With slavery, Britain has a debt to acknowledge – but not a price to pay - The Independent

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As a matter of purely practical politics, there is nothing that any British monarch or prime minister can say or do to extinguish the moral shame of slavery and its associated barbarities by way of making an apology or paying reparations.

A formal apology is, to many, problematic, in the sense that the British people of today, living in a multicultural society, cannot be held responsible for things that may have been done centuries before by long-dead, distant relatives.

As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, puts it in his intervention in The Independent today: “The treatment of slaves in slave ships, and of slaves on plantations, is much the same as the treatment of prisoners in Auschwitz. And it came from the same basic sin. They were considered not to be human”.

Yet, as Welby adds, “the Bible talks very little of reparation – but it talks a lot about repentance. Repentance means recognising wrong, turning round and going towards what is right.” A nation can take responsibility for its actions, and it can open up a dialogue with those other nations and peoples who still feel that historic grievances and crimes against humanity remain unresolved.

Such is the scale of the sums involved – it is difficult to envisage how all of the miseries and stolen labour can be quantified – that it is probably now simply impossible for the modern UK to make repayments, especially with so many potential beneficiaries. Besides, regrettably, reparations are a political impossibility, given the deep unpopularity of even the tokenistic sums now allocated to overseas aid by the Treasury.

This, then, is the unspoken context of the difficult discussions about Britain’s exploitative past that are overshadowing the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Antigua.

The Commonwealth of nations grew out of empire, and some candid reflection on the sins and abuses of the past is both inevitable and healthy, in these circumstances – especially in the Caribbean. They cannot be wished away in a spirit of bonhomie, and the Commonwealth has been faced with numerous similarly awkward challenges in the past. That is sort of its value as a diverse international forum.

For their part, the King and the prime minister have thus far proved skilful diplomats in navigating their way through such painful debates. As premier, Andy Burnham literally cannot afford to concede the case for meaningful reparations. But that does not mean he has to disparage the motives of others or condescend to them about how they should be running their now independent nations – an error of judgement sadly committed by Kemi Badenoch in her tactless contributions.

Rather than get embroiled in arguments about slavery he cannot win (nor should he try), he has instead been creative and constructive, in a rhetorical and a financial sense. He has moved on from Tony Blair’s expression of “deep sorrow” in 2006, and declared himself “open” to a formal apology from the UK, without a commitment, but maintained that reparations were “not the right answer”.

Instead, he proposes a plan for a “debt reset” for the nations concerned, which will be of much greater immediate value, as will the £40m pledged to Caribbean nations to develop green energy, in which they have great potential. This is similar in spirit to what the Church of England, which was also enriched by slavery, did under Archbishop Welby.

For his part, the King is following the example of his mother when she made reference to historic wrongs from the imperial era, during her visits to Ireland, New Zealand and India. In his “unflinching honesty” and “sincere sorrow”, he is striking the right balance in his roles as head of state of the UK, of the Commonwealth and as King of the Bahamas, Antigua, Jamaica and other realms.

It is often rightly pointed out that, after 1806, Britain played a leading role, via its empire and the Royal Navy, in ending this mass forced trafficking of blameless people across the Atlantic Ocean. Yet it is also true that over centuries before then, the British accumulated immense wealth from this trade in human beings – free labour for the cotton and sugar plantations of the Americas.

The King has recognised how much the British state, business, crown, the monarchy and the Church profited from the misery of others, as have Mr Burnham and former Archbishop Welby. Britain can and must now play another leading role, this time in a process of repentance and reconciliation.