Britain must tell Caribbean nations demanding slavery reparations NO – Andy Burnham’s intervention is a disgrace

The King will no doubt be embarrassed by this intervention.

The idea that the British taxpayer should pay for the sins, not of their fathers, but of those up to eight generations back, is grotesque.

Today’s Britons bear no responsibility for the crimes of the 18th century.

The slave trade was abolished by Britain as far back as 1807.

For decades, the British navy patrolled the West African coast to ensure that the transatlantic trade in human beings was suppressed.

This was undertaken at a great cost of blood and treasure.

The evils of slavery are also compounded by the complexity of the trade itself.

Although it is often portrayed in cartoonish racial terms, where evil white men, according to the woke narrative, enslaved black people who were the victims, the trade itself was more complicated.

Many of the slavers were black tribes of the interior of Africa who enslaved prisoners of war and then sold them on to European traders.

Even more problematic is the legacy of Arab slavers who traded in black African lives well into the 20th century.

Islam, for most of its history, felt no scruples about the enslavement of non-Muslims.

Such slaves formed the backbone of the Caliphate, known as the Ottoman Empire.

Of course, in the Ottoman Empire, most of the slaves were originally white Europeans.

In the Gulf states, black slaves were common as recently as the 1950s and 1960s.

So this simple idea of Britain being the universal and sole perpetrator of great cruelty is too basic and is very wide of the truth.

Many different people of various ethnicities and religions were complicit in this great crime.

Of course, the Caribbean leaders all know this. It is, in fact, striking that few African leaders have jumped on this reparations bandwagon.

For Caribbean leaders, these cries for preposterous sums of money are purely performative.

There is still considerable mileage in bashing the old colonial power for obvious domestic political advantage.

Beating Britain up in a populist way is always a sure way of bolstering domestic support.

This is especially the case when the British government itself is perceived to be weak, woke and incapable of standing up for the national interest.

The figures often cited- I read a figure of $18 trillion- are so large as to be preposterous.

The notion that Britain will give five times its national wealth to right the wrongs of more than 200 years ago is manifestly absurd.

This reparations chatter is merely symptomatic of a polarised world where Socialist, Marxist thought is on the march and is seeking to subvert what we used to call Western Civilisation.

The reparations debate, if we can deign to call it that, is simply part of a wider attempt by leftists to overturn the West and, above all, capitalism itself.

It is time to say no to these agitators and would-be revolutionaries.