Readers respond to an article by Andy Burnham in which he says that people today can’t be held personally liable for the country’s historical wrongs
In his opinion piece (30 October), Andy Burnham argues that British people today cannot be held liable for historical wrongs “in which they played no personal part”. On one level, he is right. But he confuses two very different things: personal liability and the continuing responsibility of the state.
When slavery was abolished in the British empire in 1833, the government borrowed £20m – an extraordinary sum then – to compensate enslavers for the loss of their supposed property. Some 40,000 claims were made. The British taxpayer carried the cost, and the resulting public debt was not finally cleared until 2015.
Around 3,000 people in Britain received about half of the compensation fund. The state had effectively used public money to preserve the wealth of a privileged elite, while leaving the victims of slavery uncompensated.
If the state could identify enslavers and establish their claims to compensation in 1833, it cannot be beyond the capacity of today’s state to examine how that wealth, and its enduring legacy, might be addressed. The historical records are remarkably detailed, after all.
The state cannot claim continuity when honouring its obligations to enslavers while disowning any responsibility towards the enslaved. It is the same institution, enduring across generations.
Nobody is suggesting that today’s citizens should inherit personal guilt for the actions of their ancestors. But neither should the wealth accumulated through slavery be treated as a private inheritance, cleansed of its origins simply by the passage of time.
The descendants of enslavers, many of whose families remain among Britain’s wealthiest, cannot just divorce their inherited privilege from the injustice that helped create it. They too have a responsibility to confront that legacy. Giselle Dye Edinburgh
Andy Burnham celebrates British resistance to slavery while refusing to recognise the totality of the system against which people resisted. Recovering these histories matters, including that of enslaved people’s struggles. But we also need to understand how chattel enslavement and imperialism developed a global political economy organised through racial hierarchy, capitalist exploitation and patriarchal power.
These processes shaped who could own property, whose labour could be appropriated, and whose lives mattered. Their consequences persist in the distribution of wealth and power today. This system harmed people differently. Enslaved Africans and colonised peoples endured dispossession and violence on a scale incomparable with workers’ exploitation in Britain, but their struggles were interconnected.
Patriarchy sustained this order by exploiting women’s labour and controlling reproduction. Ecological destruction accompanied the treatment of land and life as resources for extraction.
Imperial competition drove these processes; wealth extracted through empire enriched Britain, disproportionately benefiting its landed elites. And yet Burnham writes of climate change, women’s rights and the cost of living crisis as if these issues are disconnected – as though each can be resolved independently within the very system that generated the harm.
Reparatory justice doesn’t depend on individuals having personally committed violence; it begins with these relationships. Most of us never had the opportunity to learn how they shaped past harms and continue to harm others and ourselves. An adequate response requires material redistribution and debt cancellation, alongside public education and discussion.
A parliamentary inquiry that tells the truth of the British empire is critical: how it developed, who was harmed and who benefited, how its structures persist and what repair now requires. Past solidarity should encourage us to confront these connections; celebrating earlier generations’ courage while refusing to see the wood for the trees leaves the structures they challenged far too comfortably intact. Dr Asha Herten-Crabb University of Warwick
Andy Burnham is open to an apology for Britain’s role in slavery, but rejects financial reparations. He argues that historical wrongs “happened in a different age under different laws” and that British people today played no personal part in them.
For centuries, Britain was a leading slave-trading nation. Burnham instead emphasises its leading role in the abolition movement, which began in the 18th century. The question, however, is whether the absence of personal involvement removes responsibility for injustices whose consequences persist.
Past injustices matter today if they have left morally relevant traces in the present, meaning that there are people today who suffer from the past injustices and people who gain. There is, for example, a direct link between slavery and the slave trade on the one hand, and the current poverty and underdevelopment in the Caribbean on the other. There is also a link between the incomes from slavery and the slave trade that rolled into the British economy in the 17th to 19th centuries and present prosperity.
In principle, if someone gains and someone else suffers from a historical wrong, and the heir of the perpetrator is aware of this relation, there is a moral duty for the one who gains to compensate the one who suffers. Therefore Britain has a moral duty to compensate the Caribbean nations that suffer from past injustices. An apology is not enough, but compensation can of course take various forms. Göran Collste Emeritus professor of applied ethics, Linköping University; author, Global Rectificatory Justice
Andy Burnham’s openness to offering an apology for British involvement in slavery is a welcome development. But despite his recognition of its “brutal and barbaric violation” of the enslaved, he still manages to make an “honest conversation about the legacies of slavery” seem like an act of political largesse rather than an objective audit of structural inequality.
If he really understood how transatlantic slavery “still shapes our world today” he might reflect on some of its local ironies. For example, the fact that, though not “liable for historical wrongs”, British people nonetheless, through taxation, serviced the debt that compensated enslavers (some of the wealthiest people in the country) until as recently as 2015. He would recognise the insult added to that injury for some of those taxpayers, who were descendants of the enslaved.
In fact, if Burnham truly understood historical legacies in the Caribbean and elsewhere, he might consider cancelling Commonwealth debt repayments altogether, rather than proposing to lengthen the term over which they are repaid. He might recognise that the “cup of sorrow” referenced in his quote from the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson did not disappear in 1807 at the end of the slave trade or in 1833 with emancipation, and would comprehend the extent to which slavery shaped colonial attitudes and practices, replacing a barbaric yoke with an authoritarian one.
He would see that the effects of slavery are not something to be recognised only in an annual ritual of remorse during Black History Month; neither are they redeemed by politically empty declarations to “end global poverty and inequality”, while denying the legitimacy of some of the reparative means to even attempt it. Paul McGilchrist Cromer, Norfolk
