Reparations paid to SLAVE OWNERS only stopped being paid by UK Government 2 years ago

[AssignedPuuurfectAtBirth]

IANBU to think it's a fucking scandal that

"You might expect this so-called “slave compensation” to have gone to the freed slaves to redress the injustices they suffered. Instead, the money went exclusively to the owners of slaves, who were being compensated for the loss of what had, until then, been considered their property. Not a single shilling of reparation, nor a single word of apology, has ever been granted by the British state to the people it enslaved, or their descendants.

Today, 1835 feels so long ago; so far away. But if you are a British taxpayer, what happened in that quiet room affects you directly.

Your taxes were used to pay off the loan, and the payments only ended in 2015

The benefits of slave-owner compensation were passed down from generation to generation of Britain’s elite. Among the descendants of the recipients of slave-owner compensation is the former prime minister David Cameron.

www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/29/slavery-abolition-compensation-when-will-britain-face-up-to-its-crimes-against-humanity

If you've got a penny piece in NSI; if you work for the State nationally or locally; if the business you work for sells to the State nationally or locally; or if it sells to businesses which sells to the State . . . you had better hope the U.K. goes on honouring its sovereign debt. Just like it has paid this debt; not to the slaveholders but to the people from whom it borrowed the money to pay them off.

sleepyjane it was not just the rich that compensated everyone that had slaves from the noble family that 100+ slaves to the widow who pension was used to get 3 or 4 slaves as that yielded greater returns of a navy pension which was state run and promoted by the government at the time.

Slave owner were not just the top end of the social spectrum it was rife within most social escutcheons excluding only the people living in total poverty as in if your husband / son / brother died in service the family member would get a pension / widower payment which was most of the time "invested" into pursing and renting slaves much like how pension funds these days purchase buy to lets etc

I did a lot of reading around the time this was news. One in three Scots owned slaves (indirectly as a nation with a reputation for being canny with money) they well invested in plantations and the like. Other areas like Bristol and Liverpool with trading ports also had a high percentage of slave owners. Ordinary, common people were investing in shares, slaves, the railways and on occasion, the mines.

So I do raise the proverbial eyebrow when someone mithers on about David Cameron as an example of someone with ancestors investing in business that is abhorrent in the modern day, fact of the matter is, we all probably had someone one directly involved in the slave trade.

If you want to take moral high ground, stop using sugar products or coffee or tea or cotton

The slave trade and payments are certainly reprehensible but if you read the treasury document, the loan to the original lenders was paid many years ago. Government debt was rolled into gilts and ended up in 1957 is an undated low interest rate gilt. This was paid off in 2015 because interest rates were low. Arguing we paid off the loan in 2015 is like saying we have never paid off any government borrowing because we have a larger debt today than we had in the past.
There are 32 volumes of recipients of the money, over 43,000 claims. These include George Orwell's great grandfather and ancestors of Ainsley Harriott. Full link here for more browsing if interested.

Jesus fuck.

The personal attacks on me here are ridiculous. I am shocked about this and I don't think that this reaction is 'simple minded' or whatever insults have been thrown at me.

Nor am I a SJW. It's as lazy to call someone this as it is to accuse them of being a facist.

I do not think it defensible that we have been paying off this loan 200 years later, if that makes me a looney leftie, so be it. Except I'm not.

And comparing it to the loans taken out for fighting the Nazis/WW2 is simply stupid. Or are we about to find out that we took a loan out to pay off the Nazis to end WW2?

Don't bother coming back to throw insults or whataboutery, I'm not going to reply to them.

Would be happy to discuss and learn more from people who can hold a conversation

Bet if you looked at descendents of slave owners we had to pay off they would all be doing very well for themselves. And descendents of slaves would still be very poor.

this makes no sense since the descendants of slave owners and the descendants of slaves are the same people.....

Wouldn't it be better to worry about the slave problem in the U.K. today, that we can do something about, rather than waste effort sniping at one another about something that happened 175 years ago?

this exactly

so OP? why aren't you outraged at modern slavery in the UK?

OP, YANBU. It is shocking.

To those saying it's All too easy to judge the past by the standards of today:

That is not the point OP is making. The point is that the legacies of slave ownership - and of those compensation payments - continue to shape society to the present day. For example, many of those compensation payments were reinvested by former slave owners to boost the growth of the Industrial Revolution. This boosted Britain's economic development and contributed to some of the global economic inequalities that persist today.

this is a load of utter bollocks.

the money was paid immediately in 1835, and the government borrowed to pay for it, as governments always do.

Government debt is in the form of bonds, which pay an annual dividend. This debt is bought and sold openly and changes hands many, many times.

Earlier government bonds were perpetual, i.e. they paid an annual dividend forever. This has nothing to do with slavery, it's just a form of debt.

A bond has a face value of £100, but sells at some discount or premium to that based on the bond interest rate, maturity, and prevailing rates. E.g., if prevailing interest rates are 10%, and you have a bond that matures next year paying only 1%, then an appropriate price of the bond is around £91, to make up for the fact that you get back £100 next year, and you'd earn £10 interest elsewhere, but only £1 from the government.

The government perpetual debt had rates typically around 3%, so if you bought a government perpetual then you'd get £3 each and every year forever. If you did so during periods when you could get 10%+ in the bank, then you'd not want to pay anywhere close to face value (£100), and the perpetuals traded as low as around £25.

Howeer by 2015, interest rates were rock bottom, and the government could borrow money over a very long horizon at rates below 3%, and as they had the right to buy back the perpetuals at face value (£100), they did so, rather than continue to pay 3% annual interest rates.

www.globalfinancialdata.com/gfdblog/?p=3306

They paid the slave owners in 1835, everything else is a red herring.

For those interested, here's an interesting research project about this:

www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

Actually OP I have tons to fill my time - hence me realising that you must not have much else to worry about!

I am Camilla. But I can walk and chew gum at the same time

If you were to start a thread on it, I'd be happy to discuss

The issue is not the loan repayments. Of course they should have been paid.

The scandal is that the richest people in the country (6% of those compensated) managed to trouser more than 1/2 of 40% of the government’s yearly income.

Im going to make an insane guess here. I'm going to guess that a lot of this 6% were either in parliament or "owned" MPs

The fuckers voted themselves over £150bn (equiv) of the countries money.

Thats the scandal

presumably though, one of the reasons it took so long to pay of the loan is because we are nervous about taxing wealth rather than income and allow lots of trust funds many of which will be trusts funds of 'compensation'

Im going to make an insane guess here. I'm going to guess that a lot of this 6% were either in parliament or "owned" MPs. The fuckers voted themselves over £150bn (equiv) of the countries money. Thats the scandal.

I get it, bad shit happened nearly 200 years ago... and by modern standards it’s appalling, but what’s the point getting worked up about it now...

It makes as much sense to ask Norway to make reparations for the raping and pillaging of Viking times, or for the Welsh and Cornish to demand money from German Saxony for sending hordes or Anglo-Saxons, disposaessing their ancestors I’d their land and forcing them westwards.

And besides, your title is clearly and brazenly factually incorrect. The slaveowners were paid in 1835... the debt which enabled those payments to be made was repaid in 2015, and even then there’s a strong argument that it’s not that simple.

Save your outrage for the slavery that’s occurring right now in the U.K. rather than beating this pathetic nonsensical little drum.

The irony is that if you have a pension, it could very well have owned that debt at some point and your pension pot comprises funds derived from it... Are YOU planning to pay that ‘dirty money’ back?

And if you don’t have a pension, do you expect all those public sector workers (many of whom will be descendants of slaves) whose pension contributions would have bought this debt to repay some of their pensions?

"The fuckers voted themselves over £150bn (equiv) of the countries money."

It's more like £80 billion (4% of then GDP), but yes a lot of dosh.

I think they did a study and people with 'Norman' surnames (from 1066) are still on average significantly richer than those with Anglo-Saxon names, so 200 years is relatively recent in that sense.

I think they did a study and people with 'Norman' surnames (from 1066) are still on average significantly richer than those with Anglo-Saxon names, so 200 years is relatively recent in that sense.

Crap, I have a Viking surname... Are you going to come after me for reparations?

Maybe the English should just hand over all their wealth to he poor Scots, Irish and Welsh who we battered over the years. It doesn’t matter as we’ll pay for it from reparations from the Italians for their Roman plundering!

And besides, your title is clearly and brazenly factually incorrect. The slaveowners were paid in 1835.

I am happy to concede the point about my title. coco.

So. Is this not worthy of comment?

To comment about the utter skullduggery of it is to be a SJW?

Depends why you are so worked up about something that happened nearly 200 years ago. Not sure who you want to punch/damage/shout at.

Ok Carol
History useless. Got it

Yes by modern standards it is grim. I just think that if we want to focus on issues I think current problems should be our focus not decisions made nearly 200 years ago.

But @ChazsBrilliantAttitude some of our current problems are the result of decisions taken 200 years ago. The past is not hermetically sealed.

So. Is this not worthy of comment?

From the perspective of understanding our history then yes, knowing the mistakes and evils of the past is always a good thing.

From the perspective of arguing that it’s a national disgrace that we continued paying the associated debts to the bond holders (e.g. pension funds and the like) until 2015,
and that this was somehow using 21st century taxpayers money to support 19th century slave owners, no, it is palpable nonsense.