The Middle Kingdom, The Middle Passage

As Keir Starmer said to me, “If the Aborigines don’t like Australia, why don’t they go back to where they came from?” Not really. He has never met me. But we all know that that is what he thinks. I only ever met Sir Peter Ustinov once, but one of the things that he said to me was that what really worried him about Australians was not that they were all descended from convicts, but that some of them must have been descended from warders. The loss of the Empire meant that we had nowhere to which to send a potential British Hitler to live out his days as a minor law and order official. So, as was always inevitable at some point, we have ended up with one of them as Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, the world moves on. Narendra Modi is not in Apia for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, because he is in Kazan for the BRICS Summit, where a resolution is at least approaching even of the dispute between India and China over Arunachal Pradesh, currently in India, and over the Aksai Chin plateau, currently in China. In 2020, that had led to their first fatal confrontation since 1975.

Taiwan lays claim to the lot, including the part of Aksai Chin that is in Tibet, and including the part that is in Xinjiang. As conventionally portrayed, you cannot support both Taiwan and Tibet, or both Taiwan and Xinjiang. Ask them in Taipei, and they would tell you that they were the Republic of China, of which Tibet and Xinjiang were integral parts. As for Taiwanese independence, the United States would never bring on a Third World War by recognising it. Satisfying no one, the present situation will still be in place long after we were all dead.

Defined as the present People’s Republic, “China claims Taiwan” is reversible. Indeed, defining itself as the Republic of China, Taiwan does not claim jurisdiction only over China as it now exists, although it does claim all of that. Rejecting the authority of the present Chinese Government to resolve territorial disputes, it also lays claim to all of Mongolia, as well as to parts of Russia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Myanmar.

While the big boys of BRICS are able to amuse themselves at the fall of Andriy Kistin as Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, its Starmer or its Kamala Harris, for flagrant corruption on a glorious scale, the talk of the dowagers at the CHOGM tea party is apparently of reparations. Those might cause more problems than they solved, but the loan to compensate the slaveholders was so enormous that every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom was still paying it off until 2015, 182 years after it had been taken out. Yes, not until 1833. Not 1807. It was only last year that saw the two hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the British Anti-Slavery Society. The ban on the slave trade in 1807 had done nothing to stamp out slavery itself, and indeed victory over Napoleon had given Britain additional slave colonies.

It was time to open the Bible again. The claim that Scripture did not condemn slavery as such was made by the defenders of that institution, who generally had a pecuniary interest in it. But the idea that everyone thought that for the first eighteen centuries of Christianity’s existence is simply false, and it is very telling that the abolitionists were castigated and mocked specifically for taking the Word of God too seriously. By taking it so, then they were unable to believe that the different “races” were different species with different origins, as was widely believed by the theological conservative-liberal elitists of the day.

The suggestion that until some very late date no one had thought that slavery was unbiblical and un-Christian is bound up with the suggestion that there was no opposition to it in its heyday, but that simultaneously England and then Britain had taken it up purely for the pleasure and honour of stamping it out. In fact, though, we were not even the first country to abolish slavery, since that was Haiti, after the only successful slave revolt in history. We have still not yet been free of it for as long as we practised it. And while it is true that it could never officially exist in the Imperial Motherland because “the air of England was too pure” for it, from where did English Common Law arrive at that conclusion? Out of that thin air itself? Or from Christianity?

The beneficiaries of the slave trade remain at the heart of the British elite. There is no doubt that the monarchy was heavily involved in the slave trade for, it bears repetition, longer than the period from its abolition to the present day. But Starmer has set his face, not only against reparations, which is an argument, but even against apology. The Atlantic slave trade was the foundation of capitalism, and Starmer believes that in turn to be an iron law of nature, simply non-negotiable.

Therefore, rather than give the usual answer about Britain’s having stamped out slavery, Starmer has to say that there had never been anything wrong with it, or at least not when Britain had done it. To say otherwise would be to raise almost endless questions, beginning with why the water of England should be so impure, yet at the same time so expensive. There is a mounting case for the kind of tactics that were employed against the slave trade. What if we all just refused to pay the exorbitant water bills that went straight out in dividends?

And today’s proposal by 30 MPs for a two per cent tax on wealth above £10 million, held as it was by people who invested it at interest rates of four per cent or above and who would therefore not even notice while the rest of us regained £24 billion per year, is one of several proposals for just reparation indeed. The taxation of unearned income at the same rate as earnings, as was the case under Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson, could easily abolish the two-child benefit cap, restore the £20 per week uplift to the Universal Credit two in five claimants of which are in work, and extend that uplift to disability benefits. Merely taxing each of Britain’s 173 billionaires down to one billion pounds per head would raise £1.1 trillion, an entire year’s tax take. And so on.