In response to this:
David Cameron will visit Jamaica this week amid growing calls from the Caribbean state for Britain to pay billions of pounds in reparations for slavery.
Fuck off. You do not visit the sins of the fathers on the great, great grandsons, you arseholes. And, it was the British that set its navy across the oceans wiping out this vile trade. We did our bit. It ended two hundred years ago. Now get over it. We don’t owe you a penny.
Britain – in the class of world nations, the simpleton that the others screw over.
Many Jamaicans are descended from slaves freed by… the British. So much for gratitude, then. Maybe the British shouldn’t have bothered with Wilberforce’s 1833 Act and its subsequent updates.
It’s also worth noting that the number of British families known to have owned slaves (usually overseas) numbered only in the hundreds, not the thousands or millions. These were mostly the nobility of the time – the “1%” of their day. Slaves were *expensive* to own and far from common outside the very wealthy classes.
Blaming an entire country’s current population and demanding they *all* pay “reparations” for perceived damage clearly caused by a tiny fraction of a fraction of 1% of the population of the time is therefore no more fair than slavery itself was.
The British have already paid their ‘reparations’. If they had not, Jamaica and its culture would be very, very different today.
Quite. Fortunately, Cameron’s government seems resolute on this.
Perhaps we could bill them for the War on Drugs? 😉
The anti British lobby conveniently forget that the slaves were captured by the Africans themselves, and then traded with the traders on the coast. No white man would dare to go into the interior to catch slaves. The local chieftain would not stand for it. It was also not unknown for families to sell their own children into slavery. So, if the West Indies want reparation, they should go to Africa for it.
The Africans don’t have much money OG.
In what way have the current inhabitants of Jamaica suffered from the slave trade? Presumably, if they are the descendants of slaves, they have been born and raised in the West Indies rather than in Africa. Is Jamaica a significantly worse place to live than Africa? If so they could always move. I’m sure that I read somewhere that some African Americans did just that. If I remember correctly, they found that Africa wasn’t very nice and went back to America.