A couple of days ago I received a letter headed with a large, coloured logo ‘REPAIR’, giving a time and place for a meeting at Westminster. At first glance I thought it was advertising one of those sessions where you can take along something broken and get it fixed -Just like the excellent group that meets regularly at the Avonway Community Centre in Fordingbridge. On closer inspection however, it turned out to be a meeting to discuss the demand for reparations to be paid by the United Kingdom to Caribbean nations for our part in the Slave Trade.
This was the same agenda about which the Prime Minister was ambushed at the Commonwealth summit in Samoa last October.
That the slave trade was a despicable business is uncontested. Equally, that the UK enterprises and individuals participated in it and profited from it, is also uncontested.
Nevertheless, it was Britain that led the way by abolishing the Slave trade in 1807, and slavery throughout the Empire in 1833. We used our naval power to impose our own abolition of the trade on the rest of the World: 13% of the Royal Navy’s manpower was assigned to the West Africa Anti-Slavery Command. Historians have called that endeavour “the most expensive example of moral action”
It is wholly impractical to try to undo the wrongs over so many generations.
The demand to do so, is based on the assumption that both individuals and nations still suffer from the legacy of the Slave Trade. Comparisons however, between per capita incomes in the Caribbean and West Africa simply do not bear this out.
Leading the charge for reparations is our own Church of England, which has launched its own ‘Spire Project’ to pay initial grants for £100 million, with an aspiration eventually to reach £1 Billion. This is against a background of parishes for which clergy cannot be afforded, and where the taxpayer is being asked to subsidise repairs to church buildings.
The premise on which the project is founded, is that Queen Anne’s Bounty (the amount given in 1703 to pay for parish ministry) was funded by investments in slaver enterprises. This is false: the Bounty was funded by investments in annuities and the profits paid were afforded from Government tax revenues.
Of course, individual churchmen were involved in slavery. We regard this now as horrifying, but at the time it was commonplace. Slavery was universal, even freed slaves owned slaves.
The Church’s position does not take account of the fact that it was the Church itself, together with individual churchmen, that led the great campaign to abolish slavery and who subsequently expended blood and treasure in the effort to supress it.
Why should we be overly concerned by the Church misappropriating funds properly intended to fund its own parish ministry?
The reality is that this is the leading initiative in a much wider endeavour designed to put similar pressure on other institutions and ultimately on all of us as taxpayers. The opening demand for which is the mind-boggling sum of £15-£18 Trillion.
Rishi Sunak, when Prime Minister, made it clear that UK will not contemplate paying reparations.
We will have to see if the present Labour Government will stand firm. Reading the runes, it’s not reassuring.