No Reparations for Slavery
No Reparations for Slavery
Keir Starmer on Colonialism
By John Foster
Love doesn’t always mean never having to apologise.
But if Keir Stamer’s arrogance at this week’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Samoa is any indication, it’s undoubtedly true of colonialism.
The premier’s unwillingness to countenance even the most inconsequential moves to address Britain’s imperial history indicates the fragility of his position.
The horrors of British colonialism are familiar enough a reminder. Take, for example, the famine in British-ruled Bengal in 1943. At least 3 million people died.
Apologists for Churchill’s government are quick to point out that the Second World War and meteorological conditions were the primary causes.
Still, the record of actions the British took makes for grim reading.
Winston Churchill instigated an inflationary policy that made food more expensive in the region and failed to address the famine for most of 1943.
To add insult to injury, the British government continued to export rice from Bengal despite impending famine, ignoring warnings from colonial officials.
The result was a famine of the kind that had all too often stricken British India, resulting in mass death from starvation and disease and occasional instances of cannibalism.
This is only the most recent instance of a colonial policy in which the suffering of imperial subjects always took a backseat to other considerations.
The case of Starmer’s performance at the Commonwealth summit relates to another, perhaps even more essential aspect of British colonial history.
The issue of reparations bubbles up occasionally in the United Kingdom and the United States for their roles in the notorious trade, in which more than 12 million Africans were enslaved.
In 2006, Tony Blair expressed “deep sorrow” over British involvement but did so personally rather than on behalf of the British government.
Still, that’s better than what goes on in the US, where attempts to minimise the brutality of the slave trade (or to highlight its positive aspects) persist in public discourse.
Indeed, one of the real ironies is that the home of this disreputable talk is the GOP, the party whose former leader, Abraham Lincoln, used as a vehicle for abolition in 1865.
The question of British participation in the slave trade is of particular importance given the role that it played in the origins of the country’s industrial power.
Since the 1940s, in the wake of the pioneering work of the Trinidadian scholar (and later Prime Minister) Eric Williams, the importance of slavery in what Karl Marx termed the “original accumulation” of capital in the rise of British industry has been well-established.
For Marx, this was not a peaceful, gradual process. Marx’s term for violent expropriation was ursprüngliche Akkumulation.
This term is often translated into English as “primitive accumulation”, which strikes native German speakers as odd.
Ursprünglich means original or primary, although it can also mean primordial. Translating it as primitive makes it sound like Neanderthals are undertaking the accumulation.
The concept’s importance for UK history is how it debunks the Horatio Alger myth of British industrialism, in which the original pools of capital resulted from patient, virtuous saving.
Marx focused on how these pools had been created through the violent dispossession of England’s lower classes.
In his meticulously researched Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Williams illustrated how capital accumulated in the context of the slave trade during the early phases of British industrialisation.
A further aspect of the narrative involves the significance of humanitarian motives in outlawing involvement in the slave trade.
Britain formally abolished it in 1807 with the Slave Trade Act (although it continued in the colonies into the 1830s), primarily due to the efforts of Bishop Wilberforce and other religiously inclined reformers.
Williams, by contrast, argued that declining profitability led to Britain’s withdrawal from the trade.
Subsequent research has called this conclusion into question, suggesting that British colonies in the Caribbean were the source of healthy profits throughout the Napoleonic Wars.
Extensive research has been conducted on this topic in the decades since Capitalism and Slavery was published. However, the main thrust of Williams’ conclusions remains valid.
British engagement in the slave trade was a crucial element in the country’s rise to industrial pre-eminence in the 19th century.
Most of these facts are lost on Starmer, whose grasp of the salient events of UK history is shaped by his political aspirations.
Still, no part of the history of British colonialism translates into a win for him.
Other leaders at the Samoa conference expressed considerable interest in the topic. The British government has ruled out any material compensation, which is unsurprising.
When the issue is raised in the United States, proponents point out that the American economy would recycle any such payments through purchases of goods and services.
For the UK, payments to Commonwealth states would have a low propensity to return home.
The most Starmer was willing to concede was that the history should be discussed. That was undoubtedly an improvement but pointless in the absence of reparations.
This stands in stark contrast to the British government’s willingness to allocate £20 million in compensation to slave owners following the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, which ended slavery in the colonies.
To be fair to Starmer, he certainly couldn’t offer payments on anything like that scale, which would be worth approximately 3 billion pounds
The British economy isn’t able to undertake anything vaguely approximating that, even before Brexit, much less in the current situation.
But even a symbolic gesture might be worth something.
The UK premier prefers to look forward rather than dwell on the past. Starmer’s unwillingness is typical of his often-expressed view that Labour looks best when wrapped in a Union Jack.
That’s a ridiculous proposition, but it attests to the importance nationalism has assumed in British politics. Still, one would think Starmer is more intelligent than that.
Support for Labour hasn’t declined because the party is perceived as unpatriotic. It’s dropped because the party won’t do anything for its middle-class base.
Keir Starmer’s Labour is about as weak as a party could be with the majority it has. It has done little to define itself other than staking its claim to the heritage of British liberalism.
That’s unlikely to inspire voters. Every day that Starmer is in power is another nail in the coffin of the Labour Party.
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Photograph courtesy of Number 10. Published under a Creative Commons license.