Reparations? Why?

Lovely to see the King and Queen enjoying their stay in Samoa but I wonder if they know they are walking into a trap set up by mostly the Caribbean Commonwealth nations about reparations for slavery. Well, let me say here straight away all slavery ought to be unlawful. Surely no-one today agrees with slavery. Yet, it still exists in many forms. I suppose there are now no sailing ships taking the people of Africa to America to work on the plantations, today they go voluntarily to seek a better life. But the point, as many have said, why dreg up happenings from the past about which we can do nothing except to disown it? Obviously by today’s standards slavery is abhorrent, especially the way it was carried out in the 1500-1700’s. It is not something to be proud of. But if we start talking about reparations, financial reparations, one UN idiot has worked out that Britain ‘owes’ more than £18 trillion! Bit of pocket money I suppose. Bearing in mind that our national debt stands at about £2.5 trillion which has been accumulated over decades and we have difficulty paying the interest for that already we could surmise what £18 trillion would do to the British nation. Besides us, there were other European nations involved in the slave trade at that time. The US itself, by using it is also culpable

There is little that can be said except to apologise for the behaviour of our forebears. However, that on its own goes for all nations. To be human means we are members of that genus being capable of great injury and harm. We are also a species that kills its own members in astronomical numbers without even thinking about it. Slavery also is still occurring.

The other fact that would need to be considered is that slavery was not just something that was carried out in the 1500-1700’s. What about the Inca Empire, the Persian Empire and the Roman Empire? Would there be calls for reparations from the Italian government for taking slaves from Britannia? How about the Spanish government paying trillions to the South American nations they overran? They enslaved its population without actually moving them to Europe but slaves they were.

The problem is reparations are not the answer, I could apologise for my Dutch forebears except I do not even know them. I don’t know how they thought, how they struggled, how they were ‘Ronseled’ (forced) to serve in the navy. Starving and emaciated. Most were begging for a crust. Just the same as our ‘lovely’ Victorian cities which were running with bodily waste, where the pox was king. I would say we have had to bear our problems, yes all of us, make the best of it. Stop talking about events over which we have no control because they happened in the past but let us learn from past mistakes. Reparations will not help.