So, the madness begins. Andy Burnham has bone-headedly junked the time-honoured and common-sense position of the UK Government.
In his latest capitulation to wokery he is exposing all of us – you, me, the whole country – to a new set of financial demands that could end up costing us, and our children, literally hundreds of billions of pounds.
It is a cause that is not just morally wrong, but insane.
Burnham began last week by announcing that he was ‘open’ to a formal state apology for Britain’s role in the slave trade.
In so doing, the PM pulled the rug out from under the King, who had only just made a speech in Antigua, in which he scrupulously avoided talk of an apology.
Burnham’s next disastrous tactical mistake was to offer £40million of UK assistance to Caribbean countries, a gesture that was instantly dismissed as pathetic and inadequate by campaigners for slavery reparations.
Finally on November 3, Burnham blew up a decades-old cross-party agreement on the issue and pledged to begin ‘structured dialogue’ lasting a year, with all the injured parties, to see how Britain could make amends.
What a fiasco. What a muppet.
Andy Burnham recently paved the way for Britain to issue an official apology for its role in the transatlantic slave trade
If you think the UK taxpayer is going to get out of this mess without paying a huge bill, I am afraid you are sorely mistaken.
With supreme supererogatory spinelessness, the Church of England has already agreed to pay £100million in slavery reparations. What does that mean?
It means more and shinier Mercedes-Benzes for the governing classes of African and Caribbean countries.
It means more gleaming air-conditioned Toyota Land Cruisers for the global development aid hierarchs; and it means further tragic dilapidation for our own ecclesiastical heritage.
Next time you pass a crumbling spire or church closed for ‘repairs’, think of it as the legacy of the helplessly herbivorous former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and his lust to atone for something his flock had no part in whatever.
Where Welby led, Burnham follows, and the feet of the entire country are now skidding at the top of the slippery slope to ruin.
So, before it is too late, I want to tell you a story about a little slave-girl, and the ordeal she suffered.
I want us to go to the Northeast corner of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, in the middle of the 19th century, where this child – frightened and confused – is being inspected by customers whose language she does not understand. She is a refugee from the war raging in the Caucasus, and she comes from Circassia, which was then still a country officially recognised by Britain.
King Charles’s Caribbean tour was overshadowed by the issue of slavery reparations
She has been shipped for ten days across the Black Sea, in a wooden vessel, and now she is literally being put on the market, like the nuts, the baklava, the carpets and the rest of the commodities in the Grand Bazaar.
Her vendors know that she probably won’t command much of a price. Things are so grim in the Caucasus – as a result of a Russian invasion – that there is now a glut of Circassian slave girls.
A contemporary report from Istanbul, for the London Post, records that: ‘Never was white human flesh so cheap as it is at this moment’, and the paper goes on to say that the price of a ‘good to middling Circassian girl’ is in free-fall, down from £100 to £5.
As it is, the little girl is in luck. A kindly Turkish woman likes the look of her, buys her (for a price not recorded), and takes her home. There she educates the girl and eventually marries her off to her son. He is a successful businessman and widower of 43. The girl is just 13.
Her name is Hanife Feride and she is my great-great-grandmother. Yes, folks, it’s true. I am very grateful to the research of my sister Rachel and my cousin Sinan, because it seems undeniable: that we Johnsons are descended from slavery.
Let me ask you: does anyone out there seriously think that the large, sprawling, and broadly affluent Johnson family deserve any kind of taxpayer-funded compensation? I am asking in earnest.
What is the view of the mutton-headed Church commissioners? I would like to hear the opinion of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan (sic) Reparations, chaired by Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP.
I would like to hear from all the politicians in Caricom (the grouping of 23 Caribbean countries) and the Commonwealth who are supporting this fatuous shakedown campaign.
Would you like to see me get some sudden wodge of cash, in compensation for the undoubted injustice suffered by my great-great-grandmother?
Of course you wouldn’t. It is hard to think of a more unpopular political project than asking taxpayers to pay the Johnsons for offences committed against their ancestors; and anyway, whom would we ask?
Why should the modern Turkish taxpayer cough up for things that were done under an entirely different jurisdiction, in Ottoman Istanbul? I suppose we could apply to the Kremlin, because after all it was Russian imperialist aggression (plus ca change) that drove millions of Circassians from their land.
Yes, we could write to Putin and ask for reparations, but I think I can predict the answer. The Russian economy is already on its knees, and I think the Johnson family is pretty low, right now, on Putin’s list of spending priorities.
The same point can be made for Britain, where Labour’s economic policies are proving so ruinous that debt is now above three trillion pounds, and the cost of servicing that debt is so high – above £100billion a year – that we can barely scrape together enough to fund the Royal Navy that once ruled the waves so effectively that we put the slavers out of business.
Yes, the slave trade was appalling, and yes, the transatlantic crossing was a crime that deserves to be remembered forever as an example of man’s inhumanity to man. But it is not irrelevant that the vast majority of African slaves were at least originally trafficked by Africans. And it is not irrelevant that the one country that did the most to stamp out slavery – which had been going on for thousands of years – was Britain.
No one involved in that trade is now alive in this country; and it had probably been long gone by the time of your great-great-great grandparents. You cannot expect the British people to make financial amends for crimes allegedly committed by this country in the distant past; and if you do, where will it end? Never forget that at one time or other we have invaded 171 of the 193 countries in the UN.
If we concede this ridiculous principle, of paying compensation for the regrettable deeds of our distant ancestors, we will be in the dock for eternity.
We should not pay a red cent to the descendants of slavery. It is the quintessence of insanity. You might as well pay me; and as I say, you will struggle to persuade anyone with any intelligence to open his or her wallet and pay me compensation for being the great-great-grandson of a slave.
So why are we even talking about such reparations?
It is a disgrace that Burnham has agreed to begin ‘negotiations’. He needs to engage reverse gear now, urgently, while he still can.