Reparations have become big business for the activist class

The history of slavery has a nightmarish quality. I have in front of me one of the earliest documents of the Atlantic slave trade, reporting that a ship set out from the Cape Verde islands for Portugal in 1513 carrying “two small children who were five to six years old”. A Genoese merchant claimed ownership – I say “claimed” because, like all of us, I do not believe one human being can own another.

All this inevitably arouses emotion, and the demand for reparations to the descendants of slaves becomes louder by the day. What was once a niche historical debate is now a mainstream political conversation, thanks in large part to America’s internal neuroses on matters of race.

Indeed, a whole reparations industry is coming into existence. The latest sign of it is that Laura Trevelyan has resigned her position as a BBC news presenter to concentrate on being a “roving advocate” for reparations. In February her family said it would send £100,000 to aid community projects in Grenada, where their ancestors (related to Lord Macaulay, whose father was an active abolitionist) once owned slaves. She has formidable allies in her new cause; President Biden has supported the idea of studying reparations, although in 2021 only 29 per cent of Americans backed the idea.

Despite public opposition, the message has spread across the Atlantic to Britain, where Lloyd’s of London and the Greene King brewery promised in 2020 to channel funds to support black and minority ethnic communities. This step followed the revelation that their founders included slave owners with estates in the Caribbean who received compensation when slavery was abolished, though the slaves did not.

In the Caribbean, a Reparations Commission has been established, with a ten-point “Reparation Plan”. It includes not just debt cancellation but insistence that poor health among descendants of slaves (such a higher occurrence of hypertension and type 2 diabetes) is a direct legacy of slavery. Its most remarkable demand is for a “right of return” for those who wish to go back to their ancestral lands after all these centuries.

Some places are listening. In San Francisco, the city’s board of supervisors has expressed approval of a plan to give every eligible black resident of the city $5 million, eliminate their personal debt, guarantee the income of black residents for 250 years, and sell them homes for $1. This is insanity, and it is very possible that early expressions of enthusiasm will wane by the time decisions are actually made.

But whether or not any money is ever paid out to the descendants of slaves, plenty is finding its way into studies and campaigns. In Shelby county in Tennessee, a scoping exercise to look into the feasibility of reparations is set to cost $5 million. As this cottage industry takes hold, few dare to ask whether reparations are appropriate in the first place.

At the root of the reparations movement is a deep misunderstanding about how we relate to the past. The present generation does not hold moral responsibility for the crimes and prejudices of times long past. It is much more important to work against current prejudices than to blame others for ancient ones that they would never embrace.