The argument draws on historical precedents to argue that paying reparations for slavery is not unprecedented or unreasonable. Germany paid reparations for the Holocaust. The United States paid compensation to Japanese Americans interned during the Second World War. If those payments were right and possible, the argument goes, then reparations for slavery are right and possible too.
It sounds plausible because the precedents are real. Germany did pay, and continues to pay, significant sums to Holocaust survivors and the state of Israel. The United States did compensate Japanese American internees. These programmes are widely regarded as morally justified.
But examining those precedents closely reveals why they do not apply to the slavery reparations claim.
The German Holocaust reparations involved a state that committed crimes paying compensation to living survivors of those crimes, and to the state established in direct response to them. The perpetrator state still existed. The victims were alive. The harm was recent, specific, and directly traceable. The German government that paid was in a meaningful sense the successor to the government that committed the crimes.
The Japanese American internment compensation involved a state paying its own citizens for wrongs done to them by that same state within living memory. The victims were alive or had recently died. Their children received payment within a generation of the original wrong. The perpetrator and the payer were the same entity.
The slavery reparations claim has none of these features. The events occurred 200 to 400 years ago. There are no living victims. The recipients would be foreign governments, not the descendants of enslaved people directly. The perpetrator state has changed beyond recognition. No agreed calculation methodology exists. No legal mechanism for enforcement exists.
The closest the precedents come to the slavery case is the question of whether descendants can receive what their ancestors were denied. But even the most expansive reparations programmes have generally required a direct generational connection within living memory, not a 200-year gap across multiple continents and political transformations.
Saying that other countries have paid reparations in specific, bounded, recent circumstances does not establish that Britain should pay reparations for something that happened four centuries ago. The precedents, properly examined, argue against the slavery reparations claim rather than for it.
The one-line rebuttal: the precedents that exist involved living victims, recent events, and direct state liability, none of which apply to the slavery reparations claim.
