NO. Britain should NOT pay 'slavery reparations'

Reflections on a debate in Britain - and a decent policy response to it

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One idea that I explore in my new book Suicide of a Nation is ‘suicidal empathy’ - how politicians in the West have become so utterly obsessed with showing empathy and compassion to others they are willing to destroy their own nations along the way.

Words like empathy and tolerance sound noble and virtuous. But as the Canadian psychologist Gad Saad points out, when they are taken to the extreme they can lead people to abandon all reason and rationality.

You see suicidal empathy at work across Western nations today, where politicians routinely prioritise minorities and outsiders at the expense of their own country’s survival. And you see it at work in how some politicians are entertaining another idea that’s been debated in Britain this week - the demand for “slavery reparations”.

This is the idea that Western nations such as Britain - or more accurately their taxpayers - should transfer billions if not trillions of pounds to other countries so as to compensate for their historic involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.

The numbers are unbelievable.

Astonishingly, three years ago, one United Nations judge suggested that despite grappling with one of the worst cost-of-living crises on record the British people should be forced to pay more than £18 trillion in reparations for Britain’s historic link to slavery in 14 countries - a sum the member of the International Court of Justice also said was an “underestimation”. That figure - £18 trillion - is about seven times the size of Britain’s national economy.

And it’s not just Britain.

An earlier report by the Brattle Group likewise suggested that Western states such as Britain, America, Spain, and France should pay £87 trillion to address the harms caused by slavery - demands that are being entertained by some politicians who, driven by suicidal empathy, are far more interested in projecting their own sense of moral righteousness than ensuring the survival of their own nations and people.

Let’s be clear. Demands for slavery reparations are historically illiterate and deeply insulting. They also reflect a blatant cash-grab by often corrupt and failing states that are exploiting the sickness of wokeness and guilt that has taken hold of the West.

They are based on an extremely selective reading of history. Nobody questions the fact that Britain was involved in the slave trade. But what these extreme activists who have been fully indoctrinated in anti-British and anti-Western ideologies ignore is the major role Britain then played in abolishing slavery and enforcing this, too, when so many other nations refused to do so.

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Those demanding reparations say nothing at all about how the Royal Navy seized thousands of slave ships, freed tens of thousands of enslaved people, how countless British sailors lost their lives while tackling slavery, and how British taxpayers in the past - our ancestors - paid enormous sums to support these efforts to eradicate slavery. It’s not mentioned because it complicates and undermines the woke narrative.

Nor, by the way, do they say anything at all about the extensive black-on-black slavery that went on during this time. As historian Nigel Biggar points out, Africans enslaved other Africans for centuries, from the African kingdom of Kongo to Omani Arabs on the East African coast to Fulani Africans in Nigeria. Yet nobody ever mentions this.

What’s also ignored, as historian Rafe Heydel-Mankoo points out, is that while slavery is absolutely abhorrent and should always be condemned it is also true that Britain made enormous positive contributions to many of these nations, including but not limited to: the English language, common law, universities, effective administration, higher rates of growth, medicine, longer life expectancy, policing, and sanitation. As Heydel-Mankoo notes, if these nations were serious and consistent about their desire to ‘decolonise’ their nations then they would remove all these things, too.

Nor do these activists say much about how slavery is still practiced today, including across parts of Africa and Asia. If this really was about ‘tackling injustice’ then why are these activists not spending their time campaigning against what is happening right now in China, the Arab world, and Africa - not what happened generations ago and for which nobody today bears any responsibility? We know why - because it does not involve the increasingly guilt-ridden, self-loathing political class in the West that has become an easy mark for self-interested nations elsewhere in the world.

What we are left with, in short, is an ugly cash-grab. Forcing the hardworking, decent British people to send billions in foreign aid to nations that simultaneously demand trillions more in “slavery reparations” has to be one of the greatest Ponzi schemes of all time. Just look at the numbers.

In recent years, Britain issued …

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