DARREN LEWIS: 'UK owes it to the Caribbean to face its slave-trade past'

Did you know that you were paying compensation until 2015 to people who kept slaves? Yep, in the era of the Premier League, social media, YouTube and Netflix, a £20million fee established in 1833 – the modern equivalent of £17billion – was sill being paid out by the British government to compensate slave owners for the loss of their human property. Remember that, the next time someone like Tory leader Kemi Badenoch declares nobody alive should pay for something that happened generations ago. We already have. The only people not compensated from the inhuman episode were the slaves, their families that were torn apart and their countries. But the British state has already answered the question of whether the present should or shouldn’t pay for the past. Our own UK Treasury confirmed as much in a now-deleted tweet from 2018. It said: “Millions of you helped end the slave trade through your taxes. Did you know? In 1833, Britain used £20million, 40% of its national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the Empire. “The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015. Which means that living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade.” The backlash against the tweet, for obvious reasons, was so ferocious that it was eventually taken down. But Andy Burnham is right to be open and stand tall on the conversation as a Prime Minister living in the real world. The pushback against him and the whole concept of reparations is mental gymnastics from academics and a section of our commentariat known for intellectual dishonesty. Nobody is asking the British taxpayer to feel guilty for the sins of ancestors from a different world. But Tony Blair expressed regret – he didn’t apologise – in 1997 for the Irish potato famine, which claimed the lives of between 775,000-1.5million people between 1845 and 1852. This, too, is on the British state to address openly and pay for, literally as well as metaphorically. And good on the Caribbean nations for standing together and refusing to be patronised any longer over the issue. This country does love to use the West Indies as props for its pomp and ceremony when Royal Family members roll into town. But Caricom, the Caribbean intergovernmental organisation, has drafted a 10-point plan to address the whole thing at this week’s Commonwealth summit. Enjoy your dinner, your Majesty. For those who either didn’t study their history or who were nor taught it, the idea that Britain ended the slave trade is also nonsense. It overlooks the rebellion of the slaves themselves, from Haiti to the Baptist War in Jamaica. Yes, the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, established in 1808, captured around 1,600 ships and liberated around 150,000 slaves. But do you know what percentage that represents? Less than one in 10 slave ships. Around one in 20 of the three million Africans shipped at the time. And far from being freed, they were forcibly relocated to British colonies to work in forced labour death camps, euphemistically named “apprenticeships”. Nor is the fact some African nations owned slaves too any kind of mic drop. That story absolutely should be told and is openly being addressed. But Britain’s role is there for all to see – from the ships and plantations it built, to the banking and insurance framework it constructed and the laws it wrote enabling Black human beings to be kept as property. Opponents of an apology from the Prime Minister fear it would represent an admission of liability and open up the gateway to a compensation payout of up to £18trillion. Even the Caribbean nations see that kind of figure as fanciful. But that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any compensation at all for a period in our history that left the violated nations economic shells. And frankly, in what world do the aggressors get to tell the victims to simply draw a line under it all because it belongs in the past? The colonisers don’t get to demand it all goes away. Not any more.