The serf system argument extends beyond Eastern Europe. Within Britain itself, the conditions of rural and industrial labourers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while not comparable to chattel slavery, were far removed from freedom and prosperity. Press-ganged into the Navy against their will, employed in conditions of severe danger and exploitation in mines and factories, subject to harsh poor laws that criminalised poverty, the British working poor of the slavery era were not beneficiaries of the system. They were another class of people exploited by it.
Including their descendants in a reparations levy requires claiming that they, having inherited nothing from the slave trade, nonetheless bear liability for it because of their race. That is a position that would be immediately recognised as racially discriminatory if it were applied to any other group.
