by Daniel Hannan, Telegraph
We should treat demands for slavery reparations as hostile acts, and sanction states that make them. If Barbados wants to come after Britain, we should cancel our aid programmes there. If Ghana wants to lead a Third Worldist posse against us in the United Nations, we should deny all visa applications from that country.
To target Britain, which did more than any other nation on the planet to stamp out what had previously been a universal institution, is not just bad manners. It is an act of aggression to which we should respond in kind.
Instead, we berate ourselves, which is precisely why the grifters keep trying their luck. No one asks for reparations from, say, China (which did not abolish slavery until 1910) or Ethiopia (1942) or Saudi Arabia (1962), because these countries do not encourage the shake-down artists.
On Wednesday, the UN passed a motion condemning the Atlantic slave trade and demanding a “good-faith dialogue on reparatory justice, including a full and formal apology, measures of restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, guarantees of non-repetition and changes to laws, programmes and services to address racism and systemic discrimination”.
The resolution was moved by Ghana on behalf of the African Union, which has indicated that it intends to pursue Britain and various European countries through the courts. China, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia were among the states that backed the motion. So, shamelessly, were North Korea, Eritrea and Mauritania, the three places where slavery is most prevalent today.
How did Britain respond? Did we remind our Ghanaian friends that, even when we were locked in battle with Bonaparte, we were diverting ships to hunt down slavers off their coasts? Did we talk of how we had protected their coastal populations from Ashanti slave raiders while promoting palm oil and other industries to encourage alternatives to human traffic? Did we recall that slavery ended in inland Ghana as a direct consequence of British rule, the establishment of the Gold Coast Crown Colony being followed by a proclamation that every child born from that date was free?