Forum | Should the British state apologise for slavery? by AnotherJohn

Forum index | Previous Thread | Next thread

Should the British state apologise for slavery? 09:38 - Nov 1 with 1144 views

Andy Burnham, always eager to say something different from Starmer, has said that the UK should apologise to the Caribbean nations for slavery. My own view is that this is a big mistake, both on grounds of what is fair, and because an apology implies an admission of guilt and opens the way for legal claims for financial reparations.

Two commentators who say that no apology is appropriate are Tony Sewell and Nigel Biggar.

Sewell writes:

https://www.thetimes.com/comme

“Britain was the first mover and primary actor in ending the transatlantic slave trade and slavery itself. Incidentally, trans-Sahara and trans-Indian Ocean slave trading went on unabated. So what, many of you may be saying: you stopped a slave trade that you started. I look across the room to many of our west African leaders, who know full well that this awful trade would not have happened without their ancestors selling on their own slaves and war captives. The guilt must run both ways. I have heard it said that Africans and Arabs only indulged in ‘household’ slavery and that the British treated humans worse than animals. There are no degrees of slavery — this was a universal evil.

“Britain passed laws banning slavery across the world and deployed our Royal Navy to fight other European nations who continued with this practice. We held the line until the trade fully ended. Between 1808 and 1860 the West Africa Squadron seized 1,600 slave ships and emancipated 150,000 slaves, while losing more than 1,500 sailors. Historians have described it as the most expensive international humanitarian intervention in modern history.

“The anti-slavery movement became part and parcel of the fabric of British society in the late 18th and 19th centuries. It spread among Quakers and the new evangelical movement, and poor working-class activists like the Chartists, and even upper-class ladies refused to take sugar in protest against the evil trade.

“Those advocating for reparations argue that the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s long-term wealth were fuelled by the income from slavery. In a forthcoming Institute of Economic Affairs paper, Professor Doug Stokes argues, ‘The dynamics of slavery are complex. While it enriched small groups of Britons, it did not enrich the nation. The best evidence from recent work suggests at most a gain of a decade’s worth of income growth per capita, concentrated in places like Lancashire.’

“What seems to disturb many people is that the families of slave traders were compensated for their loss after emancipation while the enslaved got nothing. It is now clear that this payoff was tactical, designed to buy out those interested parties in order to speed up emancipation.

“It is clear to me that ordinary people in the Caribbean realise that the campaign to wrest funds from Britain is driven by their own elite. Young people in Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana are not on the streets burning the British flag and demanding reparations. Nor are they in Lagos, Accra or Delhi. They all ask hard questions of their current leadership, not of a past colonial master.

Biggar puts forward different arguments.

https://www.thetimes.com/comme

However, the argument that Britain should pay recompense for slavery is historically distorted, morally unfair and politically opportunistic. It depends on a cartoonishly simplistic tale of white people exploiting black people.

Did Britain benefit “tremendously”? Not according to one of the most eminent living historians of transatlantic slavery, David Eltis, who reckons its contribution to Britain’s industrial economy was “small” and its contribution to the economy of Liverpool — Britain’s biggest slaving port in 1750 — was “trivial”. The winner of the 2025 Nobel prize in economics, Joel Mokyr, agrees.

Transatlantic slavery was, while gravely unjust, not extraordinary. Difficult though it may be to appreciate, until the early 19th century slavery and slave-trading were practices conducted on every continent by people of every skin colour. Even escaped black slaves in Jamaica in the 1700s and freed slaves in the American South up to the 1860s kept slaves of their own.

Africans and Arabs were involved in African slave-trading and slavery for far longer and on a far larger scale. One estimate calculates that at least 34.5 million enslaved Africans were exported over the Atlantic to the Americas, through the Sahara to the Mediterranean and across the Indian Ocean. Since Arabs and Europeans seldom did the slave-raiding themselves, Africans themselves were responsible for the primary enslavement, including, it is said, the ancestors of President Mahama himself. The British share of the trade was about 9 per cent.

In 1804 it’s reckoned there were 45 million chattel slaves in the world — most of them in Asia — of which those in the British West Indies amounted to 1.7 per cent. In about 1850 the Fulani people deployed up to four million slaves on vast plantations in what is now northern Nigeria. So, at that one time there were more slaves in that one part of Africa than all the 3.26 million the British took across the Atlantic in two and a half centuries.

One report in 1797 has it that up to 1,500 people were sacrificed at royal funerals in Asante. Three centuries later, in the 1860s, Sudan was reckoned to furnish the Arab slave trade — annually — with 35,000 prepubescent African boys, to produce about 3,800 eunuchs. In other words, nearly 90 per cent died in the process of being forcibly castrated with a razor.

The argument in favour of British reparations not only distorts the truth about the past but also refuses to take into account the fact that Britain was the first major power in the history of the world to abolish both slave-trading and slavery, permanently. It then led the world in suppressing the practices in Brazil, throughout Africa and in Australasia. To single out the British — of all peoples — for slavery reparations is outrageously unfair.

So, rather than yield to the politically opportunistic exploitation of misplaced white guilt, the King and his government should publicly lament the inhumanity of worldwide slavery and the fact that some Britons ever played a part in it. Then they should point to Britain’s unequalled and sustained commitment to suppressing slavery all over the world from 1807 onwards, and invite Commonwealth members to collaborate in eradicating modern slavery in states such as Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Sudan and Libya. That would free this week’s meeting to constructively attend to the environmental and educational challenges of the present and not be divisively mired in the past.

[Post edited 1 Nov 9:48]

Should the British state apologise for slavery? on 13:55 - Nov 2 with 211 views

onehunglow

Should the British state apologise for slavery? on 13:15 - Nov 2 by Joesus_Of_Narbereth

Literally every country in the world has committed some kind of atrocity or other over the last few millennia. Not to belittle the slave trade which was obviously awful in every way but it’s just one example of millions where humans have been shitty to other humans and if everyone was obliged to apologise for every bad thing their ancestors did it would never end.

You don’t hear the same calls for Mongolia to get down on their knees and beg for forgiveness for Genghis Khan and his Golden Horde rampaging, raping and pillaging across the largest contiguous empire in history for example.

This phenomenon is mainly driven by Britain hating politicians and ‘comedians’ who on one hand often campaign for an increase in public service spending and welfare whilst unfathomably and simultaneously demand we send trillions of pounds of reperations in the form of tax payers money to far flung countries to absolve us of an imagined injustice that we are all somehow responsible for despite not being alive at the time.

There are some seriously dangerous and deranged people in our political system, it’s infested with them and some of them make it as high as government. We should be absolutely terrified if these morons ever get their hands on the levers of power.

post everyone should read and reflect u;pon
ok Apologise and get it over with
Then it will be over
Or will it?
You're right,it wint.
Reparations . How much and to whom exactly and how would they be utiilised
Africa hasn't a great reputation for handling money and resources as is evidenced by the uber resourced DRC and Congo
if reparations were to be paid ,little would filter down to the people and most to whoever is President at the time

Poll:

Christmas. Enjoyable or not

Should the British state apologise for slavery? on 14:54 - Nov 2 with 171 views

Joesus_Of_Narbereth

Should the British state apologise for slavery? on 13:18 - Nov 2 by ReslovenSwan1
King Charles should apologise. It could be argued that much of his considerable personal wealth came from the profits from slavery. All the expensive furnishings dating back a few hundred years for example

The personal wealth of the sovereign comes almost entirely from land in various duchies. Everything else belongs to the crown which is de facto owned by the government.

Poll:

We all dream of a managerial team of Alan Tates?

Should the British state apologise for slavery? on 18:48 - Nov 2 with 62 views

SullutaCreturned

Should the British state apologise for slavery? on 13:18 - Nov 2 by ReslovenSwan1
King Charles should apologise. It could be argued that much of his considerable personal wealth came from the profits from slavery. All the expensive furnishings dating back a few hundred years for example

Our Royal family were obscenely rich before the transatlantic slave trade. They got that wealth from the people of this country, they took it, they enobled their friends who took some for themselves from our forefathers.

If "our" King (because I abhor monarchy) wants to apologise for something, apologise to every British person for stealing land from the people, for taking their wealth, for subjugating and using us for centuries (where we were little more than slaves ourselves) for keeping us in ignorance, lying to us and living lives of luxury while millions in this country struggled.

Should the British state apologise for slavery? on 18:57 - Nov 2 with 59 views

shingle

Of course not to even consider it is ridiculous.

Should the British state apologise for slavery? on 18:57 - Nov 2 with 59 views

onehunglow

Should the British state apologise for slavery? on 18:48 - Nov 2 by SullutaCreturned

Our monarchy is and always has been utterly detached from gthe real world.
none of them have any ideas of life as tghey live in a bubble; hence the pitiful gesturing by Charles for an umbrella as it was raining .
No British person ever benefited from slavery apart from those in that bubble of perverts.
At the time of the Zenith of our Empire ,conditions in areas that created the wealth were appalling .
These cretins had to the cheek to suggest they too knew suffering like east enders in WW2 as a bomb hit part of Buck House

Poll:

Christmas. Enjoyable or not

Forum index | Previous Thread | Next thread