The Irish are not the only group within the British population whose historical circumstances make reparations liability logically untenable. Eastern European, Baltic, and other European communities now living in Britain bring their own histories of oppression, occupation, and dispossession that have no connection to the Atlantic slave trade.
Poland, for example, was partitioned between Prussia, Austria, and Russia in 1795 and ceased to exist as an independent state until 1918. For over a century, Poles lived under foreign occupation, with their language, culture, and national identity suppressed. The Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, spent decades under Soviet occupation after 1940. Ukraine has been subject to imperial domination for centuries.
The descendants of these peoples, now living in Britain, come from nations that were themselves victims of imperial power. Taxing them to compensate for a different empire’s different colonial wrongs, on the basis that they are white, is not justice. It is the imposition of racial liability without historical foundation.
