Britain’s slavery debt can’t be wished away – no matter how hard the new right tries

Last week, had such a thing been possible, her late majesty Queen Elizabeth II would have been smiling down on her son in the Caribbean. All those handshakes, dances and happy speeches about connections. Rancour about the visit was limited to the outer margins of large crowds – and, of course, to the culture warriors back home. The issue was ostensibly reparations for Britain’s role in creating slave colonies in the West Indies, but what was really going on was a battle for the past.

Were we, the Brits, goodies or baddies? In the past five or 10 years, the noise around the suggestion that the UK ought to pay Caribbean countries money to recognise the injustice and loss inflicted on enslaved people and their descendants, as well as the wealth that enslavement brought us, has grown. We’ll get into that argument later, let’s just note that Caricom (the nations of the Caribbean Community) approved a new version of its 10-point plan for compensation and aid back in July, and in September the Jamaican government petitioned the King asking for the question to be submitted to his Privy Council (he agreed).

I confess I have no idea how that whole megillah works, but note with alarm that Liz Truss, David Mellor and Nadine Dorries are among the 740 or so extant privy councillors. Though the Jamaican petition partly concerns the international legality of the British slave trade at the time when it was happening, in terms of the British debate the law is beside the point. Politically this is Lenny Henry and David Lammy versus Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch, the New Statesman and the Guardian versus the Spectator and the Telegraph , and everybody versus the BBC.

The King joined a parade in Parliament Square in Nassau during his trip to the Bahamas last week Talking about empire It’s a struggle for the nation’s past, it centres on our imperial and colonial history, and it’s a struggle that disappeared for half a century but has recently been resurrected. Whereas old books from my mother’s provincial childhood were full of Wolfe at Quebec, Clive at Plassey and the relief of Lucknow, postwar English history went: Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Agincourt, Tudors, Waterloo, Industrial Revolution and the Somme – an insular story culminating in the heroism of 1940 and the victory of 1945.

This partly true myth was one that suited Britons because it emphasised our qualities and diminished our culpabilities. The problem was that an increasing number of Britons owed their past not to this heroism but to their forefathers having been colonised. The Great Revisiting began, and with it a reassessment of empire. Sometimes in the past decade this would take the form of excellent popular histories , such as those written by my former colleague Sathnam Sanghera , and sometimes of an intolerance of discussion, the persecution of dissidents and the appearance of irritating didactic labels besides unrelated paintings in art galleries.

Caught in the crossfire between anti-colonialists and heritage-defenders were organisations such as the National Trust, university lecturers of the wrong stripe, schools that failed to understand variously the need for patriotic history or the sensitivities of their non-white pupils. And of course, yet again, the BBC . Related articles: Labour cannot out-Farage Farage. Right to remain shouldn’t depend on your salary The people vs populism History as polemic The use of history to settle present political scores or to sell a particular national story is a constant irritation to those of us who love the subject and are aware of the traps that surround it.

And here we can consider the latter part of the career of Nigel Biggar , who in the past half-decade has become easily the most influential figure in the conservative and new right’s battle to regain the story of Britain. Once upon a time, Biggar, though he took a degree in modern history, was a theologian by profession, combining holy orders with being a theology professor at Oxford. It was as director of the university’s McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life that – rather quixotically, you may think – he decided to sponsor a major project aimed at recovering the empire from the obloquy to which he felt the academy was consigning it.

Cue the cancellers. A campaign was waged by various “anti-colonial” academics at Oxford not to question the project, but to suppress it altogether. A Cambridge professor, Priyamvada Gopal put pitchfork to keyboard and posted on Twitter: “OMG. This is serious shit… We need to SHUT THIS DOWN.” Petitions were signed by academics from far-flung colleges. Oxford refused to close Biggar down. But even so the campaign had had the predictable consequences of making Biggar appear to be a free-speech martyr and of pushing him further to the right.

Where he found comradeship and solace in the arms of James Orr and the “National Conservatives” and gradually became the thing that his enemies had accused him of. A mild conservative was transformed into the intellectual face of the new right. Biggar is now the Reverend Canon the Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, having been ennobled in December 2024 by the new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch for services in the Great Anti-Woke War.

The Spectator has run numerous Biggar columns including “Who dictates how we see the past?” and “Wokery is a Christian heresy”. The Telegraph has hosted him on a regular basis, he appeared the other week at Battle of Ideas (Baroness Fox’s festival of Furedism), and in June 2023 – a month after speaking at the National Conservatism conference in London – was a guest of the Viktor Orbán-financed Danube Institute in Budapest at an event titled “Embodiment of Evil, Reconsidering Colonialism and the British Empire”.

Described by Badenoch as a man who “dared to speak the truth that our colonial history was not all bad”, Biggar is an archway on the well-funded Sir Paul Marshall-ed border between the Conservative party and Reform. Biggar’s shtick is essentially this: all empires are a bit shit, all great nations commit crimes, but as empires and great nations go the British empire and nation was better than just about all the others. We shouldn’t be guilt-tripped into feeling bad about what our forefathers achieved, which included founding the great nations of Australia and Canada, civilising tribes out of their endless warfare and then going on to defeat the Nazis.

Nigel Biggar is the author of Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt A lot of this is true enough. But if the purpose is to exonerate the act of empire itself, it fails. Looked at from above, Britain had no right to conquer all those people and rule over them without their consent. It did it because it wanted to. Whatever those peoples might have been without being ruled by white folk thousands of miles away is irrelevant to the question of the conqueror’s might-is-right entitlement.

You only have to reverse the conquered and conqueror to see this. Imagine a world in which a handful of Indians came over here, subjugated the people by force and then ruled over us for a century or two, renaming their leader “Emperor of all the Britains” and carrying out the occasional massacre if the circumstances appeared to require it. Actually we can go and look at the Bayeux tapestry and witness the last time it did happen. “We built fabulous railways” or “ isn’t New Zealand wonderful ” doesn’t solve the moral problem.

So the question of the empire being good only really exists when you engage in the ethically unsatisfactory business of making comparisons with other empires. Did the Chinese massacre more? Yes? That’s one-up to us. Did the French decolonise more bloodily? That’s two. Were the Germans guilty of actual genocide in southwest Africa? (Though it’s hard to see what happened in Australia on our watch as anything other than genocide. So we’ll call that a draw.)

Did we chop off people’s hands for not working hard enough à la belge ? Non ? But then, did the Belgians strap rebels across cannon barrels before firing them? Because we did. Messy. This is all interesting and should be studied – the scholarly history of empire should be neutral and aim at discovery, not condemnation or exculpation. But the moral history of empire, seen through a modern lens, is a pretty bad one. We may observe that the Jews were expelled from England in 1290 as a historical fact that reflects the mores of the time, but morally we deplore it even nearly 800 years later.

What about the slaves then? On the matter of Britain and the slave trade, the facts are, for the most part, clear. We have excellent archive resources that have allowed researchers to put together a comprehensive picture of what was done and by who. Ships from England and then Great Britain were transporting forcibly enslaved people from the coasts of Africa to the Americas and the West Indies for nearly a quarter of a millennium, and English and British plantation owners exploited that labour from Guyana to Georgia.

A good estimate is that in the time between the first slave voyage by John Hawkins in Elizabeth I’s time, to the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, 3.1 million Africans were transported, as many as 400,00 of them dying en route. (400,000 is also the number of Africans transported to the southern states of America, where births to enslaved people increased the number to 4 million by the time of emancipation, illustrating the fact that slaveholding involved far more enslavement than slave trading).

Despite Britain’s abolition of the slave trade, the right of its citizens to hold slaves in the colonies was not. That continued for another 25 years. For that time Britain, while opposed to the international slave trade, tolerated mass chattel slavery in its own territories. So for example, in 1823, there was a slave revolt in Demerara (now part of Guyana). More than a hundred slaves were killed during the rebellion and 27 were executed subsequently and their often-mutilated bodies publicly displayed.

The literature is also clear that many of those transported under British jurisdiction, and their enslaved descendants, were not only captive despite having committed no crime, but subject to degrading treatment, which continued until 1834. As well as the Bahamas, King Charles’ royal visit will take in Guyana and Antigua and Barbuda Slave apologetics You know all this, of course. Though the existence of the slave trade and conditions on the plantations were never mentioned when I was at school in the 1960s and 1970s, that situation has been transformed in the past 40 years.

How else could we explain the presence of all those pupils of West Indian origin? But there has been a backlash over the past decade based on a resentment of having Dunkirk challenged by Demerara as a primary narrative of Britain’s history. We are, after all, the goodies. And much of the intellectual heavy lifting for the backlashers has come from Lord Biggar. In books such as last year’s Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt and in columns and newsletters, Biggar has created a series of arguments designed, in effect, as a defiant demand for mitigation.

A flavour of his approach can be got from reading one of his recent Substack pieces, which begins with the author’s sub headline “Britain was among the first nations to abolish the trade, but our progressive elites have long loved to wallow in exaggerated guilt”. And then continues with the drop quote: “Of a total of at least 41 million African slaves transported, the British were responsible for just under 8%, whereas Africans and Arabs were responsible for almost 70%.”

One obvious problem here (among many) is that Africa is a continent and Arabs are of many nationalities but Britain is a distinct country whose domestic borders were set by