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There is no greater beneficiary of ‘evil colonialism’ and British Empire than the local Woke tea shop.
That doesn’t stop their painful virtue signalling clogging up my inbox with emails brandishing nauseating titles such as, ‘Celebrate diversity in your own way!’ followed by helpful advice like, ‘For you, it might be by educating yourself to do your best as an anti-racism ally.’
Other great titles include, ‘A sip in the right direction for sustainability!’ and, ‘Pour a fair share for Global Diversity Awareness Month!’ which promises to discuss the ‘significance of equity, not just equality’.
Or maybe feminism is more your thing? ‘Side by side, hand in hand, and shoulder to shoulder, let’s unite and break the bias this International Women’s Day.’
What I actually want is … tea, not a lecture from the privileged class.
Maybe I’m doing this all wrong. Instead of worrying about the alarming cost of the tea, I should be bowing down in reverence that the company is a Certified B Corporation which means it ‘meets the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance’ to ‘build a more inclusive and sustainable economy’.
B Corp was ‘developed by B Lab and the United Nations Global Compact’ and their ‘SDG Action Manager is a free self-assessment that helps businesses understand their contribution toward facilitating the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and plan for improvements’.
As their cult-ish mission video explains, our current economic systems are all about:
‘Me over we; now over the future; inequity over justice; profits over people and planet; leading to this [insert picture of starvation and general apocalypse-y things]. All of which are negative impacts of our current economic system, but it doesn’t have to be this way.’
I guess this is the sneaky new way of championing the collectivist cause with a social media-friendly packaging. My favourite part is where it encourages us to abandon ‘individualism’ in favour of ‘interdependence’. No thanks. I quite like being an ‘individual’ and have never fancied myself as a communist shovel, digging through the gravel in some feel-good gulag.
At least B Corp is honest, making it clear that they are all about co-opting businesses to drive policy change inside governments. Which is fine, but I’d rather my cup of tea didn’t come with a political opinion.
What ‘green’ outfits like B Corp are really doing is microchipping businesses, just like you’d do to your pet as a way of confirming ownership. Then they enrol their brand new pack of mutts on a training program – sit, stand, roll over, give money to our favourite things – all with little ‘treats’ to keep companies playing along with what is effectively glorified form-filling.
This particular tea shop ‘aspires to make diversity and sustainability verbs’, praising the B Corp accreditation and manifesto as a way to ‘make a difference and unite the world for good’. They’re also leading the way on Australia’s path to reconciliation with a ‘Reconciliation Action Plan’ that – I’m not making this up – ‘[is] committed to creating a culturally safe environment for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people’ and ‘our manifesto encourages all flavours and tastes; it also creates a world in which tea makes us all understood’.
…they know they sell tea, right?
It’s a shame that the quality of their shop has taken a nosedive in the last three years. I’ve spent thousands and thousands buying tea-related items from them, but now that they’re spending all their effort on ‘saving the planet’ rather than making great teapots, well, I’ve switched to coffee.
The one thing that actually saves the planet and secures real wages for people in the third-world is a good product, efficient business model, and company that focuses on what they’re selling rather than preaching a manifesto drafted by an axis of global socialists.
Possibly the most disturbing part of their publicly available assessment is something that the Australian government wants all businesses to do – rank their company via the ‘diversity’ of their workforce. Yes, we are quite literally handing out gold stars based on how many different-looking races you’ve managed to collect inside the corporate structure. It is ‘trendy’ and ‘virtuous’ to break down your employees by their gender (male, non-binary, female), ethnicity (they proudly display graphs, reducing human worth to a Bunnings paint swatch), age, disability, and languages spoken.
We follow this up with their stunning collection of available ‘diversity and inclusion badges’ to ‘uplift all the voices of our team’. These include ‘LGBTQ+ Progress Flag, Pronouns, Black Lives Matter, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander badges’. It does make me wonder what would happen to a staff member who walked in wearing a ‘straight, Apache-Helicopter-pronoun, White Lives Matter, Colonial Descent’ badge. Would diversity still be their strength, or is this the wrong kind of diversity – and if so, does that mean the company is placing a value ranking onto people’s race, age, and sexual preference? That used to be called discrimination with a dash of racial supremacy.
If they actually manage to sell any tea after all of that, their evil carbon emissions are offset by funding wind and renewable energy programs, helping to make our power bills that bit more expensive.
The one thing I know for sure after reading all of this is that I don’t want any more of their tea.
It makes me wonder how much of this ‘look how virtuous we are!’ is cover for the crippling guilt they feel about being a company whose existence is owed to the British Empire and their cultivation of the tea economy.
And not only the Empire, but specifically the dreaded East India Company.
Tea houses in the West would not be here if it had not been for the rather nasty events of 1826 when the British East India Company signed the Yandaboo Treaty with the Kingdom of Ava and began the large-scale production of tea in Assam. It ended a period of violence and financial turmoil caused by the first Anglo-Burmese war. The later importation of Chinese tea plants with the express purpose of creating a thriving tea economy for India turned tea into one of the most valuable consumable commodities in history. To this day, it remains a vital part of India’s domestic and international agricultural resources.
Ceylon Tea (Sri Lankan tea) is a 200-year success story when, in 1824, the British brought tea to Ceylon from China. At first the tea plants were intended as decorative, but from 1839 onwards, further experimentation with tea from Assam and Calcutta arrived via the East India Company. Eventually, Scotsman James Taylor set up the first proper tea factory in 1872. Sri Lankan tea is a story of capitalist success that created an enduring source of employment and international trade.
It was tea founded in India and Sri Lanka by the British Empire that cemented its popularity in the West – with Chinese teas gradually normalised much later. The British may not have invented tea, but they proved that a profit-driven business model could re-shape nations, creating robust economies.
The one thing that didn’t help the story of tea was Net Zero. Sri Lanka – the former fourth largest tea producer in the world – is currently crippled and on the verge of collapse after their Woke government followed the advice of the United Nations and their so-called ‘goals’.
In trying to be ‘sustainable’, then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa banned normal fertiliser, forcing farmers to adopt organic alternatives which created an immediate 20 per cent fall in output. This translated into 27 per cent of the country’s workforce (from tea and other agricultural crops) being sent into ‘acute poverty and desperation’. Rajapaksa was known as a great champion for arguing that leaders need to ‘implement policies without arguing about the law’.
Sri Lanka’s tea industry is in ruins running at half its former production rate while 70 per cent of its workforce faces severe hardship. Australian tea shops have had to quietly replace Sri Lankan tea with Chinese and Indian alternatives. No, they don’t publicise that their missing teas were killed off by ‘UN climate goals’.
How’s that for sustainability!
I wonder why my tea shop hasn’t sent an email celebrating that bitter detail of their ideology…
Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.
Source: https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/the-politics-of-tea/
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