US trans homicide rates LOWER than non-trans population: peer reviewed study (128 points, 33 comments)
   10. We need real feminism back! (121 points, 22 comments)
5. 1738 points, 14 submissions: LilianH
   
   1. The Left Are Abandoning Women; and in Doing So, Abandoning Everything They Stand For (167 points, 82 comments)
   2. Don’t you just love it when a man explains to you what it means to be a woman? (160 points, 34 comments)
   3. Trans group asking Ireland's "Together For Yes" campaign to apologise for being "exclusionary" (155 points, 161 comments)
   4. Violent misogyny is unfortunately not confined to the internet’s ‘incels’ (142 points, 37 comments)
   5. Topless swimmer wades into trans row (138 points, 50 comments)
   6. Meet the man standing to be a Labour party women’s officer (123 points, 49 comments)
   7. Mexico state introduces gender parity law, 19 men identify as women to take women's places (123 points, 19 comments)
   8. The demonisation of Mumsnet is just the latest incarnation of witch-hunting (113 points, 21 comments)
   9. There is only one protected class of women and it is… men (113 points, 41 comments)
   10. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘This could be the beginning of a revolution’ (108 points, 29 comments)
6. 1713 points, 11 submissions: MossWolf
   
   1. I made us our very own radfem personality meme! (278 points, 132 comments)
   2. Fuck off, it's not our job to fix your problems. (250 points, 89 comments)
   3. The intense value of "old" (177 points, 73 comments)
   4. A Mom Got Sick Of Seeing Short-Shorts For Girls, So She Started Her Own Line (174 points, 91 comments)
   5. The encroachment upon female autistic spaces. (137 points, 81 comments)
   6. Came across this extremely faulty TRA comic, decided to make my own version. (125 points, 35 comments)
   7. Old men who vie for the attention of young women (124 points, 112 comments)
   8. Brain Tumors (118 points, 44 comments)
   9. Appropriation and transgenderism (117 points, 173 comments)
   10. TiM ironically complains, as a male, that when swiping through wlw tinder, half the results are of other men. (111 points, 87 comments)
7. 1604 points, 11 submissions: heidischallenge
   
   1. Excellent Andrea Dworkin quote - advice to male allies (226 points, 36 comments)
   2. This is not meant as a litmus test, but it’s quite clear what a feminist is (187 points, 66 comments)
   3. Be Feminine, They Said (169 points, 9 comments)
   4. Men's rights activist joke (169 points, 63 comments)
   5. Sad state of affairs (169 points, 17 comments)
   6. Halloween quote - Andrea Dworkin (129 points, 26 comments)
   7. How much things can change (128 points, 30 comments)
   8. Update on the Speaker's Corner assault (125 points, 18 comments)
   9. ARE TRANSWOMEN WOMEN? | A Battle to the Death Between Rya Jones and Miranda Yardley (111 points, 52 comments)
   10. No, Teen Vogue, the backlash to your anal sex article was not rooted in homophobia (97 points, 119 comments)
8. 1445 points, 11 submissions: TossingLobster
   
   1. Misogyny and school shootings (262 points, 65 comments)
   2. "Truly a magnificent specimen" (171 points, 16 comments)
   3. Important distinctions (151 points, 171 comments)
   4. "We bought the land" - A win for women everywhere (114 points, 21 comments)
   5. Pregnant woman exisiting causes epic mantrum (114 points, 65 comments)
   6. "There was a young woman who swallowed a lie..." (112 points, 10 comments)
   7. Professor of physiology says transgender athletes have advantage in speed, power (110 points, 18 comments)
   8. Social Conformity and Trans Activism (109 points, 46 comments)
   9. "The Cotton Friend Zone" (105 points, 43 comments)
   10. Stop pandering to the minuscule transgender lobby (103 points, 49 comments)
9. 1377 points, 8 submissions: TheBioWoman
   
   1. I knew we'd get a story like this soon -> "Why This Trans Woman Can't Identify With The Handmaid's Tale" -- The Advocate (344 points, 219 comments)
   2. I was physically assaulted by a pre-everything MTF for refusing sex/intimacy in 2014 (209 points, 42 comments)
   3. I bought a "The Future is Female" shirt to piss off libfems and it worked (204 points, 112 comments)
   4. Did You Know It's Lesbian Visibility Day? (160 points, 47 comments)
   5. Being Called a TERF Brought Me to Radical Feminism (137 points, 40 comments)
   6. Rad Fem Rhetoric Spotted in Lib Fem Hipster Coffee Shop. Dun Dun Dun! (123 points, 18 comments)
   7. I Just Love Women So Much (105 points, 19 comments)
   8. Impossible to get away from TiMs on Dating Apps "HER" and "OKCupid" (95 points, 74 comments)
10. 1197 points, 9 submissions: closetedxxcishet
    
    1. Transjacking (173 points, 77 comments)
    2. Common Trans Paradoxes (167 points, 70 comments)
    3. Lulz "demisexual" (156 points, 119 comments)
    4. I don't want cock in my face at the spa. That doesn't make me a bad person. (153 points, 47 comments)
    5. Sorry, “AFAB nonbinaries,” but it doesn’t work that way (139 points, 59 comments)
    6. Sorry, trans people, it turns out you’re not the biggest victims in the whole universe (123 points, 47 comments)
    7. Spa upholds no dong policy (98 points, 20 comments)
    8. You all save me every day (95 points, 25 comments)
    9. Can we talk about "whorephobia?" (93 points, 77 comments)
11. 1159 points, 8 submissions: Kluannoa
    
    1. Let's give some more specific attention to the phenomenon of women and girls thinking that they're asexual when they're not, as they're just so repulsed by porn culture (308 points, 135 comments)
    2. Just a small realization: men's magazines tell men what to expect, women's magazines tell their readers how to meet these expectations. (157 points, 16 comments)
    3. Women's thoughts are lost in niceness. As long as we're so scared of offending men, our thoughts can't fully form. (155 points, 65 comments)
    4. Another porn harm: the breakdown of healthy sexual boundaries, the normalization of incest (126 points, 61 comments)
    5. Does anyone else feel that with the transgender subject, we're actually talking about several pretty different subjects, while still using the same word, making it all very confusing and unclear? (113 points, 37 comments)
    6. I suddenly really realize just how bad the word ''slutshaming'' is. (106 points, 43 comments)
    7. Male privilege is being blissfully naive (104 points, 27 comments)
    8. Why we need a new feminist wave, focusing wholly on elevating women, as recent events showed just how powerless we really still are (90 points, 46 comments)
12. 1135 points, 8 submissions: Wanderer9717
    
    1. Seven-year-old girl likes football and wearing "boys'" clothes but is "proud to be a girl" (273 points, 43 comments)
    2. I won't be referred to as 'non-male' by the Green Party while women still suffer prejudice because of our female bodies (154 points, 32 comments)
    3. What's the difference between an MRA and a TRA? (139 points, 14 comments)
    4. Students at "right-on" Oxford University college vote against gender neutral toilets due to concerns about harassment of female students (129 points, 19 comments)
    5. A psychologist at the only NHS gender clinic for children in England says some may be making choices they could regret (117 points, 29 comments)
    6. The Family Featured in the NYT Article About Queer Families Looks Awfully Straight (116 points, 151 comments)
    7. Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts: Transgender activists try to curb free speech on site (107 points, 24 comments)
    8. The Degenderettes – Feminist Heretic (100 points, 17 comments)
13. 1097 points, 5 submissions: gendercriticalradfem
    
    1. A transgender four year old is like a vegan cat... (574 points, 171 comments)
    2. The Many Times Hugh Hefner's Playboy Comics Made Rape A Punchline (150 points, 23 comments)
    3. Magdalen Berns Discusses How Trans Ideology Reinforces Sexist Workplace Dress Codes At The Expense of Women (144 points, 66 comments)
    4. Las Vegas Shooter An Abusive Creep: Frequently Berated Girlfriend In Public (Is Anyone Actually Surprised Anymore When Mass-Murderers Shown To Be Misogynists?) (132 points, 115 comments)
    5. Teen Who Previously Inspired Girls To Join STEM Transitions Because She Didn't Like Her "Long Curls", "Squeaky Voice", Or "Wearing A Dress" (97 points, 79 comments)
14. 1022 points, 9 submissions: LittleOwl12
    
    1. "Because not everybody has a pink pussy......" (135 points, 31 comments)
    2. How come only feminism has to be intersectional? (129 points, 42 comments)
    3. The "passing" argument. (128 points, 219 comments)
    4. When your men shock you (128 points, 53 comments)
    5. No, Tampax, this is not a good idea. Please. No. (108 points, 192 comments)
    6. Nazis are running people over in Virginia but my FB is all about TERFs. (104 points, 35 comments)
    7. Well maybe you DON'T understand lesbians then. (102 points, 52 comments)
    8. Thoughts on tomboys and MTT envy (99 points, 19 comments)
    9. "Where Are The Feminists On This? HUNH? HUNH?" (89 points, 37 comments)
15. 1022 points, 8 submissions: BigEarthBear
    
    1. I am Frustrated on the brink of tears and I need to vent. LESBIAN ERASURE IS FREAKING REAL YOU TRANS F**k.... good god. (187 points, 92 comments)
    2. Rya on HIS gender identity. He talked with total clarity and I am not misgendering him. (136 points, 59 comments)
    3. Our sexual orientation is not a "preference" (126 points, 24 comments)
    4. "Two Holes" (123 points, 73 comments)
    5. I am utterly disgusted with social media. (123 points, 50 comments)
    6. Just read E-Mails that have me really upset. Trans Activists are crap ally's (120 points, 37 comments)
    7. Transgender Activists and their Anti-Womyn Cis Homophobia (116 points, 59 comments)
    8. Gender Pronoun Rant (91 points, 67 comments)
16. 1015 points, 8 submissions: cherieblosum
    
    1. Gender and sexuality rant (199 points, 73 comments)
    2. "Vagina Monologues" at my alma mater (a women's college) (162 points, 72 comments)
    3. This ad I saw on Facebook recruiting for a focus group... (140 points, 75 comments)
    4. My date with a self proclaimed "male feminist" (108 points, 160 comments)
    5. Study finds female college graduates newly on the job market are punished for having good grades (106 points, 27 comments)
    6. Hypocrisy in psychiatry regarding "gender dysphoria" (103 points, 37 comments)
    7. We're being brigaded (102 points, 164 comments)
    8. Girl's bf excuses himself in the middle of a family gathering to watch porn and masturbate. Family accidentally catches him. Porn sick redditors come to his rescue. (95 points, 54 comments)
17. 1013 points, 9 submissions: gender_is_oppression
    
    1. Why GenderCritical Needs to Exist (145 points, 58 comments)
    2. If you use the word b*tch when criticizing a woman, I don't trust you. (131 points, 114 comments)
    3. Prostitution is not a job. The inside of a woman’s body is not a workplace | Julie Bindel (130 points, 20 comments)
    4. The future is...gender stereotypes and commercialized rape. How inspiring. (130 points, 77 comments)
    5. "Angel, now 26, is focused on using her voice to help end child marriage - and inspire those women still trapped in marriages to leave." (102 points, 5 comments)
    6. "The only thing that is different between biological women and us is the ability to reproduce." (97 points, 35 comments)
    7. If transwomen have never had male privilege, then systemic sexism is a lie. (93 points, 18 comments)
    8. The irony of straight women identifying as nonbinary to be edgy... (93 points, 35 comments)
    9. "I bind because it makes me feel safer when I'm outside." (92 points, 71 comments)
18. 939 points, 8 submissions: throwaway949508
    
    1. Why is legality the bar for the majority of men? (163 points, 124 comments)
    2. (Tumblr Post) "If you scooped my brain out of my head and filled my skull with foam packing peanuts, the brainless husk of my dead body would still be female." (143 points, 36 comments)
    3. Misogyny, male supremacy, and porn create serial killers and mass murderers. But why isn't this acknowledged? (118 points, 18 comments)
    4. AskWomen's Inclusivity Rule is an eyeroll (112 points, 38 comments)
    5. Neutral Politics asks if prostitution should be criminalized, legalized, or decriminalized in the West. Some male commenters fear that men will kill themselves without a disposable lower female caste to sexually exploit, stating "this isn't just about women's rights, it's about human survival". (110 points, 75 comments)
    6. Seattle’s new tiny house village for the homeless — women only (102 points, 52 comments)
    7. In 2013 Redskins Cheerleaders had their passports taken, were pressured to pose for a nude photo shoot, and then 9 of which were forced to be escorts for the night. (99 points, 17 comments)
    8. Banned from AskFeminists and muted for 72 hours. (92 points, 51 comments)
19. 931 points, 7 submissions: Carthimundia
    
    1. Apparently I'm trans because I don't have gendered thoughts. (197 points, 115 comments)
    2. A conversation with a trans-activist male friend (141 points, 59 comments)
    3. A top academic philosophy blogs asks "why aren't more philosophers discussing the philosophical issues raised by the claim of transgender women to be women"? (139 points, 21 comments)
    4. Charles Clymer, "male feminist", now Charlotte Clymer. Some thoughts. (132 points, 57 comments)
    5. UK talk radio: Lily Madigan hopelessly out of depth debating gender self-ID (117 points, 53 comments)
    6. In the Guardian today- man proudly describes how he likes wearing women’s underwear and freaking out sales staff (111 points, 45 comments)
    7. Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon, and liberal feminism:I just had a chilling thought (94 points, 100 comments)
20. 867 points, 7 submissions: trw365
    
    1. Irish Times exit poll projects Ireland has voted by landslide to repeal Eighth Amendment (199 points, 42 comments)
    2. Trans prisoner on hunger strike for straighteners but the press omit what they were actually sentenced for (139 points, 46 comments)
    3. Guardian article discussing TERF as a means to silence debate (135 points, 27 comments)
    4. Unfortunate health update from Magdalen Berns (110 points, 34 comments)
    5. Porn Actors Leigh Raven and Riley Nixon Allege Abuse, Violence, and Boundary Violation on Set (103 points, 66 comments)
    6. The Times: Terrified patient treated like ‘transphobic bigot' (91 points, 35 comments)
    7. Male students in Oxford stage dirty protest over losing their urinals as toliets were turned gender neutral (90 points, 48 comments)
21. 829 points, 8 submissions: hardcarrytin
    
    1. Wow, this sub is really growing. (117 points, 55 comments)
    2. "Everything is sexual harassment nowadays!" (115 points, 39 comments)
    3. Men are rarely accused of provoking women. (106 points, 28 comments)
    4. Does anyone else hate social media? (104 points, 64 comments)
    5. Why is it that when it comes to equality, men are the default? (101 points, 33 comments)
    6. Let's spread the story of Junko Furuta (100 points, 53 comments)
    7. "Does that mean I can hit women now?" (93 points, 95 comments)
    8. "Why aren't you begging?" (93 points, 43 comments)
22. 818 points, 7 submissions: InstantCoffee_
    
    1. Just a reminder to all lesbians here (181 points, 43 comments)
    2. I got called a man hater today by my LibFem classmate (131 points, 76 comments)
    3. A theory on why men only care about a woman if she is someones daughter, mother or sister but not someone (106 points, 46 comments)
    4. I Chose Radical Feminism Over My Porn Using Boyfriend (105 points, 45 comments)
    5. I just realised this about porn... (104 points, 62 comments)
    6. Stormé DeLarverie, the butch lesbian who started the Stonewall Revolution (100 points, 5 comments)
    7. To the anonymous sister who told me about radical feminism one year ago (91 points, 7 comments)
23. 770 points, 6 submissions: NPerez99
    
    1. "Rose McGowan deserves our support. It is the man who verbally attacked her who should be condemned. If you can't see this as an overt attempt to derail the women's movement you are blind." Meghan Murphy (240 points, 51 comments)
    2. "Ginuwine Refused To Kiss A Trans Woman On Live TV And Now The Internet Is At War" (Celeb gossip, I guess this is the hill trans activism will die on) (115 points, 76 comments)
    3. Miranda Yardley in the Sun: Gender-neutral changing rooms aren't safe — they just appease the trans lobby (114 points, 17 comments)
    4. @Shethinx Instagram account tries to rename women into menstruators gets pushback from a 12 year old (107 points, 47 comments)
    5. Everyday Feminism tries to push the Riley's "your dating prefs are prejudice" again, only to be met with a wall of angry comments from men & women. <3 (100 points, 52 comments)
    6. PYNK - (I couldn't wait until Friday to share) (94 points, 70 comments)
24. 744 points, 5 submissions: notthistimebuddy
    
    1. Freedom for everyone but women (200 points, 93 comments)
    2. Men don’t feel like women (199 points, 56 comments)
    3. Men are entitled pricks because media makes women look more desperate than we are (138 points, 62 comments)
    4. Men have convinced society that man brain makes them promiscuous (105 points, 114 comments)
    5. man shows up to women only pool looking exactly like a man but claiming to be a woman, was asked to leave. Naturally trans rage storm proceeds. (102 points, 51 comments)
25. 730 points, 4 submissions: Oneforgh0st
    
    1. Men are more angered by women being obnoxious than men being violent (248 points, 83 comments)
    2. Apparently it's misandry to acknowledge that 98% of mass shooters are male (200 points, 109 comments)
    3. In another women's sub, a male rape victim's post is favored over the plethora of those made by women... (148 points, 64 comments)
    4. Bitter men on women's subs: why? (134 points, 135 comments)

Top Commenters

1. Black_Phillipa (11811 points, 382 comments)
2. Carthimundia (8950 points, 336 comments)
3. BoozeBabe (8296 points, 339 comments)
4. heidischallenge (8129 points, 412 comments)
5. 4eyedPurplePPLeater (8012 points, 507 comments)
6. TossingLobster (7981 points, 209 comments)
7. totalrando9 (7962 points, 379 comments)
8. Hiyoheythere (7950 points, 261 comments)
9. afistfulofyen (7934 points, 421 comments)
10. angrytardis (7903 points, 360 comments)
11. Caranda23 (7535 points, 423 comments)
12. girl_undone (7284 points, 340 comments)
13. vulvapeople (6906 points, 333 comments)
14. eternallyfemale (6395 points, 328 comments)
15. DimDroog (6014 points, 311 comments)
16. hardy_and_free (5824 points, 347 comments)
17. notthistimebuddy (5820 points, 193 comments)
18. TruExcellentRadFem (5692 points, 197 comments)
19. BigEarthBear (5327 points, 306 comments)
20. cherieblosum (5282 points, 160 comments)
21. Ergative_Absolutive (5265 points, 157 comments)
22. MossWolf (5229 points, 235 comments)
23. yishengqingwa666 (5185 points, 464 comments)
24. susannunes (5058 points, 309 comments)
25. Dahna_Mahna (4940 points, 301 comments)

Top Submissions

1. A transgender four year old is like a vegan cat... by gendercriticalradfem (574 points, 171 comments)
2. India Rules Sex With a Child Bride Is Always Rape in a Massive Win for Girls’ Rights by sharky024 (495 points, 26 comments)
3. On the state of feminism in 2018 by scienceisarealthing (477 points, 30 comments)
4. Someone on FB shared this, 200+ comments tearing her to shreds 🤷🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️ by wrapunzel (448 points, 46 comments)
5. Janelle Monáe labelled problematic for daring to spread positivity about vaginas by scienceisarealthing (404 points, 89 comments)
6. A former stripper on how liberal/ leftist men want "enthusiastic consent" by scienceisarealthing (401 points, 88 comments)
7. The Onion dishing out some radical feminism 101! by scienceisarealthing (400 points, 19 comments)
8. "When I hear how 'sex work is women's rights,' that's pimp shit." by scienceisarealthing (390 points, 117 comments)
9. Attending a birth this morning has cemented my radical feminism forever. by furious_doog (366 points, 41 comments)
10. Sex industry survivor Rachel Moran destroys libfem hypocrisy by scienceisarealthing (363 points, 95 comments)

Top Comments

1. 389 points: glazedhamster's comment in I knew we'd get a story like this soon -> "Why This Trans Woman Can't Identify With The Handmaid's Tale" -- The Advocate
2. 295 points: jessieware91's comment in Transwoman feels "less valid" after seeing women posting #metoo on social media
3. 292 points: iheartmanhating's comment in So, the pussy hats are violent & offensive, but a penis hat at the Women's March isn't? 🤔
4. 265 points: jetpackbluess's comment in Peak Trans VI! Tell your story here
5. 255 points: FatGraceJones's comment in Janelle Monáe labelled problematic for daring to spread positivity about vaginas
6. 251 points: Ergative_Absolutive's comment in Pornhub today. Yikes
7. 238 points: Ergative_Absolutive's comment in Libfems who argue "sex work" is a job like any other are shocked and outraged when columnist takes this idea to its logical conclusion
8. 235 points: RealMapelFlavour's comment in So, the pussy hats are violent & offensive, but a penis hat at the Women's March isn't? 🤔
9. 235 points: glazedhamster's comment in Dude wonders why he gets sexually excited about dressing up as a woman even though it's totes not a sexual thing.
10. 229 points: Black_Phillipa's comment in When they try to deny that their idea of "being a woman" is just them perpetuating oppressive gender roles, remember this: 336 upvotes. They're so fucking transparent.

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