So it’s a “no” to reparations, yet again. No to repairing the damage done by the gravest and longest-sustained of human rights abuses, says Keir Starmer, once a crusading human rights lawyer. Buttressing his position is the foreign secretary, David Lammy, previously an advocate of reparations.
No from King Charles. Can’t turn back the clock, even if it is a rather nice clock bought with colonially ill-gotten gains.
Reparations are a hard sell for any British government that doesn’t wish to emulate Liz Truss’s length of tenure in office. However, given that Labour was established to represent the interests of working people, it really shouldn’t be. In fact, reparations present the party with a vast and unique opportunity for the type of redistributive, social and even psychological change it was founded to champion.
The greatest trick white supremacy ever pulled was to convince working-class white people that they had a stake in it. That they shared in the spoils of the racial supremacy-laden economic exploitation of “lesser species”, such as slavery and the colonisation of Africans. In reality, working-class white people were actually the dispensable pawns of white supremacy. Or as Lyndon B Johnson put it: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best coloured man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” In Britain, pockets were royally picked.
“We’re all in this together” was the highly seductive mantra of the austerity-happy Tory chancellor George Osborne, but in the exact same way Black people are not a monolith, neither are white people. Yet working-class white people have historically and repeatedly been expected to underwrite the crimes of the white capital class.
The core beneficiaries of enslavement were the families who got rich out of the illicit trade, either via directly enslaving Africans or investing in their enslavement. These very families then got even richer when the British state paid reparations to enslavers. In many cases, they remain rich to this day due to the illicit wealth that was hoarded. Whereas the enslaved didn’t receive a coin in compensation – let alone reparations – this bailout of British enslavers by the state remained the largest in our history until the financial crisis of 2008/09 and was not paid off until 2015. Without this intervention, there is a fantastic chance slavery in British-controlled regions would have inevitably ended in violent revolution and conflict, as it did in places such as Haiti and the US.
The question then becomes: should the ordinary and working-class British taxpayer really have spent their money buying off plantation owners, rescuing wealthy enslavers from the grisly fate that surely awaited them had they not taken the money and ran?
Should the working class really have paid for the crimes of the capital class and the establishment (including the royal family)? Should council-estate Chris (whose forebears did not participate in the slave trade) have paid to ensure that the Camerons or Welbys (who did participate in the trade) remained rich enough to send young David and Justin to Eton?
Yes, slavery benefited British society as a whole. Yes, it made Britain a much richer country, helped to finance the Industrial Revolution and improved the standard of living of all Britons. But saving wealthy enslavers from the repercussions of their perfidy was reverse redistribution: a private benefit. I would argue that it is firmly in the economic interests of working-class white people to join hands with Black people to demand that the moneys received during the great slavery bailout (and in enslavement itself) should be clawed back via vast expansions of taxation on wealth linked to the slave trade. Then, it should be redistributed as reparations to the descendants of the enslaved (and the colonised), with perhaps some repayment to working-class people who were forced to fund the slavery bailout payments up until 2015. Call it a “reparations and repayment” programme. Or just economic justice. Whatever we label it, reparations are a concept that should be backed by working-class white people. University College London found that between 10 and 20% of Britain’s wealth had “significant links to slavery”. This wealth was inherited by families who in many cases still hold the wealth extracted from the enslaved.
The sums owed to economic justice are vast. Finding the beneficiaries and emptying their bank accounts won’t be anywhere near sufficient. But there is a principle here: why should the money and “whiteness” of working-class people continue to permit the likes of Richard Drax to hoard their inherited, intergenerational loot?
The reparations conversation has long been bastardised as a matter of white people paying for the sins of their forebears. A racial zero-sum game. It isn’t that – class is a factor. But the self-serving arguments of those who did directly benefit and their forebears have helped kick the can of reparations down the road for generations.
Well, let’s end that. When the predictable anti-reparations demagoguery emerges, people of all hues should ask: is this person, with his expensively acquired speech pattern, palatial home and a bearing reflective of a privilege amassed on the broken backs of others, materially benefiting to this day and using me as cover?
Wise up: they exploited everyone but themselves. They are still doing it.
Nels Abbey is an author, broadcaster and the founder of Uppity: the Intellectual Playground
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