This relates to the BBC article [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66596790] which states “the UK should pay $24tn (£18.8tn) for its slavery involvement in 14 countries”.
The UK abolished slavery in 1833. That’s 190 years ago. So nobody alive today has a slave, and nobody alive today was a slave.
Dividing £18tn by the number of UK taxpayers (31.6m) gives £569 each. Why do I, who have never owned a slave, have to give £569 to someone who similarly is not a slave?
When I’ve paid my £569 is that the end of the matter forever or will it just open the floodgates of other similar claims?
Isn’t this just a country that isn’t doing too well, looking at the UK doing reasonably well (cost of living crisis excluded of course), and saying “oh there’s this historical thing that affects nobody alive today but you still have to give us trillions of Sterling”?
Shouldn’t payment of reparations be limited to those who still benefit from the slave trade today, and paid to those who still suffer from it?
(Please don’t flame me. This is NSQ. I genuinely don’t know why this is something I should have to pay. I agree slavery is terrible and condemn it in all its forms, and we were right to abolish it.)
We (the UK) have to be honest about how it is we come to be a member of a G7 country. It didn’t come about in the last 20 years, it came about because we were the leading world power between the Napoleonic Wars and the start of the 2nd world war. During that time slavery was legal, then made illegal but at the same time we colonised other countries, keeping their populations in conditions not much better than slavery.
When you include the Industrial Revolution and what some people say was our own ‘internal’ psuedo-slavery of the working classes, the UK became massively wealthy and it’s a foundation and status that we still have today.
This wealth via exploitation and slavery had the effect of not only making us a rich nation but the countries we raided and colonised, very very poor. That’s a foundation and status they still have today.
I don’t know what the answer is, but we can’t pretend it’s a simple as ‘this happened a long time ago and therefore doesn’t count’.