Good Repair?

With the Caricom Reparations Commission visiting London, it genuinely discombobulates some people to learn that Britain had any role in the slave trade except to end it, but in fact our engagement in it lasted longer than the period since abolition has yet managed.

Yet at last year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Keir Starmer refused even to apologise for slavery. Not pay reparations. Britain is never going to pay trillions of dollars, and no court is ever going to make even a paper order for it to do so. Starmer does not understand opening negotiations by asking for far more than you would ever get, in order to get anything at all. So much for his legal background. And so much for a party in hock to the trade unions.

Mention of the unions raises the questions of reparations to whom and from whom. Are the descendants of the Peasants’ Revolt, of the Levellers, and of those who were massacred at Peterloo, to pay the present rulers of Africa and the Caribbean? Certainly not. The slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle. Moreover, large and growing numbers of us are descended both from these Islands’ immemorial working class and from African slaves.

The continuation of slavery in parts of the Commonwealth even today, including in parts of Africa that did not become independent until the second half of the twentieth century, establishes that the British Empire’s suppression of it was largely a legislative statement of aspiration, while the argument that the white working class could not possibly be held responsible for slavery is an observation of the effects of events in the eleventh century, never mind between the sixteenth and the nineteenth. Keep those and many other things in mind as you read the wise words of the great Paul Knaggs, which I myself read in the knowledge of my own family background in Fife and the Lothians, meaning that I may well be descended from slaves on both sides.

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 2023 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 such as Demerara and Mauritius. Ah, Mauritius. The Government’s position on the Chagos Islands was defended in the House of Lords yesterday by Jenny Chapman, whom Starmer gave a peerage, made an Under-Secretary of State, promoted to Minister of State, appointed to the Privy Council, and invited to attend Cabinet, and who, while Starmer’s wife was pregnant, bore him the child who was now supported by Chapman’s Ministerial salary. But I digress.

In 1833, 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 18 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, 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 and fuel bills that went straight out in dividends?