DANIEL HANNAN: Britain's only being targeted for slavery reparations because we're seen as a soft touch. Time to fight back!

This has gone far enough. The countries coming after us for slavery reparations, mainly Caribbean states but also some in Africa, are not just rude and ungrateful.

They are launching a hostile campaign against us, and we should respond accordingly.

If Barbados pursues us through the courts for trillions of pounds, we should cancel our aid programmes there. If Ghana wants to lead a Third Worldist posse against us in the UN, we should deny all visa applications from that country.

We have a range of sanctions to deploy against unfriendly countries, ranging from targeted embargoes to travel bans. We should recognise that we are dealing with hostile states.

To target Britain, which did more than any other nation on the planet to stamp out what had previously been a universal institution, is not just bad manners. It is an act of bellicosity.

Britain was not just early in declaring slavery illegal. It then did something unique, pouring its blood and treasure into a campaign to extirpate the foul institution everywhere. Even when we were engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Napoleon, we were still diverting warships to hunt down the slavers.

Grifters

Yes, Britain had been a major player in the slave trade in the 18th century – a time when it was regarded almost everywhere as permanent and inevitable. In the 19th century, though, it broke with other countries.

Driven partly by religious conviction, partly by Enlightenment individualism and partly by capitalism, which made forced labour economically obsolete, it banned slavery in its colonies and began a global campaign against the traffic.

That campaign was resisted by many African kings, who saw slavery as both naturally ordained and economically essential. It was their hostility that drove abolitionists and evangelicals to demand the establishment of African colonies.

Jamaica’s culture minister, led a delegation to Britain to petition King Charles for slavery reparations earlier this month

Wokesters tend to talk of ‘colonialism and slavery’ as if they were the same phenomenon. They rarely admit the extent to which the first was intended to stamp out the second.

Following abolition, Britain attempted to make restitution in a meaningful way, spending an astonishing 1.8 per cent annually of GDP between 1808 and 1867 on hunting down the slavers, the most expensive moral foreign policy in history.

If there were a case for reparations in principle (which there is not), that sum alone – not counting the billions given since in aid – covers any debt many times over. But such is the moral fervour of the reparationists that few want to tell them when they are talking rot.

The trouble is our diplomats and officials – and also, often, our MPs and ministers – keep indulging these grifters. That is the sole reason why they keep targeting us. No one asks for reparations from, say, China (which did not abolish slavery until 1910) or Ethiopia (1942) or Saudi Arabia (1962). You know why? Because they don’t encourage the shake-down artists.

Imagine it the other way around. Suppose we were to send a bill to, say, Ghana on grounds we had expended a great deal of blood and treasure defeating its slavers. What might today’s Ghanaians argue in their defence?

First, they would point out that retroactive law is wrong. We don’t generally punish things that were legal at the time, and with good reason. It would open the door to chaos.

Second, they would argue that slavery was not the only evil in history, and again they would have a point.

Yes, slavery was abominable, but the past is full of injustices. Can we confidently say slavery was worse than, say, the Cambodian killing fields, the Holodomor (the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine), the Mongol conquests or the sack of Carthage?

And even if slavery were in a different moral category from other past atrocities, why should transatlantic slavery be treated as different from the forms of slavery that existed everywhere else?

King Charles is expected to attend the upcoming Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Antigua

Vendetta

I do mean everywhere. Every society, from the Mayans to the Maori, enslaved people. It was almost universal across Africa. Britain is unusual only in having eliminated the practice.

Some 17 million Africans were sold as slaves in the Islamic world, for example, many of them castrated to serve as eunuchs. Britain’s only involvement with that trade was to halt it. Yet we see the heirs to that trade, Arab states, cheerfully voting in the UN to demand reparations from Britain.

Even if none of these considerations applied, there would still be something peculiarly abhorrent about resuscitating the notion of ancestral guilt. It is not only indefensible on practical grounds, owners of Barbadian plantations being likelier to have descendants in Barbados than in Britain;

it is offensive on moral grounds, because it revives the logic of vendetta.

There are around a million Britons of Caribbean origin. Under what conceivable logic are they under an obligation to pay money to their cousins who stayed in the Caribbean? Our legal system, like our

Judeo-Christian ethical code, is based around the idea we answer for our own behaviour: ‘The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.’

Where, in any case, are the current victims of the transatlantic trade? Whenever the question of reparations comes up, some British people jokingly complain they want reparations from the Romans, Vikings and Normans.

Among the many objections to that argument is that we are, in fact, also descended from Romans, Vikings and so on. Everyone of British ancestry – and, indeed, most people of western European ethnicity – is descended from William the Conqueror.

By the same token, who is more likely to be descended from, say, a Jamaican plantation owner – a white Briton or a black Jamaican?

Countries, like individuals, are ultimately responsible for their own prosperity. Every human being alive today is descended, if we go back far enough, from both slaves and slave owners. All of us have ancestors who have suffered horrors. The only thing we get to choose is whether to let those horrors define us.

Let us review the story one more time. Yes, Britain was a major player in the 18th-century slave trade. Although there was no slavery in Britain – anyone enslaved overseas who reached our island was automatically emancipated – there were slave-worked plantations in our Caribbean colonies.

Grievance

Towards the end of the 18th century, following campaigns by religious groups, notably Anglicans and Quakers, Britain began to see slavery as morally abhorrent, banning the trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, raising the then colossal sum of £20 million through taxation and government borrowing to buy and free every slave in its dominions.

It then made restitution in the most practical way possible. It adopted an almost unbelievably ambitious plan to wipe out slavery worldwide. It pressured other nations to impose their own bans, meeting stiff resistance from local chiefs, who fought to keep the institution. In the end, Britain prevailed.

Yet, of all the nations in the world, it is Britain that is now targeted by the grievance mongers. Which prompts a final observation.

Does anyone imagine that, if we caved in and paid these countries, they would treat it as a final settlement? We all know the answer.

Victimhood is a state of mind, a condition that leaves sufferers drained, miserable – and hungry for more. Until we are prepared to hit back, this will not end.

• Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs.