This relates to the BBC article [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66596790] which states “the UK should pay $24tn (£18.8tn) for its slavery involvement in 14 countries”.
The UK abolished slavery in 1833. That’s 190 years ago. So nobody alive today has a slave, and nobody alive today was a slave.
Dividing £18tn by the number of UK taxpayers (31.6m) gives £569 each. Why do I, who have never owned a slave, have to give £569 to someone who similarly is not a slave?
When I’ve paid my £569 is that the end of the matter forever or will it just open the floodgates of other similar claims?
Isn’t this just a country that isn’t doing too well, looking at the UK doing reasonably well (cost of living crisis excluded of course), and saying “oh there’s this historical thing that affects nobody alive today but you still have to give us trillions of Sterling”?
Shouldn’t payment of reparations be limited to those who still benefit from the slave trade today, and paid to those who still suffer from it?
(Please don’t flame me. This is NSQ. I genuinely don’t know why this is something I should have to pay. I agree slavery is terrible and condemn it in all its forms, and we were right to abolish it.)
So, American here. My family immigrated from Germany, Poland, England, and Italy (the nationalities of my four grandparents). My family never owned slaves, never owned farmland, never profited from any of that. Why should my tax dollars go towards paying reparations for something my family had no part in?
That’s the part that I struggle with. Should the families who directly profited off of slavery pay reparations? Perhaps. Should the families and individuals who had nothing to do with slavery? Absolutely not.
Nobody is suggesting that your taxes should increase to exactly match the amount you’d have to personally pay. It’s the responsibility of the government to do it, and while the government does ultimately use your tax dollars it’s not like you’ll personally feel the effect.
Except you would feel the effects. The government would end up with less money for services so worse roads, hospitals, schools etc and probably higher taxes
Good news - your government will spend as little as it can possibly get away with on those things whether you pay slavery reparations or not!
This always seems such a strange argument to me, as if governments are just screaming to spend money on roads, hospitals etc. They spend it on pet projects and tax cuts for their voterbase.
Of course they are, roads, hospitals, railways etc are vote buying. Doesn’t mean they are doing it out of a sense of civic duty because they are generally scum. But if you think that 14 trillion in reparations (450k per tax payer!) Isn’t going to have a massive impact on future spending then I have a bridge for sale!
It depends on the period of time they’re paid over, doesn’t it? Generational debts like these are repaid over, well, generations. It’s not going to be something we notice, and the UK aren’t the only country involved.
Plus, if that’s what you think, I don’t think you can have seen the state of the UK’s roads, hospitals and railways.
I use them daily so imagine how much worse they would be with generational debt.
It would be used as an excuse to privatise every thing left :( I really can’t understand how it wouldn’t affect the average person. You can’t just hand wave away the impact of a very large amount increased debt. Ironically the people that would have had the least amount ‘benefit’ from the slave trade would be the ones that feel the most impact from any reparations. Social programs would be the first ones hit
I promise you, we had massive generational debt all the time I was growing up in the seventies, eighties and nineties, and when my mother was growing up in the 50s and 60s. We had way better public services then than we have today. Whether or not the government is making debt repayments has no bearing on public services—that’s all about the attitude of the government, and a government that wants to privatise everything and destroy the public trust will always find some pretext to do so, such as the triple lock being the biggest votewinner in the land.
Well, if we’re talking about ideal spending of tax dollars, this isn’t acceptable either. Any way we split it, the government will not spend our money the way we see fit, so it’s still a valid argument to me.
The hospitals, schools, libraries, roads and services were built with the aid of the disputed money in the first place.