Working through the logical filters produces a striking result. Remove the descendants of enslaved people, who should not pay reparations to themselves. Remove the Irish, whose own history with Britain exempts them from this liability. Remove Eastern European, Baltic, and other European communities with their own histories of oppression. Remove South Asian, East Asian, and other communities from nations not involved in the Atlantic trade. Remove the descendants of the British working poor who had no stake in the trade. Remove recent immigrants from any nation.
What remains is a very specific and narrow group: the descendants of the English, Scottish, and Welsh merchant and landowning classes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who demonstrably profited from slavery. That group exists. Some of them are identifiable through the compensation records. Several of their descendants are prominent in British public life. But they are not “white British people.” They are a specific historical class, and targeting them specifically is not what the reparations campaign is proposing. The campaign proposes that Britain pays, meaning all of us, which is an entirely different and far less defensible proposition.
