The claim sounds plausible because it rests on a real and documented injustice. The 1833 compensation payment is a matter of historical record. It is genuinely the case that slaveholders were compensated and the enslaved were not. The moral asymmetry is not invented or exaggerated. The British state made a deliberate decision about whose financial interests to protect.
The intuition that an unpaid debt compounds over time also has surface plausibility. If a person is owed money and is never paid, the injustice does not diminish with time. The argument that enslaved people and their descendants are owed something that was never delivered has genuine moral force at the level of individual cases.
The compound interest calculations, while contested, are not absurd in principle. They are an attempt to quantify a wrong that most people agree occurred. The fact that the numbers are very large is not itself a reason to dismiss the underlying point.
Finally, the argument draws strength from the fact that the loan to compensate slaveholders was genuinely still being repaid within living memory. The connection between the 1833 payment and contemporary British taxpayers is not entirely theoretical.
