Reparations are wrong on every level. We must reject the divisive politics of national grievance

A majority of Britons want their children to be taught to be proud of the country, regardless of background. Labour must listen

‘As Caribbean people, we are not going to forget our history,” David Lammy, then a ­backbencher, told Parliament in 2018. “We don’t just want to hear an apology. We want reparations.”
Lammy was referring to reparations for victims of the Windrush scandal, but it was, to say the least, an infelicitous use of the word “we”, and, although it was not explicit support for them, it encouraged groups around the world who want Britain to pay them for all manner of imagined wrongs. These groups, treated as a lunatic fringe even five years ago, are now celebrating what they see as a victory at the heart of the British state.
“He [Lammy] has been a supporter of the discourse while he was in opposition,” says Sir Hilary Beckles, the leading reparations campaigner. “The question is whether he would be given a free hand in his government to take the matter to a higher level.”
Sir Hilary, vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, also heads the reparations commission for Caricom, a group of 15 Caribbean nations. The sums being floated are so absurd as to topple into slapstick. Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, wants £3.9 trillion – nearly three times Britain’s total annual budget.
Still, in the frenzied mood that followed the lockdown and the murder of George Floyd, all sorts of demented ideas started being entertained. It isn’t enough to dismiss the case for reparations as too silly to address. Address it we must, so here goes.
The concept of historic collective entitlement (or guilt) is morally and legally absurd. Think about it for a moment. There are, for example, 21,000 Britons of Barbadian origin, including such national treasures as Ashley Cole and Moira Stuart. What principle could conceivably make them liable to pay reparations to Mottley? 
What goes for them goes for every other Briton. Our legal system, like our Judaeo-Christian ethical code, is based around the idea that we answer for our own behaviour: “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.”
The concept of personal responsibility, although it can be traced to biblical passages, especially those of St Paul, came into its own with the Enlightenment. 
It cuts modern civilisation off from its tribal precursors, kin-based societies where vendetta and blood-feud were ruling imperatives. Understanding that it is not acceptable to injure people because of what their grandparents did is a precondition of an open society. As so often, we see so-called post-modernists espousing some chilling pre-modern ideas.
But if you actually believed in inherited guilt, you would come up against a bigger problem. Where are the descendants of the slavers today?
Whenever the issue of reparations comes up, a certain kind of white person likes to say, with a knowing chuckle, that Britain should in that case get reparations from Denmark for the Viking attacks. 
One of the many objections to that argument is that today’s Danes are largely descended not from those who invaded England in the 9th century, but from those who stayed behind. The lineal heirs of the axe-wielding berserkers who carved out the Danelaw are largely in these islands.
By the same token, where are you most likely to find the descendants of West Indian slave-owners? Yes, some people owned shares in plantations without leaving Britain. But you are far more likely to find the blood of the slave-owners among people in the Caribbean today
Then again, every human being alive today is descended from both slaves and slave-owners. It could hardly be otherwise, human bondage having been common to all pre-modern civilisations. 
Britain was earlier than most places in extinguishing slavery within its own borders, but it was a major player in the international trade in the 17th and 18th centuries.
In the 19th century, however, it diverged from most other places. Driven partly by religious conviction, partly by Enlightenment individualism and partly by capitalism, which made forced labour economically obsolete, it banned slavery in its colonies and poured its resources into a global campaign against the traffic.
Britain’s anti-slavery campaign, which began in 1807, was resisted by many African kings, who saw slavery as both naturally ordained and economically essential. It was their hostility that drove abolitionists and evangelicals to demand the establishment of African colonies. 
Wokesters, including Lammy, tend to talk of “imperialism and slavery” as if they were the same phenomenon. They rarely admit the extent to which the first was intended to extirpate the second.
Then again, as Lammy put it, when talking about reparations, “Some people simply do not know their history or do not want to know hard truths.” Quite.
Lammy’s point on that occasion was that slave-owners were bought out by taxpayers. This issue was debated by abolitionists at the time, who in the end concluded that paying compensation would accelerate emancipation by at least a decade. 
The fact that British voters were prepared not simply to oppose slavery in the abstract, but to dip into their own pockets to hasten its abolition is a cause for pride rather than shame.
Following abolition, Britain attempted to make restitution in a meaningful way, spending an astonishing 1.8 per cent annually of GDP between 1808 and 1867 on hunting down the slavers, the most expensive moral foreign policy in human history. 
If there were a case for reparations in principle (which there is not), that sum alone – not counting the billions given since in development aid – covers any debt many times over.
But, as Lammy says, some people simply do not know their history. Including some people who, though they are now propagandists, still call themselves historians. Sir Hilary himself, for example, has made a series of tendentious arguments about slavery, most recently about the role of the Church of England.
The Anglican Church, through the sermons of its clergy and the faith of its individual adherents, including William Wilberforce and John Newton, was a mighty force behind abolition. 
Yet Sir Hilary claims that the Church was one of the chief slave-holders in Barbados (it wasn’t), that it opposed emancipation (it didn’t), and that the bishop of Exeter was awarded “the largest amount of reparations for slavery, more than any other one in England” (he owned no slaves and was a committed abolitionist; he simply happened to be the executor of the will of a plantation owner).
Such is the moral fervour of the reparationists that few want to tell them when they are talking rot. Yet their fanaticism should not be confused with popularity. 
The Telegraph reported last week that 67 per cent of Britons of black Caribbean origin (and 72 per cent of all Brits) wanted their children to be taught to be proud of this country.
Reparations would be wrong on every level. They are aimed narrowly at the country that, in a slave-owning world, distinguished itself by a decades-long struggle to end the foul business. They are based on a collectivism that is impossible to reconcile with freedom. They rest on poor history. They divert the energies of Caribbean politicians from domestic economic reforms to international rent-seeking. 
And one more thing. Does anyone imagine that, if Britain forked over the ridiculous sums that campaigners want, that would close the issue? Would any settlement be treated as final? 
Of course not. Grievance and self-pity are addictive. Blame and victimhood have the same wasting effect as other narcotics. The worst thing we could do would be to feed the addiction.