the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The only thing funny about Sir Hoover is more funny peculiar than funny ha-ha. I’m baffled by the fact that anyone ever thought him a comedian. A total mystery. To me, he was as funny as a kick in the bollocks. He was like the joke in a Christmas cracker. The joke being the fact that everyone knows the joke is going to be crap, but plays along anyway so as not to ruin the mood. Everyone knows everyone else is playing along and everyone shares in the communal sense of good-natured embarrassment. 

But fuck me, he’s only gone and pulled a blinder. Something genuinely funny and even if it wasn’t totally unexpected, it was still a shock. A fucking big one. Hoover has co-written a book entitled ‘The Big Payback’ in which he advances the case for the UK to hand over £18 trillion in compensatory payments, as reparations for Britains role in the transatlantic slave trade. The book claims that the reason why there is racism in Britain today is because of the slave trade, and that this is key to understanding why disparities exist between black and white citizens. He then goes on to suggest not only in a vast cash transfer to Caribbean nations, but also for money to be given to individual black British citizens, arguing that “we personally deserve money for the effects of slavery”. 

Where to start with this? Probably by stating from the get go that slavery was one of the many stains on humanity, unspeakably evil and should be rightfully condemned as the abomination it was. That being the case, we also have to acknowledge that the transatlantic slave trade is but one iteration of this monstrous obscenity. Slavery has a long and ignoble history, one that our own history amply demonstrates.

Before the Roman occupation, slavery was prevalent in Britain, with indigenous Britons being routinely exported. Following the Roman conquest of Britain, slavery was expanded and industrialised and following the fall of Roman Britain, both the Angles and Saxons cultivated it to their own advantage. When not fighting the Vikings, Saxon slave traders sometimes worked in league with them, often selling Britons to the Irish. So prevalent had slavery become in Britain that by the time the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, over 10% of England’s population were slaves. So most Britons are, one way or the other, descended from slaves. 

But as is so often the case these days, there’s a ‘right’ kind of something and a ‘wrong’ kind of the same thing, and suggesting that most the indigenous British population has an ancestor who was a slave is ‘wrong’. It doesn’t accord with the prevailing narrative, which promotes the notion that slavery was exclusively suffered by black people because of white people. 

And its also obscenely simplistic to suggest that because Britain owes much of its global success on the Industrial Revolution and that the cheap labour afforded by slavery was a contributory factor in achieving that success, it necessarily follows that if we are white British, we have debt owing. Because most of us don’t. Most of us aren’t rich and neither were a our ancestors.

It wasn’t the rich who were losing their lives deep underground in coal mines. It wasn’t the rich who were evicted from their homes to allow for the building of the railways that transported that coal to the factories that powered the Industrial Revolution.  The rich neither worked in those factories, lived in the slum housing that surrounded them or had their lives blighted by poverty, disease and want. It wasn’t the rich who suffered.They never do. 

Another problem is the idea that the solution to any problem is money and that’s before we even start with the sum involved, £18 trillions. I know, a trillion sounds a lot like the outlandishly astronomical numbers bandied about in primary school playgrounds, “I bet you a gazillion pounds I can eat a bicycle.”The difference is that whilst a gazillion pounds was made up, and that we all knew it was – rather like everyone knowing the joke in the cracker was crap – a trillion pounds is real. All too real, actually.

A billion pounds is a thousand millions and a trillion is a thousand billions. To put that in terms that are slightly easier to understand, last year Britains GDP was about $3.66 trillions, GDP being the total output of our economy. Sir Hoovers proposal is essentially that in order to atone for an historical atrocity, we should commit a financial one now. The UK’s national debt net debt is already £2.91 trillions equivalent to 96.4% of GDP. 

But ignoring that for the moment, who exactly would share in all this largesse, which black Britons would qualify anyway? How black would they have to be, and what kind of black Briton. Most of Britain’s 2.4 million black population is of direct African descent, and therefore not the descendants of people enslaved in the Caribbean. How would anyone prove it? Mixed marriages and children born outside of them would only complicate matters. So would there be point whereby if ones ancestry couldn’t be proven by DNA to be more than 25, 50 or 75% of the qualifying kind, then would one be unable to claim? Or would there be a sliding scale? And who would decide what that scale is?

Again, I’m not making light of slavery, but what I am doing is pouring well deserved scorn on the fatuous assertion that money makes everything better. And where would the money come from anyway? The UK is already facing unprecedented social and economic challenges as it is, without massively adding to them. Reducing the budget of the NHS, of schools and of a whole host of other public services won’t only adversely impact the indigenous British population. Many of whom are themselves descended from slaves and a significant minority of whom – about  a third of it it – are either first or second generation immigrants.

I’m one of them. My parents moved here from Ireland. It’s beyond offensive to suggest that others peoples ancestors sufferings are worth more than my own. I don’t know for certain, as I haven’t been bothered to find out, but given that both of my parents families were rural farmers, quite possibly some of their sufferings were caused by English landowners. Why should my life be made worse because of something none of my ancestors participated in or benefitted from? I’d imagine that my reaction might be shared other children of immigrants.

So whilst It might seem at face value radically progressive to call for reparations for slavery, it manages to be logically inconsistent because, as Orwell put it “Some are more equal than others.” Far from eradicating racism as Hoover hopes reparations would, it would exacerbate and entrench it by not only placing a greater value on one groups sufferings than on others, but by giving that value a price and expecting others to pay it

There has to be a statute of limitations regarding compensation for wrongs committed in the past. They weren’t crimes when they were committed and despite them being immoral and obscene, they were legal. Otherwise madness awaits if humanity is now to be forever judging the past by the standards of now. Even the most cursory examination of slavery reveals rather sobering fact that has always existed. As far back in human history as you go, slavery has always been there, existing across many ethnicities and cultures because of a simple irrefutable truism of the human condition. The powerful will always want more power and it is the weak who will always suffer