Even setting aside the legal problems with a race-based levy, the logic of the reparations argument produces a pool of liable people that is far smaller than its advocates assume and far different from the “all white British people” framing that the campaign effectively implies.
Follow the logic of inherited responsibility and apply it consistently. Who actually bears liability for the Atlantic slave trade? The people who participated in it. Who participated? British merchants, ship owners, plantation operators, and the investors who backed them. Who did not participate? Almost everyone else.
Once you start applying filters, the pool of people with any logical claim to liability shrinks rapidly. The Irish have their own historical grievances with Britain that give them no plausible role as compensators for Caribbean slavery. Eastern Europeans who are now British citizens come from nations that were themselves oppressed and had no connection to the Atlantic trade. South Asians, East Asians, and other communities with no historical connection to slavery carry no logical liability. The British working poor of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had no capital, no political power, and no stake in the trade.
This section works through those filters and examines what remains at the end.
