WHAT were your ancestors doing 200 years ago?
I’ve never traced my family origins but I’m pretty sure they weren’t busy benefitting from the slave trade.
And I’ll wager good money that yours weren’t, either.
How do I know this?
Well, because MOST British people’s ancestors didn’t get rich off the backs of African slaves.
Indeed, the vast majority of Brits living two centuries ago didn’t have any riches to speak of because they were living hand-to- mouth, working long, back-breaking hours in the fields and the mills on pittance pay, and dying at 30.
In fact, when Britain abolished the slave trade overseas in 1834, young children back on our own shores were still being forced to work down coal mines.
So why on Earth should the descendants of those ordinary Brits be asked to pay reparations to the descendants of the trans-Atlantic slave trade today?
It’s a question that is dominating the Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting in Samoa today as Caribbean nations push for the issue to be put on the summit agenda despite Sir Keir Starmer’s best efforts to keep it off.
Their demand is simple.
The black population of the Caribbean alive today are largely descended from African slaves bought and sold by British slave traders over 400 years until the mid-19th Century.
And their political leaders claim those descendants are still living with the impact of slavery, so they want justice and compensation for that crime.
Some campaigners talk only of wanting a formal apology, but others insist the sum owed for the misery of slavery reaches an eye-watering — and frankly laughable — £19TRILLION.
Of course, we can all agree that slavery was a heinous crime against humanity.
Yet the demands for reparations ignore many reasonable questions.
Such as why Britain is uniquely culpable for slavery when every other empire that ever existed had slavery as the norm?
After all, when are Britons going to get reparations for the slaves taken by the Barbary pirates or the Normans or the Vikings or the Romans?
Why are the Caribbean nations demanding compensation from the country whose traders bought slaves, but NOT from the many African nations whose kings happily rounded up their fellow Africans like cattle to sell to the highest bidder?
Why is no one calling on Benin and Nigeria to pay up?
And why should Britain atone for the sins of slavery when we were one of the first countries to abolish it, spending a fortune to end the trans-Atlantic trade, both in buying the slaves’ freedom and policing the high seas, at a cost of billions in today’s money and many sailors’ lives, too?
When will we be compensated for those costs — and who pays?
The truth is that the demand for reparations is not about seeking justice or rectifying the terrible deeds of the past.
It’s nothing but a plain old grift.
The Commonwealth leaders know that Britain remains far wealthier than their countries and that many “progressive” British politicians are wallowing neck-deep in their own white ancestral guilt, so why not try to get some free money for their island nations?
Right now, Sir Keir insists that reparations aren’t on the table.
But can we really trust that he will stay true to his word?
This, after all, is the man who took the knee for Black Lives Matter; the man who gave away the Chagos Islands; the man who took down portraits of Elizabeth I, William Shakespeare and Margaret Thatcher from the walls of Number 10 because he cares so little for our history.
This, too, is the Prime Minister who appointed David Lammy as his Foreign Secretary — a man who said of his Guyanese heritage: “As Caribbean people enslaved, colonised and invited to Britain as citizens, we remember our history.
“We don’t just want an apology, we want reparations and compensation.”
But reparations wouldn’t bring justice.
Any payment would be made not by Britain or the handful of rich former slave-trading families.
It would be paid by ordinary British taxpayers.
How can it be fair for the descendants of 19th Century farm labourers, mill workers and miners to be forced to atone for the sins of someone else’s father?
THE Government is pushing ahead with a ban on the sale of disposable vapes from next summer, backed by enthusiastic public demand.
Disposable vapes have quickly become the focus of the latest moral panic to sweep the nation.
Once welcomed as a less harmful alternative to cigarettes, vapes are now seen as the root of all evil and MUST BE STOPPED!
This is madness.
The main objections to disposable vapes are that kids use them and that thousands of discarded plastic vapes are littering our parks and streets.
But laws ALREADY exist against both of these things.
So why not start enforcing the existing laws, with huge fines for shopkeepers who sell vapes to kids and hefty fines for littering, rather than making yet another law that everyone will ignore?
IT took just three hours for a jury to rightly acquit a Met Police firearms officer over the killing of Chris Kaba in 2022.
Yet within another three hours, protesters were on the streets proclaiming: “No justice, no peace” – insisting that the verdict was another racist Establishment stitch-up.
The BBC claimed “black communities” were “really traumatised” by the verdict, while the likes of London Mayor Sadiq Khan and MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott treated gangster Kaba as an innocent victim despite his lengthy criminal record and role in TWO shootings in the weeks leading up to his own death.
Now the courageous police officer involved, Sergeant Martyn Blake, still faces the sack and is in hiding with a £10,000 bounty on his head.
Why would any police officer agree to carry a gun when they could face prison, dismissal and threats to their own life simply for bravely doing the job we ask them to do?
