Slavery Reparations Is A Grift

No ifs, no buts

So here we’ve a piece shouting that, really, Britain must pay a lorra lots to some foreigners:

Global calls for reparations are only growing louder. Why is Britain still digging in its heels?

Hilary Beckles

Just to let you in on a little trick here Hilary. We’re not dragging our heels. We’re just not gonna pay you. Ever or never. Bugger off.

Global opinion, however, has rallied around the idea – rooted in international law and bolstered by the best ethical and moral thinking – that there is a case to answer and that negotiations should be inevitable. In 1939, Arthur Lewis, a Nobel laureate in economics, set it out clearly. Britain, he said, had 200 years of free labour from an estimated 20 million black men, women and children. This was Britain’s black debt, which must be acknowledged and repaired.

It wasn’t free labour. Now, yes, there will be squealing about this but it simply wasn’t free. Slave owners bought slaves - that’s not free. Slaves gained food, shelter etc. That’s not free.

No, no, stop squealing. Yes, slavery was appalling, vile, we’re all damn glad we don’t do it any more. But slave labour was not free.

We could - possibly should - look at the difference between that subsistence level that the slaves got and what free labour - not free as in at no cost, free as in free to choose - got at the same time. The answer being not much difference in fact. If we’re to believe Jason Hickel (which, of course, we shouldn’t) free labour in England got below subsistence incomes. To be Marxist, what was the expropriation from those slaves, from the value of their labour? And, well, not a hugely different amount from that of free labour at the time.

While imperial Britain soared to sustainable economic development and global military superpower status, the enslaved and their descendants were left to this day with enduring pain, persistent poverty and systemic suffering.

This is, as the cool kids say, problematic. Beckles is from Barbados. So, let us use Barbados numbers. And compare them to Sierra Leone and Liberia. The places that slaves not transported across to their servitude were freed into.

So, Hils, Matey, what is this poverty and pain you’re condemned to?

An obvious point - it’s not possible for us to compensate a man for having made him better off.

But we need to go further too. Britain did not benefit from this labour anyway. We did not then have a state controlled economy, we do not now have a state controlled economy. Britain didn’t own the slaves so it’s not Britain that - even if you can prove that there should be reparations - which should pay for owning the slaves it didn’t.

This does then rather leave the reparations argument being that Barbados - or whoever - needs to go around suing, individually, the estates of those who owned slaves. Good luck with that one.

The so-called Slavery Abolition Act, the most racist legislation ever passed in the British parliament,

Aha, have you ever in your puff seen such a perfect perisher of an argument? That abolition of slavery itself was the most racist legislation ever?

Aha, aha, aha. Becks must have practised that one in the mirror a lot for no audience would be able to hear that without screaming in laughter.

compensation of £20m in cash paid as reparations to the enslavers. The enslaved were valued at £47m, and the remaining amount was paid off with labour in kind for four extra years of enslavement after they were freed. They received no compensation for the theft of their labour or the denial of their human identity.

A £20 million bribe and cheap at twice the price. For that’s what it was. A bribe. One we’re still paying off today - no, Osborne did not pay it off, he issued more gilts to pay off the old ones - and I’m wholly happy to be paying my mite of that amount. Absolute damn bargain, freeing 700k people from slavery for such a trivial sum. As to the slaves, well, they gained their freedom. Which is of value. Actually, that’s rather the point, freedom has value, no?

The issue of Britain’s black debt has generated several accounting and actuarial studies. Many methodologies have been used to quantify the debt, resulting in figures that include the pain and suffering of dehumanisation, torture, terror and genocidal management practices.

Indeed so and all of those calculations are shit.

The British imported some 3 million Africans into the Caribbean and upon emancipation in 1833, only about 700,000 had survived. Barbados, where it all began as an economic explosion, received 600,000 people from British ships over 200 years; only 83,000 survived.

There’s one of those shit arguments in fact. Yep, agreed, sugar planations were absolutely vile. The usual intention was to work a man to death in 7 years. But the argument here is that those who survived - or their descendants - should have more cash to make up for those who died. Eh?

There are no enemies within the reparations enterprise, just partners in search of mutual development and justice for all.

The demand is that we who have never owned slaves must compensate those who never were slaves for the existence of slavery two centuries ago.

The correct answer is this is a grift. Now bugger off.