This relates to the BBC article [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66596790] which states “the UK should pay $24tn (£18.8tn) for its slavery involvement in 14 countries”.
The UK abolished slavery in 1833. That’s 190 years ago. So nobody alive today has a slave, and nobody alive today was a slave.
Dividing £18tn by the number of UK taxpayers (31.6m) gives £569 each. Why do I, who have never owned a slave, have to give £569 to someone who similarly is not a slave?
When I’ve paid my £569 is that the end of the matter forever or will it just open the floodgates of other similar claims?
Isn’t this just a country that isn’t doing too well, looking at the UK doing reasonably well (cost of living crisis excluded of course), and saying “oh there’s this historical thing that affects nobody alive today but you still have to give us trillions of Sterling”?
Shouldn’t payment of reparations be limited to those who still benefit from the slave trade today, and paid to those who still suffer from it?
(Please don’t flame me. This is NSQ. I genuinely don’t know why this is something I should have to pay. I agree slavery is terrible and condemn it in all its forms, and we were right to abolish it.)
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Here’s a way to think of it:
If I steal all of your money and invest it to grow over time then I’ll end up with even more money while you don’t benefit from the growth that should have been yours. Now we have children and pass on our wealth. You pass on less because it was stolen, and I pass on more because of what I stole. This multiplies over the generations and a disparity is maintained. My offspring will have better educations and better opportunities because of the wealth they had access to, and yours will have fewer opportunities because you don’t have the money to spend on them.
The goal of reparations is to attempt to correct some of this disparity. It tries to provide opportunities for people who don’t have it but would have if something in the past weren’t stolen.
For an example that’s easy to see: In the US, black people are less likely to know how to swim. This has nothing to do with them being black, but what opportunities they had access to. This is for many reasons. One part of it is that most places had community pools, but they had restrictions for people of color. When this was outlawed, they instead just closed the pools or added memberships that required payment.
People also built up wealth over time through property, but black people were prevented from getting loans to buy property except in redlined places. This prevented them from building up generational wealth like white people were allowed to do. (This is ignoring the whole slavery thing…) It causes ripples through time where their children have less opportunities, which then causes their children to have fewer, and so on.
The problem I have with this viewpoint is this.
Where does it start and where does it end?
World history is full of atrocities, crimes, war etc.
Additionally, many of the things which we now consider atrocity or crime might not even have been one in the past.
Fabricating such artificial claims is the same as Putin is doing by using the history book for creating claims on Ucraine.
This has always been an issue I get stuck on. If we hold current people liable for the crimes of their ancestors, how far back do we go?
The trans-atlantic slave trade was abhorrent, but slavery didn’t begin or end with it.
Do Egyptians owe Jews reperations due to how they were treated? Should the Italians compensate half of Europe and North Africa for what the Romans did? Should Arab nations pay the UK and Ireland for the people kidnapped by the Barbary Pirates?
The Ottomans were still keeping slaves until the early 1900s, long after the western European powers had ended the practice, why aren’t we seeing calls for reperations from Turkey to Slavic nations?
this is why the slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy
“if we punish people for murder, what about self defense?”
or
“if we arrest people for selling meth, it’ll end up making the state arrest people who drink coffee”
you can legislate for a specific instance and not have it spiral out of control into insanity.
Maybe some people would try to seek reparations for ridiculous stuff. It’s exactly the purview of the law, politics and diplomacy to navigate that.
This isn’t a slippery slope fallacy. Nobody’s saying “if we let the gays marry the next thing that will happen is people will want to marry animals!”
What people are saying is, okay if this is being done in the interest of fairness, who else needs considered, and is it practical to consider them? Are we ever actually going to be able to achieve something close to fair?
In the US a great example in this discussion is native Americans. Do they get more or less for having their entire society destroyed, land confiscated, being driven on death marches to far away land, repeated treaty violations, decimated by smallpox, and many of the other tournaments?
I have native American, German, and Scottish ancestors that never owned a slave. I don’t have “African”, Irish, or “Asian” ancestors.
Do I get a check, do I get excluded, or do I pay for the sins of someone else’s forefathers? And then because… despite all the struggles my ancestors endured themselves, I lived in a country that’s trying to reconcile past sins of slavery they had nothing to do with directly (and hopefully were opposed to)?
Fact of the matter is, native americans suffered horribly, they just don’t exist in any kind of numbers to make a stink about it, and many of them bred into the white population.
We’re never going to get to “even” and we seriously need to consider if more unfair government wealth distribution is the solution to previous unfair government wealth distribution.
Hell I’m a full on Democrat and I strongly believe this will only make race relations worse. Like by a factor of 100 if they did that here. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and there’s no way sufficient time money and resources will be spent to actually make anything resembling fair happen here or in the US; you can’t do that when you’re trying to score political points.
Governments should be trying to help people from where they are now, not trying to reverse history and retroactively remedy history spread across hundreds of years.
Honestly, it should never stop. There should be wealth, inheritance, and estate taxes that even out advantages and disadvantages over time. Poor people shouldn’t be paying for it because of their race, rich people should because of their advantages.
This is hard for me to commit to an opinion on. I totally understand the argument that systemic injustices of the past have impacts today on the opportunities presented to descendants of affected individuals, therefore proactive steps are required to achieve equity. But solutions like requiring blanket reparations from one race to another seem to take for granted that everyone of the first race has been equally privileged by historical injustices, while everyone of the second race has been equally disadvantaged.
This obviously isn’t true. People of color are disproportionately likely to be disadvantaged, but there are people of color who lead highly privileged lives, and there are white people who are highly disadvantaged due to coming from low socioeconomic class, poor health, lack of access to education, etc.
The concept of reparations being paid on a basis of race necessarily involves the government forcing disadvantaged white, Asian, Latino, and other non-black people to become more institutionally disadvantaged, so that a group that contains highly privileged people of color can become more economically advantaged.
Something absolutely needs to be done, we need to be actively fighting for equity, but it’s hard for me to accept an argument that that should be done on the basis of race instead of addressing the causes of class-based inequality that will benefit disadvantaged black people along with disadvantaged people of other races.
For example, instead of seeking to improve the intergenerational income mobility of POCs in a system that restricts the income mobility of those without wealthy parents, we should fix the system and ensure a level playing field between someone who is born to high-school drop outs, and someone who was born to Ivy League graduates.
This is how I tend to view it too. We should be raising all poor people up and target wealth equality for everyone, regardless how they got there. I suppose reparations to POC would be a step in that direction but it by nature excludes people who might need help now. Idk, it’s a hard subject for me to form a solid opinion on too but I think social safety nets need to be prioritized for all.
I don’t know who implied paying it would be based on race. It should be based on class. Rich people are rich because they had advantages and exploited people. They should be taxed and the money should be used to raise up people who weren’t as advantaged or exploitative.
Your number is a bit off. It’s more around 569000 per person.
Who downvoted this? It’s correct.
£18.8 trillion divided by 67.7 million people is £278,000 per person.
That’s just not possible as a sum. 18.8 trillion is more money than the entire nation has. I’m all for reparations btw. But I can’t see how that much is realistic?
I thought 500 quid seemed a bit light to be mending generational wealth accumulation.
This seems much more in line with what I would expect.
Note, I’m a statistician, but don’t do maths outside of 9-5 /s
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Nations that were the source of slaves remain on the whole impoverished and underdeveloped.
Nations that were slavers still remain on the whole wealthy and highly developed.
This is not a coincidence, and there is a reasonable case to be made for reparations on these grounds.
The UKs position today is arguably due more to leading the Industrial Revolution and that was the main factor in the decay of slavery, so you need to balance historic grievances with development i.e. “what have the Romans ever done for us?”
This is so false, slavery was wide practice in Africa already, the “slaving countrys” just bought them for the most part…
Is it possible that other factors led to the countries being wealthy or impoverished, and this allowed the wealthy to colonise or take the impoverished as slaves?
Yes, and even accounting for those, wealthy countries that took slaves still hold an enormous amount of responsibility for what they did
The original OP argument is that those captors or slaves don’t exist anymore. Even the countries barely exist. Is this a matter of descendants being responsible for their ancestors crimes?
I think there’s a strong feedback loop argument here but I’m not sure that’s the point you’re making.
Do descendants have the same responsibility as their ancestors who actually owned slaves? No. But do they bear some ongoing responsibility as a benefactor of a system that was built around their ancestors owning slaves? Yeah they do.
All of this is incredibly messy, but approaching it at a governmental level is definitely something I support, because slavery was sanctioned and even encouraged by the government we’re talking about, which has existed continuously
That’s the feedback loop argument, right?
Some countries collonised others: crime of ancestor
But those countries used slaves and stole resources, making those countries wealthier. That wealth allowed them to develop better technologies, making them even wealthier.
So the argument is that while the original crime is not the responsibility of those alive today, the proceeds of crime should not be kept - they should be returned. In this case the proceeds are wealth, so a monetary reparation is appropriate.
Is my train of thought right? Because it seems to make sense to me.
Pretty much my take.
OPs position is based on the idea that the reparations are punitive, which they are not.
No one alive in England today was engaged in slaving, but everyone is the beneficiary of the practice.
Disclaimer that I’m not English and don’t particularly have a dog in this fight, and my opinions are a little mixed. On the one hand, I agree on the morality there, a lot of people were damaged in the very long term by slavery. But on the other, even if you can say that it’s an act to attempt to return the wealth to the wronged people, that doesn’t mean the wealth has simply been sitting there for nearly 200 years, waiting for return. That money has to come out of some budget, somewhere.
So where are they going to pull 18 trillion to give reparations from? Certainly, cuts will need to be made somewhere to make it happen, and often, those cuts are usually made along the lines of political agendas rather than things that are objectively bloated.
Exactly. If anything, this amount of money is way too small.
Occasionally we read a news story about someone who escaped a maniac that kept them locked up for years, forcing them to work and do depraved things for little or no pay. We rightfully think this is terrible and the criminal is inhuman.
Slavery was millions of people in that situation for their entire lives. Whole economies were based on this genocide. We put Nazis to death for genocide. We put other leaders on trial for similar crimes. Paying this tiny fine is the least the British (and other European governments) can do. The amount they really owe would bankrupt them.
What amount of money would you exchange for measurably worse lives (education, health, jobs) for you, your family, and everyone who looks like you for generations?
Slaveholders got to build wealth off the free labor of slaves. When they died, that wealth didn’t disappear. It was passed down to the next generation. The descendants of slave holders are better off financially than the descendants of slaves because of that accumulated wealth. The descendants of slave holders should pay back the wealth they now own to the people it was stolen from.
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There was substantial indentured labour and serfdom in England too. Surely simple redistributive tax based on wealth is fairer?
Anyway how do you determine whos ancestors had slaves, or weren’t involved, or were slaves? You want to start tracing bloodlines?! Should the English pay the Irish?
You’re welcome to look at my bank statements. If you can find £569,000 that I can pay someone without going bankrupt then I’d be most surprised.
Ending slavery doesn’t reset everything back to zero. Imagine if you’re running a race against someone else. The person officiating the race (no clue what this kind of person is called 😅) lets your opponent start running the race and keeps you back at the start line. Then, they have a moment of clarity and say to themselves, “Wait a second… This isn’t fair!” So, they stop that person where they are, apologize to you, say they promise never to do it again, and blow the whistle so that you can both start the race.
But wait! That person still ended up starting way ahead! But we already ended head starts before the race started so it’s OK, right? Well, no, because the person who got the head start still got to start from their advantaged position.
But this isn’t quite the same because your issue crosses generations. So, a better analogy might be a relay race. Maybe the head start is stopped just as the second person on the opposing team receives the… thing you pass in a relay race. (Why am I making an analogy to a thing I know nothing about? 😅) They didn’t personally get the head start. So, it’s OK to go ahead and start the race now with one relay team already on their second runner while the other is on their first, right? It wouldn’t be fair to punish that person who didn’t directly gain the advantage of the head start.
Well, no, because that team still got an advantage and the other team still started at a disadvantage. Reparations are less about punishing an individual and more about leveling a playing field.
I like to think of online gaming. 2 teams against each other. One side uses cheats for part of the match and runs the score way up. Midway through, they turn the cheats off and apologize, but the score is still lopsided.
Old players might drop out and new players might join in, perhaps to the point where most players in the match were never around when the cheating occurred. You might even argue that some of the score gap might be attributable to differences in skill between the two teams. But it’s undeniable that one team is benefiting from an unfair advantage, and doing nothing to adjust for that perpetuates the unfairness.
Now, imagine that the game also has a mechanism that makes it easier to stay in the lead once you get there.
For my taste your analogy is faulty.
You put it like it was a game of Civ.
The history and development of nations and cultures on Earth was/is much more complex.
