Ahead of a meeting with Commonwealth leaders, Andy Burnham wrote that Britain needed to ‘acknowledge its complicated history’
At the end of his interview with Kuennsberg, Healey was also asked to comment on a potential apology for Britain’s near-250 years of perpetrating the slave trade and why the government should or shouldn’t pay reparations to enslaved people and their countries.
Sitting in the grand settings of Number 11 Downing St, Kuenssberg pointed out the lavish interiors:
Considering a formal apology doesn’t mean accepting that British people now should accept the financial liability for any party and things that happened hundreds of years ago, in which they had no role.
For almost 250 years (1560s-1807), British ships trafficked more than three million enslaved African men, women and children in a state policy backed by the monarchy and parliament.
Many were taken to British-owned plantations in the Caribbean, which enslaved generations. Children were born into slavery, uprisings were put down with extreme brutality
There were still 800,000 enslaved people on British plantations when enslavement was finally abolished by parliament in 1833
Abolishment was only achieved because the government agreed to “compensate” the enslavers. The government paid an enormous sum, the equivalent of billions of dollars these days, to the “owners” of enslaved people; this came from a huge loan that was only paid off in 2015.
Britain has never paid any compensation or reparations to the people who were enslaved, or their countries.
U.K. politicians have traditionally focused on the country’s role in banning the slave trade in 1807 and outlawing slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833.
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