Britain’s Prime Minister Says He’s Open to a Formal Apology for Slavery

Prime Minister Andy Burnham of Britain said Friday that he was open to his government issuing a formal apology for the country’s historical participation in the slave trade, a major shift in British policy. The change could clear the way for King Charles III to apologize at a meeting of former British colonies next week. Writing in an opinion essay for The Guardian, Mr. Burnham rejected calls for Britain to pay financial reparations to the descendants of slavery, saying that British people should not be “held liable for historical wrongs, however heinous, that happened in a different age under different laws and in which they played no personal part.”

But he said that his predecessors had refused to have an “honest conversation” about the legacy of British involvement in the slave trade “by sticking our heads in the sand.” He said he had asked the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown to lead a global effort to restructure the debt of some of the poorest former British colonies. “Listening to calls for a formal apology on behalf of the British state will form an important part of this process,” he wrote, “and I am open to them.”

A formal apology, if it comes, is unlikely to satisfy some of Britain’s critics, who have for years demanded that the government and the crown provide financial compensation for trafficking about three million enslaved Africans on British ships across the Atlantic in the 1700s and 1800s to work on colonial plantations. Attempted rebellions were brutally crushed. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

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