A new IEA paper finds the £18.8 trillion slavery reparations demand facing Burnham in Antigua exceeds the UK’s entire £13.3 trillion net worth per the ONS, and is mostly compound interest. Report author Doug Stokes points out that cutting the Brattle Group’s assumed interest rate by just a fifth of a percentage point wipes $7 trillion off the total. Some useful airborne reading for Andy as he jets across the Atlantic…
The most thorough recent research puts slavery’s boost to Britain at around a decade’s income growth, concentrated in a few thousand families. Ending it cost 1.8% of national income a year for sixty years, five thousand British lives and the £20 million compensation bill, which taxpayers only finished paying off in 2015. Brattle treats even that as a debt still owed. The size of Britain’s national debt – a more pressing issue for the government, you’d think – is now above £3 trillion…
Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Qatar all backed March’s UN resolution branding the Atlantic trade the gravest crime against humanity. As Stokes points out:
“The atonement complex has allowed hostile regimes internationally to use Western guilt over slavery as a tool of statecraft, often while deflecting scrutiny of their own conduct regarding slavery.”
Even Starmer didn’t bother going down this road…
Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked John Healey: “Just finally, I mean Andy Burnham has been very clear he wants Britain back in the European Union in his lifetime. Do you?”
The Chancellor replied: “I’m older than Andy Burnham. I don’t expect to see that.”