Opportunities for cynicism abound as news breaks that Leigh Day, an activist firm of solicitors in London, are to sue the UK Government on behalf of descendants of Jamaican slaves.
Slavery, to be clear, was not invented by the British. It is thought to have existed across the overwhelming majority of cultures for over 10,000 years. The British did not even invent it in Africa. Five hundred years ago, long before the Europeans started interfering on a grand scale, there were parts of Africa where 50% of the population consisted of people enslaved by other Africans. What the Europeans did however was approach slavery on an industrial scale, buying slaves in Africa and shipping them to the other side of the Atlantic.
Once the worm turned the British were instrumental in the fight against the slave trade, banning it throughout the British empire in 1807, encouraging other countries to do the same and finally devoting considerable naval resources to stopping the transatlantic trade by force. In the following 50 years the British navy seized 1,600 slave ships and freed over 150,000 Africans aboard them.
It would seem fair to suggest that Britain's record on the slave trade is no worse than most and a lot better than some.
The plaintiffs in Leigh Day's cases will be ordinary Jamaican individuals. They were not slaves themselves. The Torygraph today features one such, an elderly (please note) Jamaican called Willie Thompson, whose great-great-grandmother was sold for work in the sugar cane plantations.
Some facts. Mr Thompson would almost certainly not have been born were it not for slavery. Otherwise his great-great-grandmother would have had to meet his great-great-grandfather in Africa, give birth to his great-grandmother (or father), who would then have had to meet his great-grandfather (or mother), also in Africa, give birth to his grandmother (or father), who would then have had to meet his grandfather (or mother), in Africa, who would then have had to sire his mother (or father), who would then have had to meet his father (or mother), who would also have had to sire Mr Thompson. In Africa.
It is of course beyond unlikely that this should happen. Far from suffering from slavery, Mr Thompson in fact owes his life to slavery. And the fact that he is living in Jamaica, not in Africa.
To illustrate how lucky Mr Thompson is, the average male life expectancy in Jamaica is about 74 years. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, by way of example, it is slightly under 50.
So Mr Thompson is dead lucky. But he wants the British government to compensate him for the undoubted suffering of his great-great-grandmother. Leigh Day are a very effective law firm. I'm pretty sure they will succeed in gouging some pretty fat compensation out of the UK government, netting themselves some fat fees in the process.
Although actually of course it's not the UK Government's money at all. It's ours, yours and mine. Personally I don't remember profiting very much from slavery. It would be strange if I had. It was illegal for one hundred and fifty years before I was born. Yet Mr Thompson thinks some of my tax should be given to him.
So people who did not suffer from slavery (who in fact have benefited dramatically as a consequence) are now looking for a payout from people who did not profit from it either. Funny old world.
