Reparations?

No one, I imagine, would place a large bet on Keir Starmer resisting for very long the demands of corrupt politicians from various small countries of the former Empire for so-called reparations for what was done to their ancestors more than two centuries ago.

After all, this would accord fully with his world-outlook. For him, justice means making other pay while he basks in reflected glory of his own generosity. And if by some mischance part of the bill arrived on his doorstep – why, he could always rely on gifts from admiring multi-millionaires to make up any shortfall in his suits, spectacles, tickets for popular entertainments, etc.

Double-entry bookkeeping, though it has been around for nearly a millennium, seems not to be known to those who claim reparations from people who had nothing personally to do with ancient injuries for which they claim such reparations.

No doubt such claimants would go on to argue that all prosperity subsequent to the slave trade was the consequence of that trade. This, of course, is a highly contentious, not to say ridiculous, historical claim, but let us just grant it true for the sake of argument, to examine what would follow if it were indeed true.

I will also overlook the evident fact that many Africans were co-responsible for the slave trade, in the sense that without African help it could not have taken place. Europeans could not penetrate into the interior of Africa with any force until they had a large and regular supply of quinine, which became available only many years after the Atlantic slave-trade ended. Africans sold other Africans to the Europeans, and they could hardly have supposed that the Europeans bought them to do them a kindness.

If it were true that our current prosperity was the historic consequence of the slave trade, and that the descendants of the beneficiaries should have to pay reparations though they bore no personal responsibility for that trade, it is also true that the principal contemporary beneficiaries of the Atlantic slave trade are the descendants of those who were transported. To give one small example of the benefit received as an historic consequence of the Atlantic slave trade, the inhabitants of Barbados have a life expectancy twenty years greater than that of Nigerians, and an economic product per head ten times larger. Yet the ungrateful inhabitants of Barbados have never expressed any thanks to the slave traders who transported their ancestors, or to their descendants, nor have they expressed any thanks to descendants of the African captors of their ancestors, by (for example) transfers of money.

Behind the claim for reparations is the theory that prosperity depends on its extraction from someone else, that in essence wealth is exploitation and poverty is injustice. But as the Marxists would say, it is also no coincidence that the demand for reparations should become so insistent only a few months after Starmer came to power. Blackmailers, cardsharps and swindlers know weakness and stupidity when they see it, and take advantage of it