Put simply your argument sounds shocking, but it isn’t simple. Skavery itself is simply shocking, but the methods of getting rid of it are not simple and I think the Guardian’s article lets the paper down.
If one looks under, for example, Anderson or Blair, two Scots names, you will find some owners of huge numbers where the combined totals come to high hundreds but also owners of say one or two, often but not exclusively women. What is one saying about them? Or the people whose money - not necessarily wealth - indirectly came from the system?
What is one saying about people whose wealth was based on, say, indentured labour in the Far East?
And the system of Government gilts, the 3%rs, were as described, non hypothecated, used for much more than just this issue. It’s a very clear description above. It’s only because interest rates have been unhistorically low that it's been worth paying off gilts.
Like others, I prefer a financial solution to one of bloodshed. And it took long enough as it was, even with compensation. Trying to get the Govt to agree to go to war with its nationals so far away when so many people up and down the land of the United Kingdom, rich and poorer, were invested either directly or indirectly, would have been on a hiding to nothing,
It sounds as though it’s ok to dislike inherited wealth unless it can be proven to be clean money. In which case it’s good that we do now have ethically based funds. But that’s a whole other issue that needs disentangling.
But - and here I am speculating- it also sounds possible to me that the Guardian writer has in the back of the mind the fact that Haiti only paid off its payment for freedom to France relatively recently, in 1947, despite having revolted successfully. To me that’s a very different issue.