BORIS JOHNSON: China will get away scot-free over Covid… however we face weird calls for for slavery reparations as a result of Starmer’s international coverage is about as strong as a tea-dunked hobnob

Today I want us to consider two great crimes against humanity. Each of them has consigned millions of people to horrible deaths. Each of them has deprived whole populations of their liberty – brutally incarcerating men, women and children; and, in both cases, lives and hopes have been shattered across the planet.

In either case, or so it can argued, there was one great world power that was principally to blame for the catastrophe. The two great evils I have in mind are the slave trade and Covid-19, and the nations that have been held to be responsible are – respectively – the United Kingdom and China.

Let us set these two cases side by side. Let us compare the relative vigour and indignation with which they are now being prosecuted in the court of global public opinion.

It is amazing, and instructive, to see the difference in political temperature: the one subject provoking the tearful anger of liberals around the world, the other muffled in studious silence. Look at the double standards applied to these controversies – because this stinking hypocrisy tells us a lot about geopolitics today, and the overboiled-linguine feebleness of the current British government.

The case against Britain, for slavery, is weak to the point of absurdity. The case against China, for Covid, looks increasingly overwhelming. And yet it is Britain – poor old us – that is now being asked to pay £18 trillion in reparations for the slave trade.

We are still being asked to accept that this horrible disease began in a Wuhan wet market. Really? Do you believe that? When that very city happens to be the home of a laboratory where scientists were busily fiddling around with the genetic material of Sars-Covid viruses? 

How much are we asking from the Chinese, in compensation for the trillions of economic damage from Covid? Zero, nada, zilch. What the hell is going on?

Britain did not originate the slave trade. Slavery has been part of every historic culture that we can observe, and quite a few modern ones, too. The ancient Britons were themselves enslaved by plenty of people, including the Romans. There is a famous relief from Aphrodisias, of Britannia being brutally subjugated by Claudius.

Should we be suing Signora Meloni for reparations from the modern Italians? We weren’t responsible for the slavery that was for centuries endemic in Africa, everywhere from Senegal to Nigeria – from the Middle Ages onwards. It wasn’t the Europeans, let alone the British, who were responsible for enslaving a third of the population, some to serve in households, some forced to harvest crops, some to be soldiers.

It was the Africans themselves. It wasn’t even the British or the Europeans who came up with the horrific practice of transporting those slaves to work in other markets: it was the Mesopotamians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs. It was just about everyone on the long march of man’s inhumanity to man, and though the British unquestionably played their part, they were relative newcomers.

Come to think of it, my own great-great grandmother was a Circassian slave-girl. My Ottoman great-great grandfather is said to have bought her in a market. I am afraid that’s how they did things in those days.

Is anyone seriously suggesting that her descendants – including the current author – should seek reparations from the government of Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara? The whole thing is preposterous.

The only thing more derisible than asking for compensation from modern Turkey, for the enslavement of my great-great grandmother, is the idea of asking for modern Britain to compensate the nations of the earth for our role in the slave trade.

The Chinese, frankly, make it clear that they will not take any nonsense from anyone, while the Starmer government are tragically and destructively wet

We didn’t start slavery; in fact, we were the nation that did more than any other to abolish it. I was in Brazil not long ago, and the curator of one of the great museums in Sao Paulo reminded me, with gratitude, that Brazil had been the last South American country to abolish slavery, in 1888, and that it had been largely thanks to the Royal Navy.

There is no one now alive in this country who bears the slightest moral responsibility for the Transatlantic or any other slave trade. None of us were involved, none of us decided to invest in slaving, or in companies that made use of slaves. So what on earth is going on at this Commonwealth Summit in Samoa? Why are our friends suddenly claiming the UK taxpayer is on the hook for trillions – when neither the UK government nor a single one of those taxpayers has the slightest culpability?

The claims for reparations are all the more astonishing, and nauseating, when you contrast the Chinese guilt over Covid.

In this case, of course, there certainly are people alive in China who know what happened, and who should be prosecuted – and yet the world simply refuses to address the subject. Five years after the tragedy of Covid began, we are still being asked to accept that this horrible disease began in a Wuhan wet market – as the result of some romance between a short-sighted pangolin and a bat, or some other natural zoogenesis.

Really? Do you believe that? When that very city of Wuhan happens to be the home of a laboratory, where scientists were busily fiddling around with the genetic material of Sars-Covid viruses so as to achieve ‘function gain’ – or to make them more contagious?

It was an accident, no doubt; a terrible and tragic accident for China and the world. But in the end it was the Chinese who let that foul virus out the test tube – and there is a general principle that those responsible for an appalling medical disaster (think of Bhopal, think of Thalidomide) are held to account. So why do we hear nothing about the possibility of global reparations for Covid?

Why this conspiracy of silence on Covid, and this bizarre demand for slavery reparations from the UK?

We are dealing, first, with the extreme reluctance of scientists generally to blame other scientists for a disaster. Scientists worry (often quite reasonably) that human superstition will prevent them from pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. Quite a few of them, moreover, are funded by the Chinese, and do not find it remotely convenient to point the finger at Beijing.

The same point could be made about many of those Commonwealth countries – whether in the Caribbean, Africa or the Pacific – now complaining about the UK role in slavery. Look at their debts to China. There is a natural reluctance, when you are heavily financially beholden, to get too worked up about the origins of Covid and so to embarrass your Chinese lenders.

When it comes to bashing Britain, of course, no such inhibition applies – and here, my friends, we come to the fundamental explanation of the double standards.

It is all to do with the posture of the two governments in the dock. The Chinese, frankly, make it clear that they will not take any nonsense from anyone, while the Starmer government are tragically and destructively wet.

Why are our Commonwealth friends suddenly blathering about slavery reparations – which never seemed to come up in my time? Because they have seen the Starmer lot pathetically hand over the Chagos Islands, and they think they now can get away with it.

The Chinese government relentlessly stick up for what they see as their national interest; today’s Labour government, I am afraid, does the opposite. Starmer’s foreign policy is about as robust as a tea-dunked Hobnob.

That is why the British taxpayer now faces an indefinite and ludicrous clamour to cough up for slavery, while the Chinese originators of Covid are getting away scot-free.