This was my letter to Labour List this week. Not published this time.
Is it fanciful to think that the people who are so viscerally opposed to apologising for Britain’s role in industrialising the slave trade – during which the life expectancy for anyone who survived the Atlantic passage and ended up working on a plantation was six years – are the same sort of people as those who opposed abolition in the first place?
Words, however, are cheap. Free in fact. If Andy Burnham is serious about making amends – and giving parity to the descendants of the slaves whose 150 years of unpaid labour made British slave owners so fabulously wealthy, then set them up for compensation payments for losing their “property” when slavery was abolished – he’d reinstate the Overseas Development Aid budget as a first step to future proofing developing countries (and us) from climate impacts; instead of cutting it to pay for “hard power” that won’t defend us – here or there – from the floods and fires that are already with us. The funds for this could come from a wealth tax – as most of the descendants of the slave owners are still the richest people in Britain. Time they paid back.
On a related theme, Shabana Mahmud’s assertion that people who have migrated to the UK and want to stay should have to prove themselves worthy of citizenship by being continuously employed, among other things, gives a green light to their employers to abuse them; as they will be so frightened of losing their jobs that they will put up with a lot of bad treatment to keep them. That will have a bad effect on the terms and conditions of all workers.
I’d add that any edict that people who come here to make a life for themselves – a positive choice – should be considered unworthy until they prove otherwise over a ridiculously prolonged period, makes them considered guilty until proven innocent. Whereas national virtue is taken for granted in those of us who are here through an accident of birth, whether we have it or not.
I hesitate to point that out, as the notion that citizenship is a privilege to be conferred by the state could begin to be much more widely applied; and invert the relationship we should have – that the state is a tool for and an expression of the people who live in it – all of us – not a body that sits in judgement on whether we have stood in line, tugged our forelock and saluted enough to be conferred rights.
