The claim is that enslaved people and their descendants were never compensated for the labour stolen from them during the period of chattel slavery. When Britain abolished slavery in 1833, it paid compensation to slaveholders for the loss of their ‘property’, but paid nothing to the enslaved people themselves. The debt created by centuries of unpaid forced labour therefore remains outstanding. It has never been acknowledged, let alone paid. Reparations would constitute the first recognition that this debt exists and an initial step towards settling it.
The argument is given additional weight by the scale of the compensation paid to slaveholders. The £20 million paid in 1833 was roughly 40 percent of the British government’s annual budget at the time, and the loan taken out to fund it was not fully repaid until 2015. British taxpayers were still, until very recently, paying off a debt incurred to compensate slaveholders. The enslaved received nothing and were required to provide four more years of unpaid labour under the apprenticeship scheme. The moral asymmetry is stark.
In its strongest form, with compound interest applied, advocates calculate the unpaid labour debt at figures running into trillions of pounds. The argument is that the passage of time does not extinguish the debt, it compounds it, and that the failure to acknowledge the debt is itself a continuing wrong.
