On October 8th a debate took place in the House of Lords called ‘Reckoning with History: A Critical Discussion on the Reparations Debate‘. The event tapped into an area that is becoming increasingly politicised along cultural lines. Cultural politics straddle party-political lines, as attested by the All Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations (APPG-AR). A year ago, the Guardian reported on the group and its aim to take “a very distinct and clear call for reparative justice” and its inaugural conference that was to bring together “representatives from the Scottish National Party, Green Party and Labour Party”. It is notable that Conservative MPs are thin on the ground in this group, and it seems unlikely it will ever include any Reform MPs. However, the issues of reparations and repatriations are pulling every party, every institution and every person in Britain into the vortex of often highly politicised and ideologically based discussions.
What stood out about ‘Reckoning with History’, organised by The Equiano Project, was the attempt to present a truly diverse range of views on the subject. I think the project succeeded rather well in that regard. The discussion was sufficiently wide-ranging to highlight the differences between the speakers’ positions. And what the speakers didn’t cover was covered by the audience members. Report of the discussion is available from the Equiano Project.
One of the major disagreements was to do with the data and the context of specific cases. This brought to the fore the fact that the discussion about reparations far too often veers off into one-size-fits-all solutions. When talking about reparations, too often a case is referenced in one county and the findings applied across the board to other countries straddling the Caribbean and Africa. In addition, the reparations argument relied on sweeping claims. For example:
- That the Trans-Atlantic slave trade system devastated Africa and the Caribbean.
- That it is a continuing contributing factor to the disparities for Caribbean people in the Caribbean and in the U.K.
- That while the evidence of the disadvantage is “difficult to pinpoint”, it is “reasonable to assume because no assets [of the slaves] passed down the generations”.
- That Britain and Western Europe developed because of colonialism.
- That the developmental aid, reparations, repatriations and mitigating climate change are connected remedies for the alleged historical moral injustice.
- That reparations are in the U.K.’s national interest because it will shore up our soft power to counter the influence of China.
Some of this was challenged from the Caribbean perspective that emphasised local culpability and the propensity to blame Britain when things are not going well. Others questioned whether the claims of disparities could be directly attributed to the claimed causes. After all, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and British colonialism happened some generations ago. The related question was: “Is it fair for us, U.K. taxpayers, to pay?” For many this might be the crux of the issue – is there concrete, measurable, uncontested proof of disparities traceable to British slavery, the slave trade and colonialism? The question of fairness rests on the existence of such proof. Unfortunately, there isn’t such proof, and that much was evident from the discussion. The claim that the impact is “reasonable to assume” relies on far too many assumptions. Assumptions are not proofs, and it would make a highly contested and unsound practice for any government to base transfer of funds and property on the basis of untested assumptions. After all, one might claim that a Yeti exists because many people claim they have seen it; that the Yeti will become extinct if the ice in the Himalayas melts any further; that we must stop the ice melting because the Yeti will die. There might be other reasons for trying to stop the ice melting in the Himalayas, but if the claim is that the Yeti will die, should we not first have the proof that it exists before we spend billions trying to save it? In the case of reparations and repatriations, there are far too many studies funded by activist organisations that are accepted without anyone scrutinising the conflicts of interest and the basis for the claims. Before plunging into bankrupting Britain to the tune of over £18 trillion – the amount the UN says Britain owes to descendants of former slaves – it might be worth seeing if the Yeti of reparations actually exists.
One of the most interesting discussions was around the moral justice question and moralising. And, of course, the case of the Benin bronzes and their return to the Oba of Benin came up. An audience member asked whether it was fair to return these objects to the beneficiaries of the Nigerian slave trade. Someone pointed out that Benin traded slaves too. While historically accurate, this somewhat missed the point. Following the argument about the soft power earlier, if Britain is to use reparations as soft power and enforce the moral rightness of reparations for past slave trading, then in effect it asks others to follow suit and atone for their slave trading.
It was rather unsurprising to hear the claim that the Benin objects were stolen and that giving them back is a matter of justice. I’m writing a thesis on this subject, but I’ll forego delving into this claim here. What was interesting about this part of the discussion was the point about conflating moral justice with economic improvement of certain groups. As the person pointed out, post-WWII reparations were about moral justice whereas today reparations appear to be about addressing economic inequality. The question was, if it is about economic inequality then should we still think of them as reparations?
Several questions picked up on the difference between on the one hand the past, justice, grievances and victimhood, and on the other the future, freedom, equality, agency and resilience. The overwhelming sentiment was about focusing on the latter and moving away from reinforcing wounds and incentivising perpetual grievances, especially given the difficulties in identifying the victims today. As Robert Tombs of History Reclaimed said, for any reparation claim to stand, there ought to be a perpetrator, an ill-gotten gain and a victim. Citing the Church of England case, he pointed out that the proposed CofE reparations would go “to black fund managers, social entrepreneurs and historians” and that while as a historian he welcomes the latter, these “are not generally thought of as the principal victims”.
While the discussion was rich and complex, the crux appears in the perception of who the victims are and what evidence there is to support their claims. For the proponents of reparations, the Caribbean and Africa form a Pan-African victim of the white Western slave trade, colonisation and oppression, with the emphasis on the moral injustice of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the suffering of the estimated 12.5 million human beings. For others, the context of slave trading is less narrow, the contemporary issues are more pressing and the empowering of people to achieve their best irrespective of their ancestral history takes precedence.
The arguments and questions voiced at ‘Reckoning with History’ will be stated and restated over and over – this discussion is not likely to go away during the Labour’s term at the very least. The Don’t Divide Us representative hit the nail on the head by voicing a concern that what reparations appear to create is the moral framework of redistribution but at the expense of undermining the framework of equality. The questions the discussion left open are whether reparations and discussions about reparations can make positive progress towards a resolution of perceived grievances without shattering the framework of equality, without destroying the principle of fairness, without denying agency, and without negatively affecting the future by demonising the past.
Olga Gillies is Finishing a PhD thesis in Cultural Politics at the University of Buckingham.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Reparations are spoils of war, nothing else. In any war, all involved parties invariably believe their case is just. After a war has ended, those who won it will usually plunder the others to some degree. There’s no “moral justice” involved here, just people taking away stuff from other people by force who cannot help that.
Or maybe this is about “moral justice”, then, unfortunately, you’ll have to accept that your own behaviour falls far short of moral standards in a great many respects and hence, that you’ll also have to pay through the nose for the alleged misdeeds of your ancestors.
That’s your call to make.
Some countries (generally the same ones as have been historically) will always be less rich than others. The differences will probably remain more or less at the same level as they are now. I live in a rich country (England). I don’t want my country’s riches given to other countries. Call me a selfish bastard.
Call me a selfish bastard.
These people are living on very fertile land with a congenial climate the Spaniards originally conquered from the natives they helpfully then all but exterminated and England then conquered from Spain before it became a present for the people presently ruling these islands. They’ve also been recipients of so-called foreign aid ever since.
There are certainly some selfish bastards here.
Did anyone discuss:
a) That Western civilisation is the only great civilisation that put together a successful campaign for the abolition of slavery? And why that should be.
b) Why these demands for “reparations” (i.e. attempts at organised thefts) are only ever made of contemporary white people who have never been slave-holders?
c) Why are no demands for reparations ever made, for example, of Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and the Africans themselves?
d) That the Arabs, Persians, Ottomans, Chinese, Indians, etc. etc. etc. all had slavery but didn’t start the Industrial Revolution?
e) Why slavery was legal everywhere until wicked whitie abolished it?
f) Why the slavery that brown-skinned people were subject to supposedly affects their descendants today, but that the slavery white-skinned people were subject to definitely doesn’t affect their descendants today?
g) Given the above, are these demands simply an expression of anti-whitism?
This is no more anti-whitism than people pestering others for spare change is anti-working-people-ism. This is people who want money going to other people they believe to both have more money than they need and be prone to spending it rashly to make up some random bullshit to make them part with some of it.
The reason why the cover story makes no sense is because it was never meant to make any.
NB: I understand and agree with your reasoning. I just think it’s a waste to time to argue with these people.
We’ve hardly got a patriotic Foreign Secretary, there’s footage on Youtube of him demanding reparations. And there was me thinking MPs are meant to put the interests of British people first.
Lammy probably plans to make history as the first British foreign secretray who was openly black after coming out as such.
:->
£18 trillion – the amount the UN says Britain owes to descendants of former slaves
If this meets with any reaction beyond immediately and unequivocally telling the people making such demands where they’re free to stick them, you (author of this article and similarly disposed people) deserve nothing better than being asset stripped until your children have to immigrate illegally into Jamaica to escape starvation at home.
Are slave reparations just an excuse to extract money? Well, what else?
Any money extracted in this way will be used to fund the lavish lifestyle of corrupt political leaders.
But if the idea is to be taken seriously, why stop at the Caribbean slave trade? Should the Ottoman Empire pay reparations for their slave trade? How about Mongolia for Genghis Khan? Or the Croatian government for deporting my great grandfather after WWI? (Long story but true…)
There was no Croatian government after WWI. These parts of what used to be the Habsburg territories collectively called Austria went to a newly created Kingdom of the Southern Slavs (Yugoslavia), IOW, became spoils of war for Serbia. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the so entente-cordially self-determinated non-Serbian peoples threw off the Serbian yoke in a serious of uprisings and civil wars (minus a brief interlude during WWII).
You are right but as my great grandfather was deported from Zagreb and the Yugoslav state no longer exists, I could only claim reparations from Croatia.
But don’t worry, I bear no grudges.
Speaking of reparations, decolonisation, etc…
The current colonial Black occupation of the Caribbean island should decamp back to Africa and return the islands to the descendants of the original native inhabitants many of whom fled to the South American mainland when the Europeans pitched up.
The Message of the West must be clear and simple:
“Dear Third World,
We owe you NOTHING.
Stop whining and get over it.”
Why is it we only ever hear about the Atlantic slave trade, horrific as it was, but nothing about the trade into the Indian ocean and Arabia possibly even more horrific.
And who actually enslaved these unfortunate souls?
If it wasn’t for the slave trade to service sugar cane plantations, the majority of the population of the Caribbean would still be in Africa and we would be dealing with the Arawak and Taino people, the indigenous population. They might have a stronger claim to the land than the current crop of Johnny-come-latelies.
I agree that all descendants of slaves should be offered reparations of one-way tickets to the African country of their forefathers and cancellation of their passports to come to the West. I wonder how many volunters there would be?
Off-T.
Happening now. Billy and the rest want to raise, ie steal $7.1 billion from taxpayers in order to fund their kill programs.
Aren’t they lovely?
https://interestofjustice.substack.com/p/gates-foundation-and-wellcome-shill?triedRedirect=true
https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/question-everything-except-that-thing
Here is another bombshell.
Both DS and the Brownstone Institute declining to publish articles questioning the origins of the C1984.
DS seemingly because it’s the “wrong side of the line” (whatever that is) and Brownstone supposedly because it’s a distraction. The distraction argument has some merit, though the counter argument to that is that if “covid” doesn’t really exist then we really ought to know about it.
My understanding of the “questioning the origins” is that the zoonotic vs lab leak debate is a false dichotomy – which implies that C19 wasn’t a novel pathogen/doesn’t exist.
Hope this comment doesn’t disappear!
And I share your views tof but then I have never been convinced of the Scamdemic in any case.
Thanks for the link.
It’s a worthwhile read I believe.
However distasteful to modern thought, slavery was not illegal at the time. So to claim reparations for that period is to try and apply a more recent law retrospectively.
Retrospective laws are generally considered a bad thing because there could be no intent, and therefore no blame, to break a law that didn’t exist.
Nulla poena sine lege¹ has been a fundamental legal principle for a really long time (that’s obviously why it’s in Latin). The problem is that everybody – especially the post-marxist “antifascists” seeking to create their own idea of a just world – knows that it was discarded in favour of “higher moral principles” once, so that the Nuremberg trials and the associated de-nazification of Germany – still very much an ongoing process insofar present-day German lefties are concerned – could take place.
In the opinions of the people who believe the British Empire (and really everything European) was “really just as bad” as the Third Reich, if not even worse because “it lasted longer”, what they refer to by the (badly) invented terms “colonialism/ slavery” really calls for another such exception.
They will obviously quickly find more such exceptional cases if they succeed with this one.
¹ Literally No punishment without law. The meaning is that only what breaks existing laws can rightfully be considered a crime.
We gave them the bloody Caribbean for chrissake.
The average income in Jamaica is 6 times that in Togo, for example. So why would reparations go to the descendants of slaves living in Jamaica?
Neither Liberia nor Haiti immediately appeal, compared with living conditions of American Blacks or those in the Caribbean (other than Haiti.).
How much does the UN want Erdoğan and his mates to cough up for the Ottoman Empire’s slave trade? (Which continued into the C.20th).
Castrating male slaves when they marched to Turkey seems to have reduced the number of “decendants” with hands stuck out.
d. You could argue the opposite. That these countries developed because of colonialism
Perhaps we could offer to transport the descendants of slaves back to the part of Africa they think they originate from?
Oh and if we’re talking about “justice” perhaps we should send a bill to Africa and the Caribbean for their use of all the inventions we’ve gifted them for free since the industrial revolution.
I remember that when Muhamad Ali was in Africa fighting the famous rumble in the jungle boxing match, An African journalist asked him what he thought of Africa, he replied I’m glad I was brought up on America
Talking about slaves. My father was used as a slave on the Burma railroad. He eventually got some compensation (£10,000) not nearly enough in my opinion for 3 1/2 years of beatings and starvation and eventually made it home weighing 6 1/2 stone suffering from berry berry and malaria. The compensation was not paid by the Japanese government but by the British government basically to shut everyone up. He received this money only weeks from his death and was suffering from dementia so he never really knew he’d got it. After he died the compensation was immediately scooped up by the Treasury in inheritance tax! You’ve got to laugh otherwise you’d cry.
How awful— such appalling injustice to your father, after all his brave military service to the nation!
And to top it all off, the Japanese owners of Horizon are still being allowed to profit from the unimaginable suffering they inflicted upon British Postmasters, and are still being given lucrative contracts by the British government. Guess who’s running the systems for the new “Banking Hubs” around the country to replace the former High Street banks? Horizon.