Nobody alive today, owes anyone an apology for the transatlantic slave trade of the 1500s – 1800s.

This week has seen fresh talks in the UK about this subject and I will now add my two cents worth!

Nobody alive today is in a position to offer a meaningful apology for the transatlantic slave trade. PERIOD. Anyone who does, is simply being disingenuous.

Similarly, NOBODY in the UK today, living here, is not a beneficiary of slavery – whether you’re black, white or whatever other colour’s in use. Most of what we have today, be it schools, universities, our strong financial system, our economy, our way of life, ALL benefited from those centuries of cheap labour. CHEAP as it wasn’t free – some evil folk were paid for each slave.

The problem we have today is that people continue to spout rubbish. Critical Race Theory? bollocks! You don’t need any theory to understand the economics and depravity of what went on back then and how it has impacted people. The wilful distabilisation of a continent, to promote strife and conflict, leading to sale of hundreds of thousands of people. The ongoing distabilisation of that same continent – for a different set of reasons today. The way schools should teach slavery is simple: no race on earth, no nation, has escaped the clutches of slavery in human history. We have all been enslaved at one point or the other. The most recent and therefore, most savagely vivid example, being the transatlantic slavery of the 1500s to the 1800s but that is only one era of slavery. And for those who wonder why the church didn’t intervene – after all the head of the church of England is the King or Queen – well, if you ask that question, it means you have never read the Bible. Slavery dates back to biblical days and was sanctioned as a winner takes it all concept. So, no chance of religion stepping in to try to stop it in the 1500s or later. You only have to look at the religious status of slave owners in America to reach an accurate conclusion.

It happened. It was vile. It fed into what we all now have today, whichever way one is to look at it. So, tearing down the statue of a slave-trader can only be meaningful, if we also hand back centuries of societal benefits and the infrastructure that was built on the back of those poor slaves. Clearly not feasible right? Well, what then??

Heinous things were done to the transatlantic slaves and many of the surviving photos are shocking, BUT why do we expect the perpetrators or their descendants to be horrified? I doubt there is anything done to these slaves that hadn’t been done before at Newbury prison and other 14th, 15th century prisons in the UK (all the famous de-bowelling, hung-drawn-quartered etc,) done to each other as it were, so doing those things to African slaves was very readily done and mist likely without any second thoughts whatsoever. What is more concerning, is the TODAY, hundreds of years later, we still have some crude and primitive means of torture, which is inexcusable. Including extra-judicial killings by the police in America, mass incarceration of drug peddlers while the consumers go unpunished etc,

Anyone who thinks someone will denounce or renounce what Britain got from trading slaves, when we are still refusing to hand over more recent items from the days of the empire e.g. the Elgin marbles, need their heads testing! Yes, you will readily find many who are appalled by the brutality of slavery and are keen to join statue-toppling protests, but when you lay out how they have and still benefit (and we all still do) from slavery, you will get nothing from them, other than conjecture. It is impossible to uncouple the impact of hundreds of years of slave labour and revenues from it, from what we still enjoy today. So, what would an apology be worth? NOTHING!

We just have to move on. Teach history with some blooming perspective and not in a manner that continue to make some people feel like victims in the 21st century.

Your ancestors were enslaved. All ancestors have been enslaved at one point or the other through history. Move on. Let’s focus on today’s problems, and if some of those problems are still directly linked to slavery and/or colonialism (which is indeed the case), the solution is clearly not where people keep looking, which is why it has dragged on for this long….