As spokesman for the Caribbean Community (Caricom) of 20 countries, Dr Hilary Beckles has long campaigned for Britain to make amends for slavery by paying reparations to the former colonies of the West Indies. One politician that Beckles has always counted on for support is David Lammy, the son of Guyanese parents and the Labour MP for Tottenham since 2000.
While in opposition, Lammy accused the then Tory government of ignoring the debts owed to the descendants of slaves in Britain and the Caribbean. He pointed out that when Britain abolished slavery in 1833, slave owners were paid £20million in compensation, while not a penny was given to the slaves themselves.
Now that Labour is in government and Lammy is foreign secretary, Beckles has seized his moment. Caricom has this month called for a high-level summit with European nations, including Britain, and insisted that they must address the issue of reparations. Lammy ‘has been a supporter of [reparations] while he was in opposition’, Beckles said last week. ‘The question is whether he would be given a free hand in his government… to take the matter to a higher level.’
It looks like an astute move on Beckles’s part. Lammy is not only being asked to make good on demands he made while in opposition. Beckles is also playing on Lammy’s personal story, as a second-generation Afro-Caribbean Brit with a dual British-Guyanese passport. It has prompted right-wing critics of Lammy to ask where his loyalties lie – with Britain or the Caribbean.
The real problem here though is not Lammy’s passport, but the guilt-ridden approach to Britain’s past embraced by our ruling elites. Lammy and other champions of reparations are right to point out Britain’s pre-eminent role in the brutal and exploitative 18th-century slave trade. History is replete in violent oppression and domination. But the idea that everyone in Britain today owes a debt of reparation to the descendants of people enslaved 200 years ago is absurd.
As Lammy has pointed out, slave owners were indeed compensated for the loss of their property, which means that we have a good record of who actually owned slaves. According to the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of the British Slave Trade, at University College London, there were 47,000 slave owners out of a population of 12.9million. This means that just one person in every 275 owned a slave. This shows that, unsurprisingly, slave-owning was an elite concern.
At the time parliament agreed to compensate slave owners, just over 700,000 British adults had the vote. The vast majority of men did not, and no women at all did either. Most Britons weren’t slaves, but they weren’t free either. They lacked political rights, and the millions who worked for others were subject to the Combinations of Workmen Act 1825 and later the Masters and Servants Act 1867, which prevented them from bargaining for better pay and made them liable for employers’ losses.
It’s clear that most of our ancestors in Britain did not have a pot to piss in, let alone an estate in Barbados. Why should the great, great grandson of a landless farm labourer pay compensation to the great, great grandson of an enslaved West Indian sugar planter? If anything they have common ground to fight for a better deal for everyone in the present.
In opposition, Lammy used to sarcastically lecture his Conservative opponents on their supposed ignorance of history. But Lammy and others seem ignorant of the history of reparations. Offering slave owners reparations was the price for getting the Abolition of Slavery Act through parliament. The government was effectively paying for the slaves’ freedom.
In an ideal world, such a grubby compromise would not be necessary. But we do not live in an ideal world. Thomas Fowell Buxton, who proposed the compensation package, was no friend of slave traders – in fact, he had spent his life campaigning against them. Yet he saw no alternative. The obvious challenge to those who today denounce the compensation paid out during the 1830s is to ask them if they would have voted against the act that emancipated slaves at the cost of paying off slave owners?
More challenging still is the fact that when Britain and other European powers decided to suppress the ‘Arab’ slave trade during the 1870s and 1880s, they agreed that they would have to take over Africa to do so. Nowadays people are understandably sceptical about European powers’ claims that they needed to colonise Africa in order to liberate it. But it is undeniable that the explicit motivation for late 19th-century imperialism was a moral desire to end slavery and make amends for Europe’s slave-trading past. Moralistic imperialism and the idea of making amends have often gone hand in hand.
The actual history of British imperialism should make proponents of reparations think twice about calling for Britain to take action to address past wrongs. The problem with reparations is that they always ask the injuring party to design the compensatory scheme for the injured. That tends to reinforce the basic relationship of inequality that already existed. This was clearly the case in both the compensation paid to slave owners in the 1830s and the scramble to colonise Africa in the late 19th century.
Reparations did redress past wrongs, but on terms dictated by those in power. Former slave owners salved their consciences by buying the slaves their freedom, but they left the Caribbean desperately poor. Later, Queen Victoria backed David Livingstone’s campaign to stamp out Arab slavery and had her statue put up over new British colonies in Africa for the next 50 years.
Perhaps Hilary Beckles’s invitation to David Lammy to finally address the issue of reparations is not as cunning a move as it first appears. Ordinary Brits, like ordinary Guyanese and Trinidadians, will see no practical advantage from whatever ‘restorative justice’ programme that Beckles and Lammy might cook up. All the wining and dining, overseas visits, cultural investments and educational programmes that might emerge will only ever reward a narrow elite. The rest of us will just be left wondering what really changed after all.
James Heartfield writes and lectures on British history and politics. His latest book is Britain’s Empires: A History, 1600-2020.
