I have no difficulty with the Government compensating those who have been damaged by the British state in recent years. The Horizon scandal and the Tainted Blood scandal being two obvious examples.
I just don’t hold the same view when both victims and perpetrators have been dead for over a century.
Recently I was at a lecture by a clergyman who told us that we all needed to apologise and atone for slavery. I disagreed vociferously on the ground that I had nothing for which to apologise, as I haven’t ever enslaved anyone.
Now some Commonwealth nations are demanding mind-boggling sums from Britain as reparations for the slave trade. They badgered the Prime Minister into abandoning his original stance ‘this is not on the agenda’, to one of ‘opening a discussion’. Such discussions open the door to a slippery slope: The original flat refusal to engage was the correct response and he should have stuck to it .
Many Britons were engaged in the ghastly slave trade and profited mightily from it from about 1650 to well into the 19th Century. Africans and Arabs profited from it too.
Monstrous though slavery is, it had been a universal institution for millennia. Even the Maroons -the escaped slaves in Jamaica- kept their own slaves. Freed slaves in North Carolina owned slaves until the American Civil War in 1861.
Britain abolished 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”
Whilst contemporary UK subjects can’t claim the credit for the action of our forbears in stamping out the trade. Neither should we be asked to pay compensation for being involved in it in the first place.
Some of the Caribbean nations that suffered under the enslaved plantation system have prospered whilst others much less so. It is not the history of slavery that has blighted those that have not prospered, so much as other circumstances, not least weak and corrupt government.
We must not pay up