The Sunday programme, sometime between 7 am and 8 am apparently. On the subject of reparations for slavery. Guess which side of the we should do this/we should not do this I am?
The Sunday programme, sometime between 7 am and 8 am apparently. On the subject of reparations for slavery. Guess which side of the we should do this/we should not do this I am?
Who should pay reparations? How about the Africans/Arabs who enslaved them?
Can we retrospectively bill India a couple of centuries of management fees?
I’m in favour of reparations for slavery, we spent a lot of money abolishing the slave trade and it’s time the beneficiaries of that paid up.
Starting with Diane Abbott.
@ Steve
Diane Abbott should *not* pay up as slavery in England was abolished a millennium ago, before anyone in Europe enslaved a black African. A few centuries later some rich men brought slaves into England and a judge ruled that they ceased to be slaves on arriving here and any who wished to leave their “master”‘s service were free to do so. [Interestingly some chose to stay with their “masters”].
The vast sums expended on destroying the slave trade did nothing to benefit black Africans in England because they were already free.
Steve
Perhaps the Americans, both North and South, should also send you Brits some cash. It could come out of the money the wicked Africans’d be paying them as compensation for all the convicts they dumped on them.
Of course this might create an awkward precedent for Oz and Siberia?
John77 – Interestingly some chose to stay with their “masters”
Damn right they stayed.
It was alarmingly easy to die in a ditch of destitution in them days, and that was for 90% of the native white population – people who knew where they were and spoke the language and had a theoretical social safety network in family, friends and fellow parishioners.
The old master who gives you food, clothes, and a roof over your head would’ve seemed an attractive option for many a bewildered ex-slave in a foreign land. Not all slave owners were cruel men, or at least they weren’t cruel by the general standards of the time.
Boganboy – I feel sure we owe Australia reparations for Sam Smith.
Poms Gone Wrong.
@ Steve
That is part, albeit only part, of the reason for my use of the word “interestingly” instead of “surprisingly”; many of the black pages could have obtained paid employment as pages to other nouveau-riche “would-be gentry” but chose to stay with their “masters”.
The typical English gentleman (and many of the would-be-gentlemen) treated the black “slaves” far better than the Africans who enslaved them or the traders who bought and sold them, so it was a rational decision.
It’s quite easy really. HMRC should set up a “reparations account” to which those who feel wracked by guilt would be free to contribute.
Any former “slave” who wants reparations could then make an application for funds. It would be up to them to claim an amount.
Awards would be by lottery.
“And tonight’s winner: Rastus watermelon of Brixton who claimed 10 million. Well done, but sorry Rastus, you won’t be getting a bean because there’s fuck all in the account”.
Tim – you might want to mention that slavery was common in Africa. So much so that it’s likely that anyone of African descent had someone who was a slave and someone who was a slave owner among their ancestors. Long before the Europeans joined in the trade. So they probably owe reparations to themselves.
The vast sums expended on destroying the slave trade did nothing to benefit black Africans in England because they were already free.
Yeah. But the Abbottapottamus is descended from the ones who weren’t. So under Steve’s excellent scheme & bearing in mind reparations are judged to be incident on the descendants, she’s righteously on the hook. Have to be a bloody sturdy hook though.
How much of Abbott’s ancestry is slaves liberated from the slavers by the West African Patrol and given land and freedom in the Carribean? The best I’ve managed to track down is back to her ancestors born in the 1850s in Jamaica, so all of them will have been free citizens at that time.
I wonder what the practical difference was for the ex-slave in Britain who became a manservant. He could freely go and work for someone else which would surely limit how badly he might be treated. Presumably he might get Sunday off. He’d get some cash pay, I imagine.
We are discussing, what, several dozen people? A few hundred?
There was a case in the West Country of a young mulatto man, son of a planter and a slave, who inherited heaps from his father and set himself up as a landed gentleman. I suppose his father must have ensured the boy had been educated.
He became a magistrate, an officer in the Yeomanry, and Deputy Lieutenant of the County. So obvs his fellow gentlemen must have thought well of him.
@ dearieme
An excellent example of the variability of humankind: the English father recognised him as a son and brought him up as such, whereas it is alleged that many American slaveowners treated their bastards as slaves.
Steve,
“The old master who gives you food, clothes, and a roof over your head would’ve seemed an attractive option for many a bewildered ex-slave in a foreign land. Not all slave owners were cruel men, or at least they weren’t cruel by the general standards of the time.”
Some old slaves were interviewed in the 1930s and most of them say that they were well treated. And the truth is that if you left what else were you going to do except be a free man doing farm labouring.
People are bad at judging history in context. We’d consider slavery abominable today because we want to go have a gap year in Thailand or work at Google or write a novel. 1840, it was working on farms as a labourer or a skilled person like a blacksmith.
A good slave owner was really no worse than a good squire in England. What made slavery so wrong was that people were not free to leave if the owner was a total bastard.
And of course, no-one makes movies about the better slave owners because that would be boring.
As a slight aside I was reading about the book/film Brooklyn, and how the writer first did historical research, and found that actually, the immigrant groups in New York weren’t all hating each other, and that the Italian guys were all going to Irish dances to try and get Irish wives because they were exotic creatures to them.
In 2018 Ukraine passed a law smashing the rights of local Russian speakers (Belarussian and Yiddish too, but not EU languages). Can’t educate your kids in your local language, watch tv in your local language or have dual language road signs etc.
They justified this partly on the grounds that historically Russia had been awfully bad to Ukrainians which was true. Very much so in the 30s and 40s.
So modern peoples who never did discriminate against Ukies got discriminated against by Ukies who were never discriminated against themselves. This policy is not working out well.
Swap for slavery and the analogy works imv.
It would simplify matters greatly if we only entertained any discussions concerning the 170 odd years of the ‘dark history’ of Britain in the slave trade after we have had discussions on the thousands of years of the dark history of black Africans in the slave trade followed by discussions on the thousands of years of the dark history of arabs/moslems in the slave trade.
Well done, but sorry Rastus, you won’t be getting a bean because there’s fuck all in the account”.
Besides, you’re dead so we couldn’t pay you anyway.
“it is alleged that many American slaveowners treated their bastards as slaves”
Wot, that Tom Jefferson, frinstance? Leftiepedia reports:
… freed … two of his children from his relationship with his slave (and sister-in-law) Sally Hemings. His other two children with Hemings were allowed to escape without pursuit.