Reparations for slavery would amount to a “vast fine on the entire British people for a crime they did not commit”, the former Archbishop of Canterbury the Rt Revd Justin Welby said this week.
“You may be able to fine individual people for their conduct, but not everyone for their nationality,” he wrote in The Independent on Tuesday. “Group punishment is a moral evil. It mixes up the guilty and the innocent even when it is about contemporary times, let alone two centuries past.”
The article was published on the same day as a speech made by the King at the opening of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in St John’s, Antigua. The transatlantic trade in enslaved persons was a “shameful chapter of history” that “fills my heart with horror and my soul with the most profound personal sorrow”, the King said.
The UK Government has so far resisted calls for reparations, although the Prime Minister has indicated that a formal apology may be forthcoming.
