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Free Gear Kier has said reparations are off the table only to find that the Commonwealth leaders have put it firmly on his table. The prediction has to be that this weakling will cave in and agree to trillions in reparations, after all, he won’t be paying it. The UK being pretty close to bankrupt and with an over £2.7 trillion national debt it is hard to see where the largesse is going to come from. My guess is we’ll have to borrow it if anyone is daft enough to lend us a few quid.
If you have a basket case country and you get a whiff of a few billion you will be all over it. We all know what will happen to the money anyway, straight into the capacious pockets of the President or Prime Minister with his cronies getting some crumbs to keep them sweet.
There are 56 countries in the Commonwealth and only 4 are majority white. It is easy to assume that of the 52 other countries, many will be expecting reparations for slavery. It was kind of hinted that it was the Caribbean nations who were pushing for this. It is hard to see the others calmly acquiescing and restricting the demands to the West Indies and thereabouts. We can expect the West African nations, from where many slaves originated, to join the queue of mendicants.
The lunatic Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, has started working on reparations payments. The arguments are off the scale regarding who gets the loot, though not who will be paying. If any payments are made expect a major chimp out as the recipients find out they are not all equal and those who get nothing will be incandescent.
California is still investigating how to handle this rat’s nest it has stirred up. So far financial payments to descendants of black slaves is off the table. There it is, that damn table again. California was never a slave state and the few other states also sniffing around this can of worms were not slave states. Thus far the legislators are trying to restrict it to improving people’s lives. It sounds like it will be very pork barrel style.
To return to the Commonwealth demands for reparations. There has been no list of countries who deserve reparations nor any details of what they will contain. I reckon most people in the Caribbean think they will be millionaires by next year. What is not in question is who is going to pay, that’s right, it’s us again and we have to assume many of the 52 other countries will decide they deserve reparations. No wonder they are talking in terms of trillions of pounds.
If any compensation is agreed I suspect it will be along the lines of foreign aid rather than pressing massive amounts of money into the hands of those who feel aggrieved. There will be much disappointment and multiple chimp outs. The upper echelons of these countries will do very nicely out of it along with Mercedes and private jet manufacturers. The rest of the people in those countries will see very little change to their lives.
The big question will concern which countries are in line for reparations and how they will be paid. Should it be restricted to countries where British ships once shipped slaves. What about the other countries that also engaged in the slave trade.
Most of the transatlantic slave trade was run by seven countries; the Portuguese, the British, the Frogs, The Spanish, the Dutch, the Americans and the Danish. Estimates are around 12.5 million slaves were shipped, nearly 5 million of whom went to Brazil and 2.3 million went to the British Caribbean and surprisingly a mere 388k to North America.
Whatever the history we are fully aware of who is going to pay, that’s right us as usual. The only questions are who gets paid, how much and how will it be distributed.
I would suggest the recipients will want cash, we on the other hand, assuming we don’t tell them to do one, should offer improvements to their infrastructure and the like. Whatever we provide is going to be nicked so does it really matter what we provide. The charities supplying water wells to the Africans regularly see their pipework stolen. South Africa which had a first world infrastructure is now edging into the third world seeing as some of it has been nicked and the rest has not been maintained since the ANC took over.
As to the question of how much – a sum of £2 trillion has been mentioned. This is back of a fag packet stuff and completely nonsensical. It will depend on how many countries manage to get on the list of recipients and what kind of compo is agreed.
The biggest bun fight is going to be which countries will be on the list of recipients. Maybe it will only be Commonwealth members, this will not include all who feel we owe them oodles of dosh. In the case of the USA, only 388k slaves were ferried across the Atlantic to the US slave markets. This out of the 12 and a half million who were transported. The biggest share, over 5 million, went to Brazil, the second was the British Caribbean countries with well over 2 million shipped across. We shipped about 3.25 million slaves in total across the pond. It should also be mentioned that an estimated over 1.8 million perished on the voyages. Heartless as it seems, the captains were only paid for live slaves delivered; they had an incentive to keep them alive if possible.
If we agree to pay reparations to the Caribbean nations in the Commonwealth, what of other nations in the Caribbean. These would for example include Cuba and Haiti. You can’t tell me that they would sit by and watch other countries suck at the reparations teat without wanting a go themselves. Would we be opening up the French, Spanish and Portuguese to yet more grifting. I sincerely hope so. Once other nations are in line to payout all hell will break loose.
I deliberately restricted this article to the transatlantic trade, There were many more routes and countries involved if we look at the whole world including the Barbary pirates trafficking white slaves and the Ottomans castrating their African slaves. There have been various allegations about the ethnicity of the people financing this trade and I have deliberately avoided that can of worms and not only because I have seen no proof.
My bottom line is that many in the Caribbean will now think they are going to be millionaires. This would in a few cases be true but whatever happens you can be sure the average citizen will not see a penny of any compo. It is equally certain there will be uproar in this country as we are already paying billions a year to be invaded and more billions on top for historical slavery may be just a step too far. Two Tier Keir will need to tread very carefully.
© well_chuffed 2024
