#uk slavery

[northern-punk-lad]

A very important video on the money Glasgow made from the empire and especially Scotland role in the slave trade

[ausetkmt]

How many people in Britain today have benefited from industrialised slavery in the Caribbean? A vast and many-stranded enterprise, it was responsible for 11% of British GDP at its height in 1800. Wealth and privilege seeps down the generations, and British slavery ended only 185 years ago: there must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Britons whose lives are touched by the money it generated.

“You aren’t responsible for what your ancestors did. You are responsible for what you do,” says the writer on culture and racism Emma Dabiri. I examined my ancestors’ involvement in a book published two years ago. Now I, and others with similar histories, have decided we should go further.

We’ve tried to listen and learn from the descendants of those who were enslaved. Today, we launch a new lobbying group – Heirs of Slavery. We hope to support the existing movements asking nations and institutions for apology and discussions about repair. First on that list is the Caricom group of nations and its 10-point action plan for reparative justice, delivered to Britain and other European nations in 2014. That request for talks has been derided and ignored in Britain (though not by the governments of Denmark and the Netherlands).

Acknowledgement, repair and reconciliation: these are good things to work for in modern Britain. We hope more heirs will join us.

They are many. Records from the 1830s show that 46,000 individuals, including two of my three-times great-grandfathers, received British governmental compensation for “giving up their slaves” at abolition, which was completed in 1838. Some put the money into land, or into shares in railways and the other tech startups of the British industrial revolution. That huge injection of cash seeded new fortunes: some of those families remain among the richest and most powerful in our country today.

But LBS’s list is just of the people who held the 700,000 enslaved of the Caribbean as property at abolition – it is only a snapshot of an industry that went on for 250 years. There were a host of ways to make a fortune, or a living, out of the vast enterprise of exploiting the free labour of enslaved human beings – most without ever setting eyes on the horror that was a sugar plantation or a slave ship.

Shipbuilders, gunmakers, rum distillers, cutlery manufacturers all profited. As ever, the big money was made by the financiers – money-lenders, mortgagers and insurers – many of whose companies were gobbled up later by the banks whose names we know today.

Looking at my own family’s history, you see just how wide the economic reach of their business was. Every year they shipped out basic British manufactured goods – from salted herring and beef to cloth woven in the east of Scotland – to feed and clothe the enslaved Africans and the hired Scots men who ran their plantations.

The profits from sugar were so great that it was cheaper for the plantation owners to manufacture everything – from bricks to saddles – back in Britain and buy new enslaved people from Africa when they had worked those they had to death. The life expectancy of an African adult newly arrived in the Caribbean colonies at the height of the trade was just four years.

And at the other end of the story is government. My ancestors’ records show they paid more in tax on their slavery businesses than the family ever made from them. It is clear, too, that involvement in banks that lent money to slavers was far more lucrative than the business of running a sugar plantation. The men who helped found the Manchester Guardianfor the most part made their fortunes not from slave ownership, but from manufacturing with slave-grown cotton. Obviously, that makes the people behind those institutions no less culpable.

What do you do with this knowledge? People have been getting in touch with me since I published my not-for-profit book. Like me, many are aware that though not directly wealthy from slavery, we have privilege that derives from our recent ancestors’ comfortable and empowered lives, and the violence and greed that enabled those.

“I can’t feel guilty about something I had no part in, but I do feel shame,” such people say. There’s much to feel ashamed of, then and now. But there is atonement of a sort available.

The obvious thing is to ask people who are descended from those who were enslaved what we should do. In my experience, the first answer is almost always “apologise”. Britain has apologised for its part in the Irish famine of the 1840s, for the murder of civilians in Kenya in the 1950s – why not for this great crime against humanity? Apology has power: those who mock proposals for reparation and reconciliation with west Africa and the Caribbean fear it.

And then there’s justice and money. Simply put, how can it be fair that those descended from the enslaved are so much poorer today than those descended from the enslavers? That’s generally true in unequal Britain and in the Caribbean. Guyana, once one of the richest of the British sugar colonies, is now among the poorest countries in the northern hemisphere.

Some of my family, and others I’m in touch with, give to educational projects and other organisations here and in the Caribbean. Glasgow University and the Scott Trust, owner of the Guardian, have started their own multimillion pound reparations projects. Lloyds of London and Greene King brewers have made promises. Hundreds of other institutions are watching.

We all understand this work is a token. In our case, how can you compensate for the 900 or so people who died on the plantations, and for their descendants, left to live in poverty? How to calculate the worth of a ruined life?

Charitable giving is just the easiest of many options: coalition is more interesting. Our privilege and influence can be put to use in the work that our institutions and our nation should do.

Britain’s governments and the royal family legitimised and encouraged British transatlantic slavery; it is for the whole country to address the racism, poverty and inequality that derive from it. We who are the heirs of slavery’s wealth have a part to play in that. “We cannot change the past,” says Sir Geoff Palmer, the Jamaican-born Scottish campaigner for acknowledgment of the legacies of slavery, “but we can change the consequences of the past.” That is inspiring.

Alex Renton’s Blood Legacy: Reckoning With a Family’s Story of Slavery is published by Canongate. He is a co-founder of Heirs of Slaver

[nando161mando]

[Hartlepool, UK]

Just Eat couriers in Hartlepool are going on strike!

Last week JustEat removed the 50p per order bonus for riders, who are already struggling with low pay during a cost of living crisis.

Support the riders outside KFC in Hartlepool Marina at 11am tomorrow!

@antifainternational @anarchistmemecollective @kropotkindersurprise @radicalgraff

[reasonsforhope]

Non-paywall version here.

"When Arley Gill, head of Grenada’s National Reparations Committee, envisioned his work seeking repair for centuries of enslavement on the Caribbean island, one thing was certain: It was going to be a long slog.

But just two years since its founding, the task force is fielding calls from individuals around the world looking to make amends for ancestors who benefited from enslavement in Grenada. 

“If you had told us this would be happening, we wouldn’t have believed you,” Mr. Gill says, crediting a burgeoning movement of descendants of enslavers getting wise to their family’s history and taking action. 

In Grenada’s case, the momentum began with a public apology made by former BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan and her family in February at a ceremony on the island. They apologized for their forebears’ enslavement of people in Grenada and their enrichment from it, pledging an initial contribution of £100,000 ($130,000) toward education on the island.

“She opened the doors for people to feel comfortable” coming forward, says Mr. Gill.

In April [2023], Ms. Trevelyan and journalist Alex Renton co-founded an organization called Heirs of Slavery. Its eight British members have ancestors who benefited financially from slavery in various ways...

Heirs of Slavery says wealth and privilege trickle down through generations, and that there are possibly millions of Britons whose lives were touched by money generated from enslavement. 

The group aims to amplify the voices of those already calling for reparations, like Caribbean governments. And it supports organizations working to tackle the modern-day consequences of slavery, both in the United Kingdom and abroad, from racism to health care inequities. But it’s also setting an example for others, drafting a road map of reparative justice for enslavement – at the individual level...

“Shining a light is always a good idea,” says Mr. Renton, who published a book in 2021 about his family’s ties to slavery, donating the proceeds to a handful of nongovernmental organizations in the Caribbean and England. “You don’t have to feel guilt about it; you can’t change the past,” he says, paraphrasing Sir Geoff Palmer, a Scottish Jamaican scholar. “But we should feel ashamed that up to this point we’ve done nothing about the consequences” of slavery.

Start anywhere

Most Africans trafficked to the Americas and Caribbean during the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended up in the West Indies. The wealth generated there through unpaid, brutal, forced labor funded much of Europe’s Industrial Revolution and bolstered churches, banks, and educational institutions. When slavery was abolished in British territories in 1833, the government took out a loan to compensate enslavers for their lost “property.” The government only finished paying off that debt in 2015. 

The family of David Lascelles, the 8th Earl of Harewood, for example, received more than £26,000 from the British government after abolition in compensation for nearly 1,300 lives, while “the enslaved people were given nothing,” Mr. Lascelles says. He joined Heirs of Slavery upon its founding, eager to collaborate with peers doing work he’s been focused on for decades.

“People like us have, historically, kept quiet about what our ancestors did. We believe the time has come to face up to what happened, to acknowledge the ongoing repercussions of this human tragedy, and support the existing movements to discuss repair and reconciliation,” reads the group’s webpage.

For Ms. Trevelyan, that meant a very public apology – and resigning from journalism to dedicate herself to activism...

For Mr. Lascelles, a second cousin of King Charles, making repairs included in 2014 handing over digitized copies of slavery-related documents discovered in the basement of the Downton Abbey-esque Harewood House to the National Archives in Barbados, where much of his family’s wealth originated during enslavement. 

“What can we do that is actually useful and wanted – not to solve our own conscience?” he says he asks himself...

“Listen and learn”

...The group is planning a conference this fall that will bring together families that benefited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade along with representatives from Caribbean governments and Black Europeans advocating for reparations. In the meantime, members are meeting with local advocacy groups to better understand what they want – and how Heirs of Slavery might assist.

At a recent meeting, “there was one man who said he wanted to hear what we had to say, but said he saw us as a distraction. And I understand that,” says Mr. Renton. “Maximum humility is necessary on our part. We are here to listen and learn, not try to take the lead and be the boss.”

Mr. Renton’s family has made donations to youth development and educational organizations, but he doesn’t see it as compensation. “I see this as work of repair. If I sold everything I own, I couldn’t begin to compensate for the lives my ancestors destroyed,” he says."

-via The Christian Science Monitor, August 1, 2023

Note: I know the source name probably inspires skepticism for a lot of people (fairly), but they're actually considered a very reliable and credible publication in both accuracy and lack of bias.

[probablyasocialecologist]

While enslaved people were mostly overseas, in colonies, out of sight, slavery funded British wealth and institutions from the Bank of England to the Royal Mail. The extent to which modern Britain was shaped by the profits of the transatlantic slave economy was made even clearer with the launch in 2013 of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at University College London. It digitised the records of tens of thousands of people who claimed compensation from the government when colonial slavery was abolished in 1833, making it far easier to see how the wealth created by slavery spread throughout Britain after abolition. “Slave-ownership,” the researchers concluded, “permeated the British elites of the early 19th century and helped form the elites of the 20th century.” (Among others, it showed that David Cameron’s ancestors, and the founders of the Greene King pub chain, had enslaved people.)

But as Bell-Romero would write in his report on Caius, “the legacies of enslavement encompassed far more than the ownership of plantations and investments in the slave trade”. Scholars undertaking this kind of archival research typically look at the myriad ways in which individuals linked to an institution might have profited from slavery – ranging from direct involvement in the trade of enslaved people or the goods they produced, to one-step-removed financial interests such as holding shares in slave-trading entities such as the South Sea or East India Companies.

Bronwen Everill, an expert in the history of slavery and a fellow at Caius, points out “how widespread and mundane all of this was”. Mapping these connections, she says, simply “makes it much harder to hold the belief that Britain suddenly rose to power through its innate qualities; actually, this great wealth is linked to a very specific moment of wealth creation through the dramatic exploitation of African labour.”

This academic interest in forensically quantifying British institutions’ involvement in slavery has been steadily growing for several decades. But in recent years, this has been accompanied by calls for Britain to re-evaluate its imperial history, starting with the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in 2015. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 turbo-charged the debate, and in response, more institutions in the UK commissioned research on their historic links to slavery – including the Bank of England, Lloyd’s, the National Trust, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Guardian.

But as public interest in exploring and quantifying Britain’s historic links to slavery exploded in 2020, so too did a conservative backlash against “wokery”. Critics argue that the whole enterprise of examining historic links to slavery is an exercise in denigrating Britain and seeking out evidence for a foregone conclusion. Debate quickly ceases to be about the research itself – and becomes a proxy for questions of national pride. “What seems to make people really angry is the suggestion of change [in response to this sort of research], or the removal of specific things – statues, names – which is taken as a suggestion that people today should be guilty,” said Natalie Zacek, an academic at the University of Manchester who is writing a book on English universities and slavery. “I’ve never quite gotten to the bottom of that – no one is saying you, today, are a terrible person because you’re white. We’re simply saying there is another story here.”

[reasoningdaily]

Meet the Tory MP living off the profits of a slave plantation in 2024

Drax Hall is in trouble and needs to be cut up and distributed to the people it was stolen from. Both in Jamaica and Barbados. This man should not be receiving a dime.

The UK is guilty and this is proof in 2024 that links all the way back to the 1700s

[anarchistin]

Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories.

More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.

— Patrick Freyne, The Irish Times

[thelandofbritain]

Reparations for historic British involvement in slavery should be straightforward...

Those repugnant, wealthy families who are known to have held slaves in appalling working captivity were "compensated" handsomely by the British government (i.e. taxpayers) when slavery was supposedly abolished in the 19th century.

Those same wealthy families - and therefore their descendants - should be the ones who make reparations now, even if it includes selling off their stately homes, estates, lands and other assets. This applies to the monarchy, too.

Current British taxpayers should not be forced to repay the debts of the wealthy a second time.

Labour won't dare to offend the wealthy of Britain, though, of course.

[eaglesnick]

“A generation which ignores history has no past -- and no future.”  

The National Centre for Social Research Centre's Social Attitude survey, finding that there has been a sharp decline in British national pride in the last decade has driven the pundits and politicians on the right into displays of righteous indignation. 

Peoples pride in being British has fallen from 83% in 1995 to 64% in 2023. Only 53% think democracy works well in this country, down from 60% in 1995, and only 49% would rather be a British citizen than any other country, a decline of 20% since 1995. What has particularly agitated those on the right is the finding that pride in British history has dropped from 86% in 2013, to 64% in 2023.

Nigel Forage, never one to miss an opportunity for self-promotion, went on a “blistering rant" concerning the decline of national pride in British history, claiming he has been “railing against" an education establishment that is constantly  "talking down Britain’s past”.

What’s happened claims Forage is there has been a “Marxist take-over, of people that hate the country, hate what it stands for, and they have done their job” Primary school teachers, secondary school teachers and university lectures all “rejoice” in putting Britain down.

Who would have thought it? That seemingly lovely Mrs Jones, who does so much for the infants in her care, a revolutionary Marxist. The dusty secondary school history teacher Mr Smith, also a Marxist, just waiting to advance the communist revolution on the streets of Britain. Unbelievable! And as for all of those university academics…just don’t get me started.

What a load of utter piffle Mr Farage. But he knows that. What he is doing is dog whistling as usual.

Taking the teaching of slavery as an example , Forage condemns the educational establishment for teaching that Britain was “the only country in the history of mankind that had ever conducted slavery.” What’s more says Forage, Britain  "far from being the one nation, actually, that ended it,..lost a lot of money and a lot of lives driving it out."

Lets examine these claims.

First, no one has ever said that Britain was the only slave-trading nation. Portugal, France, Spain, Netherlands, USA and Denmark ALL profited from slaves.

Second, Forage was right in asserting that  Britain was one of the first major European powers to officially abolish slavery. The Abolition of Slavery Act was passed inn 1833 but not all British owned slaves were covered by this act as it specifically excluded many slave colonies owned by the East India Company and British slaves on the islands of Ceylon and St Helena.

Third, British sailors did die fighting the slave trade but nowhere near as many as has been claimed on social media. Fullfact.org, state that the figure of between 17,000 and 20,00 Royal Navy sailors dying fighting illegal slave traders is untrue, the figure being much nearer 2000.

Forth, did driving out slavery cost a lot of money? Yes it did, but none of the money went to the slaves themselves, only to the slave owners as compensation for their losses.

Despite the repugnant and morally corrupt practice of slave ownership that the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act represented, a mere four years after this law came into being another piece of slavery legislation was enacted: the Slave Compensation Act 1887.

This is something Forage and those other millionaires and billionaires on the right of British politics often neglect to tell us. Despite the repugnant and utterly immoral practice of slave ownership implicit in the Abolition of Slavery Act 1833, this new act ordered the Commissioners for the Reduction of the National Debt to compensate slave owners in the British colonies to the tune of £20 million pound – around £17billion pounds today. This payout was a massive 40% of total government budget.

What else Forage neglects to say is that the last compensation payment for loss of slaves paid for by the British government was in 2015.

In short, we the British taxpayer, have been paying compensation to slave owners and their dependents for "loss of their property” for the past 182 years!

I only wish we did teach these things in our schools but we don’t. In fact, the Conservative government, in its Education Act of 1996 made the promoting of partisan views by teachers illegal.

So much for Marxist conspiracy theories!

[lost-carcosa]

[sashasemin28]

while i don't think it means slavery is back in england, it is geninuely distressing to see an official tweet from the uk's prime minster read "If you come to the UK illegally...You can’t benefit from our modern slavery protections..." like I'm sorry what the fuck

[nando161mando]

My boss complains everyday about this. They pay 10€ per hour and it is one of the highest incomes I have received in that kind of job. Unemployment is really close to that paycheck.

[maladapted-druid]

"That's where l'm going to put my focus - rather than what will end up being very, very long endless discussions about reparations," he said. "Of course slavery is abhorrent to everybody; the trade and the practice, there's no question about that. But think from my point of view.. I'd rather roll up my sleeves and work... on the current future-facing challenges."

That's Sir Kid-Starver refusing to discuss reparations for slavery at the Commonwealth summit, I think the "very, very long endless discussions" is very telling, they don't have to be either of those things but clearly this government has no interest in engaging with the subject honestly or in good faith. The rest of the article even has various government members decrying "demands" and "we do not pay reparations."

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

ℑ𝔯𝔬𝔫 𝔐𝔞𝔦𝔡𝔢𝔫 - շ 𝔐𝔦𝔫𝔲𝔱𝔢𝔰 𝔱𝔬 𝔐𝔦𝔡𝔫𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱

[thoughtportal]

compensating British slave owners

United Kingdom finished paying off debts to slave-owning families in 2015

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/30/fact-check-u-k-paid-off-debts-slave-owning-families-2015/3283908001/

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/details/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/27/britain-slave-trade

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/01/cost-compensating-british-slave-owners

https://reparationscomm.org/reparations-news/britains-colonial-shame-slave-owners-given-huge-payouts-after-abolition/