Defence Secretary John Healey has said that a formal apology by Britain for its historic role in the slave trade would not lead to financial reparations. Speaking in an interview with Laura Kuenssberg, Healey argued that considering an apology does not mean accepting a financial liability on behalf of people living today for events hundreds of years ago, in which they had no part.
The question was raised ahead of a meeting with Commonwealth leaders. Andy Burnham, the Prime Minister, has written that Britain needed to acknowledge its complicated history. The issue of whether the government should apologise, and whether it should pay reparations to enslaved people and their countries, has long been debated in the UK and across the Caribbean, where many of the enslaved were held.
The scale of the trade is central to that debate. For almost 250 years, from the 1560s until 1807, British ships trafficked more than three million enslaved African men, women and children. The trade was a state policy backed by the monarchy and parliament. Many of those captured were taken to British-owned plantations in the Caribbean, where they and their descendants were enslaved for generations. Children were born into slavery, and uprisings were put down with extreme brutality.
Slavery was finally abolished by parliament in 1833, when about 800,000 enslaved people were still held on British plantations. Abolition was only achieved because the government agreed to compensate the enslavers, not the enslaved. The government paid an enormous sum, equivalent to billions of dollars today, to the owners of enslaved people. That money came from a huge loan which was only paid off in 2015.
Britain has never paid compensation or reparations to the people who were enslaved or to their countries. Healey's comments draw a clear distinction between a symbolic acknowledgement of past wrongs and the financial redress that campaigners have sought for decades. The discussion is expected to feature prominently when Commonwealth leaders gather, given the organisation's membership of nations shaped by the slave trade and by the plantation economies it sustained.
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