Sorry Is The Hardest Word

With King Charles touring the Caribbean, the question of an apology and reparations for the Slavery Trade is being asked again and there is a great cartoon by Ben Jennings in the Guardian which seems to sum up the awful thoughts of some of the establishment with a man arrogantly explaining that Britain has already paid reparations for slavery, to all those poor slave owning families who lost out when it was abolished.
When the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 came into force, the Slave Compensation Act 1837 followed and the British government paid £20 million to slave owners in compensation which is equivalent to £17bn in today's money paid out to 46,000 slave owners to compensate them for the loss of their 'property'.
The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership estimates that up to 20% of Britain's wealthy can be identified as having had links to slavery and despite the abolition, many owners continued to exploit the slaves on  multi-year 'apprenticeships' of unpaid labour.
Data from the University College London Legacies of British Slavery Project shows that roughly half of the £20 million payout remained in Great Britain, enriching prominent politicians, aristocrats, and merchants including several of the most notable families and political figures who received payouts.
Sir John Gladstone, father of four-time British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, received the single largest individual payout, £106,769 (equivalent to roughly £12 million today) as compensation for the 2,508 enslaved people he owned across his Caribbean plantations
The Jolliffe Family, related to David Cameron’s wife Samantha, received £4,000 (£533,200.00 in 2026) in compensation and MP James Blair who is the great-great-grandfather of Eric Blair (George Orwell) received £83,530 (£11.1m) for the thousand enslaved people he owned.
The then largest empire in the world cannot pretend that by ending Slavery they are in anyway absolved, between 1519 and 1833, Britain transported 40.5% of enslaved humans, almost 5 million humans herding onto ships and transporting them to awful conditions to work for free on sugar, cotton, and tobacco fields while bolstering Britain's economy.
It's true that Brit's today aren’t directly responsible for the actions of their ancestors, but we are responsible for somehow making sure that their abhorrent actions are at least acknowledged and widely known and castigated because as Author James Baldwin wrote: 'Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed if it is not faced'.