If the UK has to pay reparations, will other countries?

Governments raise money through taxation though so we all pay though surely?

The government, who doesn't even put their hand in their pocket to pay the heating bill on their second home, you think those guys will be footing the bill?

I think you will find that Tony Blair did apologise.

Well the government should at least issue an apology

As the government gets money from taxation that will be us.

Why on earth would you have to pay for anything?

Reperations are paid for by a government

Who's "they".

The ordinary person has never had to pay reperations. It's always the government

The fact stands that the UK were happy to receive reperations from another country.

Yes, leave reperations out of it for a monet, the UK have never done ONE thing to compensate for wrongdoings in the past. The UK have never acknowledged things they have done to other countries. They have never acknowledged anything.They have never apologised even. A lot of countries have been left totally destroyed by the UK. And the effects are felt to this day.

You know there is a lot of bad feeling towards the UK round the world.

I think the UK are being stupid in prolonging such bad feeling againt the UK, and in not even attempting to even acknowledge or apologise

Where would the money come from? I came here as an immigration and never slaved anybody so do I have to pay for this too? I have been paying a lot to help the most vulnerable already.

They are saying that the ordinary people should pay.

The relevant countries in South America can seek reparations from Spain and Portugal if they want.

The countries that the UK invaded, want reparations from the UK.

The destroyed a lot of the world, and the effects last to this day.

It can't just be glossed over

Yes, reparations were made as part of the peace agreement after WW1. Immediately after. And they were paid to, and by, specific countries. Not to individuals. It could also be argued that those reparations had a hand in the events that lead to WW2. The Nazis made a big thing about the unfairness or illegality of those payments.
Nothing is simple. And the further back we go the more difficult it becomes to compensate for wrongdoing in the past.

one problem is that the people who have to pay for it are ordinary people. There is no magic money tree - what are you willing to sacrifice in order to pay? The NHS? Benefits? Higher taxes?

Who will the money go to? Not the people who actually suffered due to the passage of time (unlike the German reparations to the Jewish people for example)

How do you put a figure on something that happened over 200 years ago?

We should absolutely never forget that it happened or gloss over it but I don't think monetary compensation is feasible. Contributing to stamping out modern slavery would be a better action IMO (and should, obviously, be prioritised anyway)

Well written post. Thanks.

No one is saying the ordinary people should apologise though are they.

They are saying that the government should apologise for past wrongdoings. They haven't apologised for one single thing.

And a lot of the world is worse off to this day, because of what the UK did to them

But the UK were happy to receive a lot of reparations after world war 1.

If they are happy to receive reparations for wrongdoing against them, they should be happy to give reparations to countries they have committed wrongdoing on

That’s true. The English feudal system was pretty close to slavery too. These were decisions made by a tiny minority. Mainly they benefited themselves. Possibly we take all the wealth from the landowning classes and divvy that up between all the oppressed people , internal and external, of ye olde British empire and their descendants. I look forward to my fiver.

Living in the past forever helps nobody, look at the current events at the moment for proof. Yes we memoralise, we treat the past with dignity where we were wrong, we teach our children of the past mistakes, but this endless self flagellation doesn’t help.

I do think it’s incredibly messy and brings up the question of where do you draw a line in history. Do we chase up the Scandinavians for vikings or the French for the the Norse? Are the Italians to blame for the Roman Empire? Should all the countries that only exist because of colonialism be handed back to their indigenous owners?

To be honest there probably needs to be some form of global reset where everyone is entitled to a set amount food/ shelter/ healthcare.Those that can should labour. Everyone should have what they need. I know it all sounds a bit communist and I don’t think it’d ever come to pass. A billion people go to sleep hungry at night whereas waste of food is an enormous issue in other places.

Slavery still exists in many places too. How do you fix the problems of the past when it’s ongoing? As global consumers do we also bear responsibility for the Chinese people forced to labour in reeducation camps. Who benefits? who pays?

I wonder how much it will strain the existence of the Commonwealth

We shouldn't entertain it, but hearing the guy this morning he won't give up

All this will do is cause more divisions and resentment amongst people in Britain and around the world. Race relations in this country are already on the way down. We don't want to find up like the US, however I feel we are going that way.

Do you seriously think that ordinary people voted government in in those days?

I mean we don't have the 18 trillion pounds being asked for, so they may as well ask for the moon on a stick or or a herd of unicorns.

I wonder if the West African countries who systematically sold hundreds of thousands of their own people to European traders will also be paying reparations?

When reparations started to Jewish people the Holocaust was a recent event. People alive had actually been directly and adversely affected by it. And many perpetrators were alive and never faced justice. I understand that the German government may have agreed to pay pensions to those who had been directly affected. ( I remember being told that by someone who received such a pension)
No one alive today is responsible for the slavery that involved people being taken from Africa.