Slavery & Your Taxes
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Slavery & Your Taxes
Not just a history lesson
JULY 2020
On the 3rd August 1835, somewhere in the City of London, two of Europe’s most famous bankers came to an agreement with the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Two years earlier, the British government had passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which outlawed slavery in most parts of the empire. Now it was taking out one of the largest loans in history, to finance the Slave Compensation package required by the 1833 Act.
Nathan Mayor Rothschild and his brother in- law Moses Montefiore agreed to loan the British government £15 million, with the government adding an additional £5 million later. The total sum represented 40% of the government’s yearly income in those days, equivalent to some £300 billion today. Kris Manjapra – The Guardian 29/3/18
This loan, paid directly to the Slave Owners, was repaid by British Taxpayers; like you and me, and this loan was not fully repaid by us until February 2015; And not one single penny in compensation went to the former enslaved people or their families. (See: BAME NEWS 16 June 2020)
So under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 we asked the treasury just what kind of ‘financial instrument’ had been used by the British government from the time of the Loan issuance to Full repayment of that loan in 2015.
Their response is as follows.
“The Slavery Abolition Act (1835) Loan was rolled over into the Government’s gilt programme, ultimately into an undated gilt, the 4% Consolidated loan (1957 or after).
The term ‘undated’ refers to the fact that this gilt was issued with an earliest potential redemption date of 1957, but it was not compulsory for the gilt to be redeemed at this date.
The 4% Consolidated Loan was redeemed on 1 February 2015, as part of the Government’s decision to modernise the gilt portfolio by redeeming all remaining undated gilts.
Money borrowed to fund the Slavery Abolition Act (1835) was therefore fully repaid in 2015. The long gap between this money being borrowed and its repayment was due to the type of instrument that was used, rather than the amount borrowed.” Information Rights Unit – HM Treasury.
BAME NEWS COMMENT: We have a particular word in the English language to describe such a response; No! We won’t refer to it as bovine manure.
Let’s just call it OBSFUSICATION’.
“Today, 1835 feels so long ago; So far away. But if you are a British Taxpayer your taxes were used to pay off the (Abolition) loan, and payments only ended in 2015.’ The Guardian Newspaper –29/3/18
BAME NEWS COMMENT:
Let us remind ourselves here as to who exactly are the true victims of this immoral crime!
From the 16th to the 19th centuries, more than 11 million shackled African captives were forcibly transported in British cargo ships to the Americas; with unknown multitudes tossed overboard when they were too sick, too resistant, or too numerous to feed. Upon arrival, the enslaved were considered property. Bought and sold, raped and lynched, their bodies branded, flayed and mutilated.
And so for HM Treasury to now opine “The long gap between this money being borrowed and its repayment was due to the type of instrument that was used” conjures up to us ‘the all too common stench of British historical amnesia’ and of Institutionalised Racism, which we have sadly grown accustomed too. Even now the legacies of slavery in Britain are not far off; they are in front of your eyes every single day.
So where did ‘your’ and ‘my’ tax money go?
BAME NEWS: I still recall opening up my very first pay slip as a freshly recruited Civil Servant to HM Paymaster General’s Office: all those summers ago – As I eagerly scanned my pay grade and ‘take home’, of course I glanced at the unavoidable HM Tax deductions column, (as we all did). And, like us all in the years that followed I would blissfully have no idea that a miniscule fraction of my ‘Tax deducted’ would be added, along with millions of other contributions, to make repayment on an 1833 Abolition of slavery loan created to pay compensation to British Slave owners who had enriched themselves at the cost of brutalizing literally millions of men, women, and children.
Generations of Britons have been implicated in a legacy of ‘financial support’ for one of the World’s most egregious crimes against humanity. Not fake news. Facts! (And they never taught me any of that in my history lessons at school).
Britain stood out among other slave owning nations in the 19th Century, particularly in its willingness to appease the Slave Owners, and to burden future generations of its citizens with the responsibility of ‘paying the bill’.
In September 1835, less than a month after the Government received its loan, slave-owners began their ‘feeding frenzy’ as they obtained compensation cheques at the National Debt Office. According to University College London, there were some 47, 000 recipients of compensation in total.
The owners of slaves in British society were not just the super-rich; UCL has shown the striking diversity of the people who received compensation, from widows in York to clergymen in the Midlands, attorneys in Durham to glass manufacturers in Bristol, but still most of the money ended up in the pockets of the richest citizens, who owned the greatest number of slaves.
These men and women (and there were a considerable number of women who lived off slave ownership) were anxious that their identities as slave owners be forgotten. And until now they had been very successful.
Follow the Money£
Academics from University College London, led by Dr Nick Draper spent 3 years drawing some 47, 000 records of compensation given to British Slave owners into an Internet Database; Now made available to the public.
https://discovery.nationalarchives.go.uk/details/r/C11249
More than 50% of the total compensation money went to just 6% of the total number of claimants.
29/3/18 – Guardian Newspaper – 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.
David Cameron’s ancestors were among the wealthy families who received generous reparation payments that would be worth millions of pounds in today’s money.
Former Minister Douglas Hogg comes from a privileged circle of Barons with Life peerages, and can boast two former Lord Chancellors – father and grandfather – as ancestors.
Dr Nick Draper UCL – “To have two Lord Chancellors in Britain in the 20th Century bearing the name of a Slave-owner from British Guyana, who went penniless to British Guyana, came back a very rich man and contributed to the formation of this political dynasty – It seems to me to be an illuminating story and a potent example’.
INDEPENDENT Newspaper 24/2/13 –‘Mr Hogg refused to comment yesterday, saying he “didn’t know anything about it”. Mr Cameron declined to comment after a request was made to the number 10 office’.
Cameron and Hogg are not the first ‘Right Honourables’ holding the highest offices in the land with Slave-owning ancestors. John Gladstone, the father of 19th Century Prime Minister William Gladstone, received the modern equivalent of a staggering £83 million pounds in compensation for 2,508 slaves he owned across nine plantations.
Banks
The roots of Slave-ownership run deep in British High society. One of the nation’s oldest banking families, Barings, and the Second Earl of Harewood, Henry Lascelles, an ancestor of the Queen’s cousin were major Slave-owners.
Royal Bank of Scotland – RBS was founded in Edinburgh in 1727.
A 2009 report funded by the bank found that directors of RBS predecessors had owned slaves, as well as giving loans and other support to plantation owners. Eighteen linked directors are referenced in the UCL database. The bank was bailed out by UK taxpayers in 2009.
Barclays Bank – Barclays traces its history back to two goldsmith bankers in London in 1690. Two managers, a subscriber and three directors are named on the UCL database as having been involved in the slave trade or received slave compensation.
HSBC – HSBC was founded in 1865 to finance trade between Europe and Asia, but its 1992 merger with the UK’s Midland Bank gives it earlier roots. Those include The London Joint Bank Stock, whose first manager, George Pollard, shared £2,416 (more than £230,000 today) in compensation for giving up 134 enslaved people in Nevis.
Lloyds Banking Group – Eight former companies associated with Lloyds have links to claimants or beneficiaries in the UCL database.
Arbuthnot Latham – Both of the private bank’s founders, Alfred Latham and James Alves Arbuthnot, were linked to the slave trade. Latham received compensation after the 1833 abolition of slavery, co-founding the bank in the same year. The bank grew into a major funder of Britain’s colonial exploits, including Cecil Rhodes’s gold field in South Africa.
As recently as June 2020 – Pedestals to vanity and colonial greed, in the image of the statue of notorious Bristol Slave trader, Edward Colston, toppled along with his so called ‘philanthropic’ reputation.
A similar fate awaits the British Born colonialist and self proclaimed ‘White supremacist’ Cecil Rhodes whose image adorns the portals of: Oriel College, Oxford. After a long and protracted campaign RHODES MUST FALL – Oxford University Governors have finally agreed that his image should be removed.
Both the BBC and REUTERS News Agency reported that Lloyd’s of London Insurance Market had apologised for their part in slavery: ‘We are sorry for the role played by the Lloyds Market in the 18th and 19th Century Slave trade – an appalling and shameful period of English history, as well as our own.’
Pub Group Greene King founded in the early 19th century by Benjamin Greene was another of the 47,000 people who benefited from Slave-owner compensation.
Current CEO, Nick Mackenzie, apologised for its historic links to the slave trade and pledged to donate money to ‘Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities’ BAME COMMENT (excuse us if we don’t hold our breath!). –
‘It is inexcusable that one of our founders profited from slavery, and argued against its abolition in the 1800’s’. Mackenzie told the Telegraph.
The Greene family continued to own sugar plantations in St Kitts after slavery abolition, finally disposing of them in the 1890’s. While the brewing side of the family prospered the former slave owning side appears to have faded away, though it did give us not only the former Director General of the BBC (1960-69) Hugh Greene but also his brother Graham Greene (1904-1991) – one of the leading English novelists of the 20th century. In 1981 Graham Greene was given an International humane award for his writing – The Jerusalem Literary Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. (Perhaps in the case of this descendent of a Slave-owner, there may be, in the words of Bob Marley, a ‘Redemption Song’)
So we can see that very few areas of British society remain untainted by money that poured in from the ‘blood, sweat and tears’ of enslaved labour; even from the fashionable spheres of the Arts and Entertainment we can trace descendents from Slave-owning ancestry.
Evelyn Bazalgette, the uncle of one of the’ giants of Victorian engineering’- Sir Joseph Bazalgette – and ancestor of the current Arts Council boss (Sir Peter Bazalgette) , was paid the equivalent of £5.7 million in today’s money.
Sir Peter Bazalgette, you may recall was a TV Producer in the 1990’s -Bazal/Endemol; Best known for shows like ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Deal or No Deal’.
Sir Peter seemed quite sanguine about the whole affair, judging from his comments to the Independent. ‘So I heard rumours but this confirms it, and I guess it’s the sort of thing wealthy people on the make did in the 1800’s. He could have put his money elsewhere but regrettably he put it in the Caribbean’.
BAME NEWS COMMENT: We wonder if Sir Peter has confused Trans-Atlantic Slavery with setting up a ‘Thomas Cook style’ Travel Agency.
TV Chef – Ainsley Harriot, who had Slave-owners in his family on his grandfather’s side, was certainly more shocked, and empathetic.
‘You would think the government would have given at least some of the money to freed slaves who need to find homes and start new lives.’ He said. ‘It seems a bit barbaric. It’s like the rich protecting the rich’. Independent Newspaper 24/2/13
BAME COMMENT: We agree with you, Ainsley.
Some of Britain’s eminent historians might not agree with Ainsley’s sentiment.
“Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain would there? You know, an awful lot of them survived”.
Dr D. Starkey – Guardian report 3/7/20
BAME COMMENT: No! Not the ranting of a ‘Neo-Nazi boot boy’, but the words of a leading British Historian. – Dr David Starkey
Windrush
If we compare the treatment dealt out by the British Government to the victims of the WINDRUSH GENERATION SCANDAL- Invited migrants, who came to aid post- war Britain in its hour of need (More of which in the next issue), and who were, after all, the Caribbean descendents of the very slaves abused by Slave owners; then we can clearly see that any notion of equality of opportunity in Britain remains only that – Simply a ‘notion’.
‘Only 60 people have received WINDRUSH COMPENSATION payments during the First year of the scheme’s operation, with just £360,000 distributed from a fund officials expected might be required to pay out between £200 million and £500 million. The Guardian 28/5/2020
BAME NEWS COMMENT:
The time has come to end our exploration into the moral mugging of British history by our Institutions. We have endeavoured to illustrate how for nearly two centuries ordinary British taxpayers have paid compensation to some 47,000 Slave-owners and their families, while not a penny went to the enslaved people or their families.
No longer should British history be hijacked to suit some neo-colonial plan, in which the rules of divide and conquer perpetuate….. History should not be put to work in the cause of some supremacist’s dreamscape, nor used to erase the identity of those who have been victimised and continue to be victimised throughout the course of history.
Sorry Mr Gove! But we must end our report with the words of an expert.
Prof. Catherine Hall (UCL) – The problem is that Slavery and it’s after effects did not glide neatly and nobly, to a halt with the 1833 Act – even if that’s what conventional wisdom would have us believe.
Thank you for taking the time to read this report; Undo the forgetting by passing this report onto others.