Slavery reparations debate has raised uncomfortable questions about our love of neighbour

Whilst there were many important issues placed on the table at the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Samoa that ends tomorrow, the only real topic of conversation has been the row that has erupted over potential reparations for the UK slave trade.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer may have slammed his foot down by insisting that neither apologies nor repayments are “on the agenda”, but other Commonwealth leaders have pressed on to draw up an agreement to conduct further research and begin a “meaningful conversation” on the topic.

The move could potentially leave the UK owing billions of pounds in reparations, so it’s understandable that there’s been a desperate attempt to switch the narrative from exorcising the past to supporting the future development of affected countries.

At the end of this latest meeting the 55 leaders will be obliged to issue a formal communique outlining what was discussed, achieved and planned for the future. However uncomfortable and divisive, the pressure is now firmly on to include some form of reference to the UK acknowledging past deeds and making recompense for them. Most commonly, demands for reparatory justice include calls for a formal recognition of wrongdoing and apology, followed by financial payments, debt relief and funded economic restructuring programmes.

On the one hand this seems a fairly straightforward proposition – after all, many countries were ruthlessly exploited and denuded of resources to create the kind of wealth structures and comfortable legacies across the British Empire that nations looking inward see as still benefiting modern UK citizens. However much as our legislators and civic leaders like to feather up their working-class roots, it doesn’t take too much research to trace uncomfortable connections between most individuals and the inherited wealth that has trickled down from the dubious days of Empire.

Over in the USA, where the reparation debate is somewhat more advanced, a radical and detailed study published just this month by Professor Ashwini Sehgal of the Department of Medicine at Case Western University has revealed unequivocally that US legislators who are descendants of slaveholders are significantly wealthier than members of Congress without slaveholder ancestry. The study also revealed a latent tendency amongst those who have inherited wealth from slavery to enact policies in the modern day that uphold the status quo and display a low priority for addressing matters of social injustice.

Arriving at this conclusion was no easy task, but it’s not unreasonable to conclude that – in almost any country – those who became the landowners remained the landowners, and the deprived and dispossessed will inevitably and tragically pass their burdens down to their descendants. One only has to take a cursory look at populations today to see that little has actually shifted in terms of personal wealth; indeed it could well be argued that many nations ought not to be campaigning for past reparations, but to address the even greater inequalities and deprivations that have beset their own populations. Western nations may well be keen to shift the narrative towards environmental and cultural changes, and to talk about ‘developing’ or ’emerging’ nations, but for the majority of the world’s countries, economic hardship and even slavery are not a receding memory, but a numerically increasing reality.

In 1860, just before America plunged itself into Civil War, a national census revealed that there were 3.9 million slaves in the country. Contrast this with the Global Slavery Index, which estimates that in 2021 some 50 million people are living in modern slavery on any given day, and that is an increase of 10 million since an earlier survey taken in 2016. Topping the table are countries with weak and corrupt governance, unstable economies and state-imposed labour – 11 million enslaved people in India, 5.8 million in China, 2.6 million in North Korea, 2.3 million in Pakistan.

Modern slavery takes many forms, and can even be more brutal and damaging than historical slavery. Forced labour, forced marriage, commercial trafficking and sexual exploitation, debt bondage and trading in children are just a few of the horrific characteristics that define slavery in the modern age.

Just last week UK Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips announced new initiatives aimed at reducing the modern slavery case backlog here in the UK, pledging 200 extra staff to the Home Office in an effort to address a backlog of more than 23,000 modern slavery victims currently languishing awaiting a conclusive decision on their status. Informed sources state that even this shameful figure is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the problem of enslavement in modern Britain.

Back in 2014 a radical new model of partnerships between the Church, police, business and civil society internationally was launch called the Santa Marta Group, led by HE Cardinal Vincent Nichols, and aimed squarely at confronting the issues of modern slavery and human trafficking.

The group welcomed Jess Phillips’ commitment to addressing this issue but warned that “the new UK government has a long way to go in unpicking the legislation and narratives” that have created conditions where those experiencing modern slavery don’t feel they can reach out to the institutions created to help them. Unfortunately, most of the victims of modern slavery are more often than not vulnerable individuals who have come into the country from abroad and who don’t have the networks and support mechanisms that would otherwise protect them. Sadly, this pattern creates a dangerous blurring of both legislation and treatment, as currently the law views people who have been trafficked into the UK as illegal entrants liable for detention and deportation. For many people, it is still hard to see such victims as being connected to their stereotypical understandings of historical slavery.

International human rights group The Walk Free Foundation has a simple but profoundly incise definition of modern slavery: “the possessing or controlling another person for your own benefit or to make a profit”.  Whilst this brief statement may corral neatly almost all instances of modern exploitation, it does also point to the changing schema of slavery in contemporary society, which of itself is posing profound challenges about how we now define slavery.

It is generally assumed that human slavery is an abhorrence from the past that has long since been eradicated, so it might surprise many to know that there is actually very little global consensus on slavery, with almost half the countries in the world still possessing no legislation to actually make enslaving another human being a crime.

At the heart of this problem was the British abolition movement itself, which eventually ended the transoceanic slave trades. It’s generally assumed that this movement made owning slaves illegal, when in fact what it actually did was to abolish the laws that made trading in slaves legitimate commerce. So, the right to own and trade in slaves was removed from the statute books, but it was not criminalised.

From 1948 onwards the emerging human rights regime pushed countries towards creating legislation not just to abolish slavery, but to prohibit it, but many countries appear not to have taken this final step to criminalise slavery. This left a dangerous vacuum between the assumption that slavery had disappeared because all the laws allowing it had been repealed, and the reality that many regimes were encouraging it because no laws existed to penalise it.

Thus, we have arrived at where we are today – convinced that human slavery is just an unpleasant memory from a long distant past that we can now disassociate ourselves from, whilst struggling to cope with the reality that human sufferings have got worse rather than better. And hereby is one of the great dilemmas of the reparations argument – to what extent are we as individuals, or as nations, culpable for the actions of our ancestors (or even non-ancestors), especially when those actions would have been considered legal and acceptable in their day?

The arguments to say that we are entirely and woefully responsible are well aired and no doubt will have occupied many of the discussions at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, as will the counterclaims that the sons and daughters of nations should not have to bear the burden of the wrongs of their antecedents. Where this disconnect will end is anyone’s guess, but there are things that can be done now in the spirit of reparation and recognition for wrongs that are obviously felt to have been done.

Rebuilding is a good start point, though ominously our Prime minister has talked about working with “international financial institutions” to help Commonwealth countries develop; sadly this is shorthand for handing out onerous and crippling loans from the World Bank and the IMF, which is really just the modern global accountant’s version of old-style enslavement.

A more meaningful step in the right direction would be that ‘apology’ which we seem so incapable of making, likely because of the legislator’s fear that any admission of guilt leads to an avalanche of further demands, and most of them monetary.

Away from all the irritable exchanges, it is just possible that the reparatory justice movement could be one of the greatest initiatives of the modern era – because at its heart is healing, compassion and love for one’s neighbour. If we can just keep the financiers, legislators, diplomats and other modern-day slave owners away from it, we might just get somewhere.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and theologian