Let’s be clear. Demands for slavery reparations are historically illiterate and deeply insulting. They also reflect a blatant cash-grab by often corrupt and failing states that are exploiting the sickness of wokeness and guilt that has taken hold of the West.

They are based on an extremely selective reading of history. Nobody questions the fact that Britain was involved in the slave trade. But what these extreme activists who have been fully indoctrinated in anti-British and anti-Western ideologies ignore is the major role Britain then played in abolishing slavery and enforcing this, too, when so many other nations refused to do so.

[…] It’s not mentioned because it complicates and undermines the woke narrative.

Nor, by the way, do they say anything at all about the extensive black-on-black slavery that went on during this time. […] Africans enslaved other Africans for centuries, from the African kingdom of Kongo to Omani Arabs on the East African coast to Fulani Africans in Nigeria. Yet nobody ever mentions this.

What’s also ignored […] is that while slavery is absolutely abhorrent and should always be condemned it is also true that Britain made enormous positive contributions to many of these nations, including but not limited to: the English language, common law, universities, effective administration, higher rates of growth, medicine, longer life expectancy, policing, and sanitation. As Heydel-Mankoo notes, if these nations were serious and consistent about their desire to ‘decolonise’ their nations then they would remove all these things, too.

Nor do these activists say much about how slavery is still practiced today, including across parts of Africa and Asia. […]

What we are left with, in short, is an ugly cash-grab. Forcing the hardworking, decent British people to send billions in foreign aid to nations that simultaneously demand trillions more in “slavery reparations” has to be one of the greatest Ponzi schemes of all time. Just look at the numbers.