AIBU to think I should get reparations?

[PositiveEngine]

I’m from a working class background. My ancestors, going back 200 years, were also working class people and before that, agricultural labourers. They weren’t slaves, but they were engaged in backbreaking manual work, for very little pay, housed in what were effectively slums, to make capitalists rich. They had no practical way out of that life and the impacts are still felt; I’ve done alright for myself, but the biggest determinant of where someone ends up in life remains where they started.

AIBU to think some reparations would level the playing field a bit?

That's a very generous interpretation.....

Except those who are seriously calling for reparations are living in a system which is still stacked against them. The structural inequities they face are a direct result of those which enslaved their ancestors. Black people are denied a mortgage more often than white people despite having the same level of wealth.

I get where you're coming from although I don't actually want money.

Some of the relatively recent history on one side of my family is utterly shocking. Situations that wealthy people would have been able to cope with (or could not have been in in the first place) resulted in incarceration or institutionalisation for WC people.

There was very real trauma and some of this becomes intergenerational. It takes remarkable strength to be the person who breaks the cycle of trauma.

I'd like to see a move towards a fairer society. Maximum wages perhaps. Maybe universal basic income ought to be explored. It ought to be socially embarrassing to be wealthy and not a great philanthropist.

To those who say "work harder" many of our lowest paid roles have the hardest workers. Our entire system is still completely reliant on badly paid people working long hours at the bottom. That's what needs to change. Your well paid important careers and comfortable lives would crumble without them.

maybe you should have worked harder!

Working class people weren’t owned but they had very little agency and others were made rich from their backbreaking labour in dangerous working conditions. They couldn’t leave those jobs and had no real way out of that life.

I say go for it OP. Then share your reparation demand template with all those factory workers today in Bagladesh, China, India etc on less than a living wage, producing goods you have bought.
Most have no agency to do otherwise, as they work just to survive, similar to your ancestors hundreds of years ago.

If you've shopped in eg M&S, Next or other high street shops or bought supermarket clothes, you're almost guaranteed to have benefitted from their labour, so you can pay them reparations.

My ancestors were Irish travellers do we get a penny from the pot too? 😬 could come in considering the size of my fucking water bill 🙄

@PositiveEngine yes, we should all get reparations as most of the landed gentry grabbed land and claimed it as their own only in vast quantities. As you say, there was very little, if any option to get out of serfdom.
The wealthy 1% or whatever that figure is would disagree and probably avoid tax through awful tax laws that let them do so. Reparations would be intolorable to the them.
I'd go back to barter if I was in charge and see who actually has skills that others need. I'm betting that the most paid do the least necessary work.

@InconvenientlyMaterial saw an article on a daytime tv thing the other day looking at the papers and they had footballers with handbags, the most expensive was 35k. Nobody needs a handbag that is more than someone else's yearly income.
It used to be that the landgrabbers would be a lot more philanthropic but even then Dicken's books have phrases like 'deserving poor'. Still a tiered system.

Not only a bit. YABU, OP.

This. The piss takers are determined to miss the point. It’s about a fairer society, and the reason it’s unfair goes back to the exploitation and theft of resources, similarly to the situation in the colonies

That's most of the population if you go back 200 years. Mine are all Ag Lab or mine workers. Who would be left to pay this compensation, even at £50 each for x million it would be a vast amount of money and I expect you would want a great deal more than that..

So if you're saying that people should be held responsible now for something their ancestors did 200 years ago, then by your reasoning people should be put in jail for crimes committed by their parents, grandparents, great grandparents and great great grandparents.

Its the exact same principle, no?

Excellent, a new way to bankrupt the country. All for it! My ancestors were largely farm workers and general labourers. I'll settle for, say, £250k? I won't push for interest, I don't want to be greedy.

You’d need to start with paying reparations to the people of the former British colonies who were actually made into slaves. Not sure there would be much money left in the pot afterwards to pay British people from working class backgrounds 😂

I think you might do better to instead campaign to stop inherited wealth or at least make it's effects smaller by taxing it higher from now on.

Although some people will bleat about the 40% inheritance tax threshold, there are quite large allowances and complicated trusts that can be set up that mean that barely anyone actually pays any inheritance tax.

I’m curious if there a difference in the inequality faced by the descendants of enslaved people vs other Black people who don’t have that background (African heritage vs African-American and Carribean, broadly)? I have no idea but it seems relevant to your argument.

In either case the immediate solution is to put effort into proper equality and removal of discrimination now - this should be non controversial and more practically achievable than attempting ‘reparations’.

same here - one side owned a workhouse - another side came from the workhouse

H's great grand father x 2 was very poor lived next door to the house where one of Jack the Rippers victims was found in the back garden. A lot of his family lived in grinding poverty in the same street and on Dorset Street, once described as the worst street in London.
I'll suggest to h, that as his ancestors, long dead, suffered such grinding poverty he ought to claim too on the grounds that, that particular line of his family, about 6 have committed suicide and MH problems including h is prevalent.

You want money from your families historical employers as yoire working class? Is that what you’re saying ? 😂

That could make for a very awkward wedding breakfast; gruel for you, venison for you...

Absolutely, and what about all working class people now. Should we ask employers to give money to their kids, so up the wage by 30 percent and hold it in trust for the kids? Saying sorry your mum was working class, here is some cash to make up for it? 😂

Don't be daft. My ancestors were poor as fuck living in slums working in factories. Right up to my gran and grandad they were poor then my dad worked hard. People now dont deserve compensation for something that didnt happen to them.

I suggest you read a little bit about the slave trade and just how destructive it was. Read about how Haiti was founded and the fact that until the 1950s I believe THEY had to reparations to France to reimburse THE FRENCE for their own freedom (little wonder it has always remained so poor). Read about how when the British empire ended slavery, the people reimbursed with compensation were the SLAVE OWNERS. And of course in the US itwas even worse with the KKK and Jim Crow Laws until the 1960s with deep structural racism.
I am in no way woke and probably not even left wing any more but the slave trade - and its aftermath - were hugely destructive to the societies affected (including those parts of Africa emptied of their able-bodied population). This is in no way comparable to social injustices faced by the general population in pre-industrial societies.

No. there is no valid case for reparations, either for desendents of the working classes or of slaves.

It’s not achievable at all, even in the uk but particularly not worldwide- how do you eliminate the impacts of trauma and loss in bengal from the famine, in bengal? It’s up to their government to sort that now.