The stolen labour argument faces several fundamental problems that the analogy to theft does not resolve.
First, the legal principle of retroactive liability. Slavery was legal when it was practised. The legal wrong is not that it happened, but that it continued after moral consensus turned against it. You cannot retrospectively apply current labour law standards to practices that were legal under the law of the time. This is not a defence of slavery: it is a statement about how legal liability works. Courts do not award damages based on the application of laws that did not exist when the events occurred.
Second, the identity of the debtor. The labour was extracted by specific individuals who are now dead. The companies and estates that benefited from it have in most cases been sold, dissolved, or transformed beyond recognition. The British state did not itself own enslaved people or extract their labour, with limited exceptions. Assigning the debt to all current British taxpayers requires a theory of collective intergenerational liability that no legal system accepts.
Third, the identity of the creditor. The people whose labour was stolen are dead. Their descendants are not automatically entitled to debts owed to their ancestors in any legal system. Inheritance of claims requires a legal mechanism, and no such mechanism exists for slavery reparations. Caribbean governments are not the legal successors to the claims of individuals who were enslaved in the Caribbean centuries ago.
Fourth, the calculation problem. The compound interest figures are produced by applying contested assumptions about labour value, interest rates, and compounding periods. Small changes in any assumption produce enormous changes in the result. The figures cited by reparations advocates range from £14 trillion to over £200 trillion depending on the methodology. A calculation that produces results varying by an order of magnitude is not a reliable basis for a financial claim.
None of this means the wrong did not occur. It means that the specific legal and financial claim being made does not follow from acknowledging the wrong.
