Tackling Racism in the UK in the 21st Century

Jobs and Freedom March on Washington 1963

I read with great interest the recent article by my friend and comrade Liberal Democratic Councillor Lester Holloway entitled “Putting the movement back into the anti racist movement”.

Lester’s article bemoans the demise of a once vibrant anti racist movement. Reflecting on the anti racist struggle for race equality and justice in the mid 1980’s and 1990’s he harks back to a more passionate age where activists were found on every street corner, bold conferences were held highlighting and exposing racism and people were not afraid of speaking truth to power.

He contrasts this with the reality today where most black organisations are politically emasculated and remain largely silent on the issues of the day.

He points out that during the last 20 years, institutional racism and its effects has worsened whilst we as a community have become increasingly politically marginalised and ineffective.

The article had particular resonance for me as I was involved in many of the black/anti racist organisations he cites in this article. There is much truth in what Lester says and I for one am hoping that it will kick start a much needed debate as to where we go from here. There are some points I disagree with but it would be both churlish and lead to an unnecessarily sterile debate to rehearse these points by way of response. Much more important is the substantive issue raised by his article that the anti racist movement, once vibrant has now lost momentum.

Lester points out that we have failed to nurture young talent. I could not agree more: that is the real reality that now needs to be both accepted and dealt with. There is an urgent and burning need to nurture and educate new leaders in how to more effectively challenge racism and injustice.

Our failure to do so has cost us dear and the August riots of 2011 bare testimony to the fact that we have failed to provide the necessary leadership and succession planning to facilitate the emergence of young leaders capable of organising and representing youth in crisis.

I would argue that the profound economic crisis in the black community, exacerbated through the powerful magnifying lens of racism, is tearing our community apart and has led to a weakening of our resolve to fight racism, a decimation of the black voluntary sector as a result of public sector cuts and as a result a virtual silencing of our strong political voice.

The public hi-tech racist media lynching.

As most people will know, others and I were the victims of a sustained and ruthless campaign led by the London Evening Standard. From Dec 2007 until May 2008 both Ken Livingstone the then Mayor and I as his political adviser, were subjected to a relentless and deeply racist media smear campaign. The length and breadth of this campaign was and remains unprecedented in British political history. For nearly 7 months the media whose real agenda was to defeat Ken Livingstone, used London’s black communities and me as their whipping boy to undermine Ken. Effectively we were nothing more than political road kill in Boris Johnson’s remorseless drive for power.

Initially many from our community defended and publically supported me. But as the campaign intensified and month after month those attack increased so that support began to wane and fall away. As time wore on I saw people physically wilt under the weight of continually defending me from scurrilous and unfounded allegations.

To be attacked for a week or a month is one thing to be attacked for nearly 7 months on a daily basis took its toll on that support. Quite simply it was beyond the experience of most black people and organisations. It was one of the most sustained racist media campaigns ever seen in British political history.

Supporters were threatened with similar ‘exposure’ by the press and understandably as a result were increasingly reluctant to speak out. Organisations concerned for their funding for the most part kept quiet. As the months passed it became clear that the Standard was intent on targeting anybody who spoke out in my defence.  Others seeing an opportunity to make good their own political fortunes or settle old scores began to feed the racist media firestorm with more smears, lies and innuendo.

In the end all but the most principled and strongest stood by me.  Tribute needs to be made to those like Lester Holloway and others too many to mention here who were resolute and unflinching in their support. Many paid a price for doing so, some losing work, some being targeted and marginalised and others were simply exhausted with continually publically defending me from a barrage of allegations.

Most damaged were those innocents who were caught up in the initial media campaign by association with me. The press attacked them leaving families psychologically damaged, politically marginalised and financially ruined as a result. To see peoples lives destroyed in such a callous and malicious media driven racist attack was excruciatingly painful for me. It is that pain of family, friends and colleagues that will remain with me all my life. More than 17 people were arrested and had their lives ruined.

I lay claim to being the most forensically investigated black man in Britain having endured 18 month investigations by Boris Johnson’s Forensic Audit Panel, Metropolitan Police Services, Financial Services Authority, DLA Piper Forensic Accountants, London Development Agency, the London Assembly, Companies House and the Charity Commission all of whom declared that  “there is no case to answer”.  Not that you saw that in the news to any large extent. Such things are routinely ignored or relegated to a small paragraph next to the horse racing results.

Despite a myriad of serious accusations being made not a single person was charged with any offence.

As a hardened activist even I was taken a back at the ferocity, length and forensic nature of the campaign. This continues to pain me most, to have witnessed the dire physical, emotional and financial effects on close friends and colleagues. To witness great black organisations who had done nothing other than defend me and challenge the racism of the press and to see them driven into the ground watching helplessly as their funding evaporated like the morning dew.

Under attack we don’t fight back.

The consequent effect of this campaign was to frighten and intimidate black and anti racist organisations from speaking out against injustice. Ultimately it was an exercise in control, intimation and discipline.

In addition during the last 4 years we have seen massive cuts to the black voluntary sector that has substantively reduced our capacity to organise effectively.  Organisations have closed, services lost, staff and client teams dismantled and management committees disbanded.

Why the ant racist movement has run out of steam.

In addition, we have seen a sustained and on going political attack led by the PM David Cameron and his Cabinet on the principles of multiculturalism and anti racism. Race equality as a policy priority has been relegated and marginalised. A new crop of Tory Black right-wingers have conspired with the press to pathologise black communities, identifying black people as the authors of our own misfortune and dismissing the reality of racism as a fiction.  Our networks were wiped out and those that do remain are much reduced in their capacity to do anything meaningful and sustained.

Meanwhile post 9/11the left in general has focused on Islamaphobia at the cost of campaigning on wholesale institutional racism of the state. The immergence of the racist English Defence League targeting Muslim communities reinforced that trend. As a result the issues of stop and search, school exclusions, deaths in custody, racism in the workplace and in recruitment have been ignored.

In 2008 during and after the elections I was asked to resign as the chair of Operation Black Vote and Equanomics both mentioned in Lester’s article. The 1990 Trust board refused to consider my return as a Trustee. All argued that politically I was a ‘toxic’ brand. Having been asked to stand down by people I respected I had no choice but to comply. In essence they were right although I disagreed with them at the time I came to value their counsel, allowing me more time with my family and to recuperate from the battering I had taken.

Since then attempting to rebuild new movements such as Operation Hope & Recovery and Black Activists Rising against the Cuts (BARAC) has been hugely difficult. Personally challenged financially as a consequence of legal costs associated with clearing my name, and carrying the burden of being politically marginalised, makes this task comparable to climbing Everest without any shoes. 

Despite this I have sought to continue to support families suffering injustice and represent black people struggling to confront racism and injustice. Without the basic requirement of an office and resources this becomes a task of herculean proportions.

We need fresh leadership.

Where I do agree with Lester is the need to help facilitate the next crop of young black radical leaders. We must do more in helping that young talent onto the national stage and provide the necessary support, advice and guidance that will allow them to benefit from the experience of seasoned activists.

Comparisons with the USA and leaders such as Reverend Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are unfair. African Americans are more homogeneous and have the benefit of Affirmative Action legislation that created a black middle class that has more political leverage than we do here in the UK. That is in addition to their huge numbers, their iconic civil rights struggle and their political and economic power developed over 300 years of campaigning.

Black communities in Europe and the UK have been around in significant numbers for a significantly shorter period. Most are relative newcomers who are much more culturally and religiously diverse than the African American community. This means the shared political, historical religious, cultural narrative and understanding of the lived experience of racism in the UK differs for many Diaspora black communities. This lack of a national single shared political narrative is disabling and makes building consensus among UK’s black communities much more difficult as a result.

Our most fundamental weakness, our real Achilles heel if you will, is the absence of a strong black economy capable of funding and sponsoring our own struggle. I cannot emphasis this enough, without our own financial base our fight for equality and justice is comparable to carrying water in a basket.

The future: Where do we go from here?

My thoughts are that there is an urgent need for a unifying national anti racist conference that can inject some greater level of organisational cohesiveness to a movement shattered and broken as a result of a sustained attack by the ascendant right and their allies in the press.

I have argued for the adoption of an admittedly defensive ‘circle the wagons’ strategy for at least two years. In 2009 I wrote to all national black organisations and suggesting a joint meeting to discuss how the cuts would impact our communities. Suffice to say that such was my fall from grace in some people’s eyes that I did not receive a single reply. Despite that I remain convinced that UK black organisations need to be unified and working together on a shared political agenda for radical change.

These organisations made the political calculation that they would be better off financially working with Government rather than building mass movements to radically challenge state racism. I can understand that they had employees with families and mortgages to pay. The real tragedy was, as a result of them keeping silent nobody heard them scream when the cuts eventually came.  Ironically today most of these black organisations have closed, are on the verge of closing and politically muzzled on a short lead.  Throughout the last decade the black struggle for race equality and anti racism became depoliticised: reduced to nothing more than a safe series of ‘diversity management frameworks’ devised by consultants.

With racism in the UK getting worse as the economy declines, the need for a fresh impetus and new tactics is abundantly clear. BARAC has joined hands with the Occupy Movement and UK Uncut in recognition of the need to develop new alliances in the struggle for equality.

We have established these strong alliances in an effort to recognise the need to reach out to young people. 

My real fear is that we will be the first UK black generation that bequeaths to its young people a society that is more, not less racist, than that gifted to us by the Windrush generation.

They self sacrificed to ensure we, their children, had real opportunities that they did not. As we contemplate the future for our children we must consider what is the legacy we wish to leave them?  I say the only legacy worth leaving is a strong commitment to achieve equality in our lifetime, not in 50 or 100 or 300 years but now. As British citizens our children deserve no less and if we fail then so we shall be rightly cursed as the generation who abandoned their prime historical and moral imperative to push their children on. 

Moving on to the future and how we no respond to the challenge we face as outlined in part in Lester’s article I do think it important to outline a possible way forward in the struggle for race equality.

BARAC has agreed a major discussion framework for a major push next year to address some of these issues and take this debate forward.

Equality in our Life Time: A National March on for Jobs and Justice

2013: The 50th anniversary of Dr Martin Luther Kings famous “I have a dream” speech.

On August 28^th 1963 Dr Martin Luther King led the historic civil rights Jobs and Freedom March on Washington. The march attracted over 300,000 people in a unique and historic effort to end racial segregation, racial prejudice and Jim Crow legislation in the United States.

Dr Kings now legendary “I have a dream” speech was the most articulate and urgent clarion call for justice envisioning the future arrival of a just and non-racial America. The March on Washington with Dr King has become the most defining and resounding image of the US civil rights struggle and the reference point for international campaigns for the adoption and promotion of global human rights.

50 years later and here in the UK racism and prejudice continues to plague human relations and violates human rights across the world. The dream of a world where the antiquated and ideas of racism and irrational prejudice were consigned to the dustbin of history have yet to be realised in the 21^st Century.  That’s why we have to march again to revitalise a new anti racist movement and ensure we push our issues back onto the political and media agenda.

Racism and injustice continues to blight the lives of millions of British citizens and as a result of the current economic is both exacerbating and increasing rates of racism. We are in real danger that yet more generations of our people will be subject to a lifetime of discrimination.

The challenges for this generation are to embark on a sustained national political campaign to end structural social and economic racism and deliver the dream of real race equality in our lifetime.

We are calling for a recreation of that famous iconic march on Washington with a march in 2013 in London. 50 years after Kings enigmatic speech we are free but not yet equal. Racism in 2012 is on the rise and the very future of our children and grandchildren is at stake. Our community cannot afford to see its black voluntary sector demolished, we cannot afford to see more of our young people unemployed, rotting in jails or becoming depressed with mental illness nor can we be denied justice at the hands of the police and the courts.

Lester’s article has ignited a debate of which this response is but one part. BARAC is suggesting this discussion continues within the context of the 50^th Anniversary of the historic 1963 march on Washington. We want to move the debate onto where we go from here in the run up to a general election due to take place on the 7^th May 2015.

BARAC is inviting black organisations nationwide to sign up to a broad discussion that explores the potential of reaching consensus agreement to:

• Attend the National Coordinating Committee for the March and help us develop the main anti racist demands and produce a mobilisation strategy for the march. 

• To join with us in helping to formulate a national set of demands for jobs and justice.

• To explore the possibility of holding major black organisations AGM’s and or national conferences during one week in 2013. We are suggesting a National Black Convention to be held during one week at a residential venue in early September 2012.

This initiative will be presented and discussed at the forthcoming BARAC public meeting on 27th July. Speakers include Marcia Rigg, Sean Rigg Justice and Change Campaign, John McDonnell MP (invited), Zita Holbourne & Lee Jasper, Joint National Chairs of BARAC and more speakers to be confirmed.  We hope you will join us.

Venue: Stratford Advice Arcade, 107-109 The Grove, Stratford, London, E15 1HP, 5 minutes walk from Stratford Rail, Tube and Bus stations.

Details: https://www.facebook.com/events/253975948046675/

Lee Jasper

Email: lee-jasper@live.com

Black Londoners to hold largest Mayoral hustings

(from Operation Black Vote www.obv.org.uk)

In what is likely to be one of the largest Mayoral Hustings during this often acrimonious contest a coalition of Black leaders including church and business leaders, activists, faith group's others will be hosting a rally/hustings to help decide who will be next Mayor for London. Given that BME communities across the capital make up a third of all Londoners if our collective vote could be a deciding factor.

With issues ranging from transport, policing, young people, the socio economic regeneration of London alongside a discussion on health, wellbeing and planning permission this event is earmarked to be a watershed for Black Britain to decide who best matches their aspirations for London’s future.

Help us make this an event that not only demonstrates that our communities demand a say in the governance of our capital, but also right across the country.

We need all of you to be there to send an unequivocal message that we demand to be listened to; we demand greater social and racial justice.

Register here to reserve your place

Date: Thursday 12th April 2012
Address: The Gourmet Theatre, Ruach Minsitries, 197-199 Kilburn High Road, London NW6 7HY
Doors open: 6.00pm

International Slavery Remembrance Day

Today 23rd August marks the official 4th national anniversary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

With events happening in the famous Slave Ports of Liverpool and Bristol but not in the nation’s capital, Lee Jasper looks at the significance of the day for the UK and London’s involvement with one of the greatest crimes ever to be committed in human history.

Whenever the subject of Britain’s role in the Slave trade is mentioned you can feel the atmosphere in a room change. White Britons have an almost reflexive gagging reflex when it comes to any discussion on slavery. People get very annoyed very quickly and although this period in British history is rarely discussed any mention of it produces huge emotion, anger, frustration and resentment. Britain suffers from an acute dose of historical amnesia on this issue that can still be detected in the routine denial of all accusation of contemporary or historical racism.

Slavery remains one of the taboo subjects in British history. It never fails to ignite a ferocious and passionate debate between those who think slavery is all “old history” with very little relevance to modern day Britain, they pour scorn on any demand for a formal apology or reparations and others who believe that slavery having defined the concept of modern day racism bequeathed a legacy to the world that is responsible for the deaths of billions.

They and I believe slavery constituted the greatest crime ever committed against humanity in the entirety of human history for which both a formal apology and reparations are due. Slavery was the legalised mass murder of millions of people and the forced and brutal enslavement of countless generations of others whose experience of plantation life was short, sadistic version of hell on earth. The scale and intensity of the violence was unbelievable. Buggery, rape, paedophilia, savage medieval torture, medical experimentation all were practiced on thousands of enslaved Africans on a daily basis for over 500 years.
Whole families and cultures destroyed

Families were sold off and slaves bred like animals with children being ripped from their mother’s breast to be sold at auction. Surely one of the most profound and heinous aspects of slavery was this unbearable torture that saw families torn asunder. Of course for individual slaves in order to mentally survive all of the stress, anxiety, physical and emotional violence inflicted upon them they had to become increasingly indifferent to all that they saw. They taught their children to avoid emotional attachment, to trust no one and that other slaves would betray them to the ‘”slave master” to save their own skin. What is quite literally amazing is that we as a people enduring such a prolonged and brutal period of history survived at all. However although we are still here, the 21st century descendants of those enslaved Africans we a free but not equal and the psychological trauma of slavery can be detected today in our state of mind, mores, cultures and behaviours.

We the historical descendants of slaves continue to suffer as a consequence of this period history. A period lest we forget that was followed after slavery by further exploitation and savagery during colonialisation and throughout modern times by neo colonialisation imprisoning us to an unbroken lineage suffering debilitating effects of both the historical legacy and the contemporary effects of racism today.
No people can survive such prolonged trauma unaffected

The psychological effects of such intense hatred and savagery lasted with various degrees of barbaric intensity from the 16th century right up to the present day. We still suffer the deep psychological trauma of that dreadful time, the largely unresolved extreme anxiety, fear and anger bred into our genes by generation after generation of African mothers and fathers who lived under the lash and in constant and extreme fear breeding children into this maelstrom of hellish racist violence.
Modern Britain was built on the profits made by the slave trade

The economic effects of slavery have left millions of the descendants of slaves with no history, no access to family resources or assets and living in continued poverty. The economic case for reparations is in my view compelling Britain secured her industrial and military dominance of the world as a consequence of the profits derived first from slavery and then colonialism. When slavery was abolished the slave owners were given £20,000 by way of compensation whilst the enslaved Africans received not a single penny. The fact that the profits generated by slavery were unprecedented and funded everything from the scientific discoveries, the industrial revolution and the establishment of Britain’s manufacturing base means that in the 20th century British domestic prosperity the building of the NHS the provision of universal education. Railroads and civic, economic and military infrastructure development were all given a huge cash boost with the profits generated from this bloody trade.

Reparations, a cheque that is very much overdue

The modern day descendant plantation societies and descendants deserve and are entitled too reparations. Britain owes them and their descendants the moral and legal justice that acknowledges and apologises and recompenses modern day descendants by the establishment of a multi billion pound memorial trust for those living in the UK and former colonies should be given reparations too.

The human cost was enormous. Africans died in their millions during capture and removal, as many as five per cent in prisons before transportation and more than 10 per cent during the voyage — the direct murder of two million people. Conditions imposed on survivors were unimaginable. In US state of Virginia it was lawful ‘to kill and destroy such Negroes’ who ‘absent themselves from … service’. Branding and rape were commonplace.

Medieval torture and brutality was routine

Notorious and sadistic Jamaican planter Thomas Thistle-Wood in 1756 had a slave ‘well flogged and pickled, then made Hector shit in his mouth’ for eating sugar cane. From 1707 punishment for rebellion included ‘nailing them to the ground’ and ‘applying fire by degrees from the feet and hands, burning them gradually up to the head’. When in 1736 Antigua found there was to be a rebellion, five ringleaders were broken on the wheel, 77 burned to death, six hung in cages to die of thirst. For ‘lesser’ crimes castration or chopping off half the foot were used. A manual noted: ‘Terror must operate to keep them in subjection.’
Barbarism’s consequences were clear. More than a million-and-a-half slaves were taken to the British Caribbean islands in the 18th century but by its end there were only 600,000. By 1820 more than 10 million Africans had been transported across the Atlantic and two million Europeans had moved. But the European population grew to 12 million while the black slave population shrank to six million.

If the murder of millions, the torture and enslavement of millions more, is not ‘a crime against humanity’ these words have no meaning. To justify murder and torture on an industrial scale, black people had to be declared inferior, or not human. As James Walvin noted, there was a ‘form of bondage which, from an early date, was highly racialised. By 1750, to be black in the Americas (and often in Europe) was to be enslaved.
“The 1774 History of Jamaica argued black slaves were a different species able to work ‘in a very bungling and slovenly manner, perhaps not better than an orangutan”.

Material produced to mark the bicentennial anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 gave the impression that white British people liberated black people. Whilst we acknowledge the first recorded national movement in the UK was the Abolitionist cause and the millions of ordinary white families who boycotted slave grown sugar and forced Parliament to eventually act British history relegates this movement and the struggle of African themselves to a historical footnote.
Black resistance not white philanthropy broke slavery

In reality, slaves rose against the trade from its inception. This broke it. The first recorded slave revolt was in 1570. There were at least 250 ship-board rebellions. Jamaican slave society faced a serious revolt every decade in addition to prolonged guerilla war. In 1760, 30,000 Jamaican slaves revolted. The culmination, recorded in CLR James’s magisterial The Black Jacobins, was the 1791 slave revolt in St Domingue. Slavery in British possessions, after abolition of the trade, was abolished following revolts in Barbados in 1816, Demarara in 1823, and in Jamaica 1831 in which 60,000 slaves participated. For this reason Unesco officially marks August 23, the anniversary of the St Dominque’s rebellion’s outbreak, as slavery’s official remembrance day.

William Wilberforce MP the much-celebrated abolitionist only joined the movement once it became clear just how popular the campaign was becoming. It was militant black resistance, ordinary British men and women and economic development that destroyed slavery, not white philanthropy.
After Slavery we were freed to live without rights and in abject poverty

Even when free, our fore parents were forced to continue to endure great acts of barbarity, political treachery, and denial of justice with no access to human rights. This continued dehumanisation of supposed “free people” rendered us little more than animals with no access to the law or human rights.
Today as we scan those African communities who suffered the barbarity of plantation slavery combined with long term immersion into a culture of poverty we see the transmission of behaviours and cultures that were once valued as survival techniques at a time of slavery that today have become profoundly self destructive. We still live in the long shadow of slavery and the difference between those who are the descendant of plantation slaves and those who endured colonialism but not slavery could not be clearer to those who have eyes to see.

History teaches us that any oppressed peoples that retain access to their own language, culture and historical and familial memory can endure great acts of repression for sustained periods of time and survive and prosper. Those who are denied such important histories cut off from their past, denied their language cultural and familial history, lineage, wealth and traditions will suffer profound psychological trauma.
London and the Slave Trade

Until the 1730s, London dominated the British trade in enslaved Africans. A major slaving centre, it is estimated that over a quarter of all Londoners were involved in the trade in some way and although the capital would later be eclipsed by Liverpool as a slave-trading port, its involvement in the trade was both longer and deeper than any other UK city. The capital, up until 1698, had enjoyed the commercial privileges bestowed on it by the charter of the Royal African Company, and the City and its officials had amassed huge profits through its revenues. Under this monopoly 100,000 Africans had been shipped to the colonies and 30,000 tons of sugar had been imported. No fewer than 15 Lord Mayors, 25 Sheriffs and 38 aldermen of the City of London were shareholders in the company between 1660 and 1690.

Following its decline as a slaving port, London assumed a more permanent and central role as the financial hub of the triangular trade. The City of London provided the money for many slaving voyages and other London institutions insured cargoes and traded plantation goods. Given the risky and long-term nature of a typical slave voyage, new forms of credit were introduced into the British banking system. The need for long-term credit, with bills payable after anything from one and a half to three years, led to the development of specialist banking houses such as that operated by Alexander and David Barclay, whose bank bears the family name to this day. Even more active in this field was Sir Francis Baring, who was reputed to have made his initial fortune as a 16-year-old slave dealer. Baring was to sit as a Member of Parliament for 18 years and died leaving a legacy valued at £1 million.

The Bank of England itself was also to figure largely in this enterprise. Sir Richard Neave, the bank’s director for 48 years, also sat as chairman of the Society of West India Merchants. Neave’s son-in-law, Beeston Long, would follow in his footsteps both as chairman of the Merchants and governor of the Bank of England. The enormously influential body of plantation owners and their representatives sat in the House of Commons and ensured their interests were protected. Given such an unprecedented concentration of political and economic power, it was inevitable that the plantation system would produce England’s first millionaire: William Beckford MP.

In the Caribbean, Jamaica overtook Barbados as the prize colony of the English and by the turn of the 18th century the European population there stood at 7,000 with that of slaves at 45,000. The richest planter of the island, Peter Beckford, was also the most powerful: at his death in 1735 he owned nine sugar plantations and was part owner of seven more. His son, William, returned to London, where he later became an MP as the most powerful businessman in the City of London, for which he would be twice selected as Lord Mayor. His brother Richard sat as an MP for Bristol and his second brother Julines an MP for Salisbury. His son Richard would serve as a Member of Parliament for Bridport, Arundel and Leominster
Economic Legacy

It is undeniable that slavery produced spectacular profits for the British and this transformed the port cities such as London, Liverpool and Bristol. In the case of Liverpool, this city grew from humble beginnings as a small fishing village into a huge dock and the hub of a growing world capitalist system. Many famous institutions in London were built on the profits of the slave trade and these included banks (Barings and the Bank of England); insurance companies (Lloyd’s of London) and hospitals (Guys and St. Thomas’s). The founding collection of pictures at the National Gallery was donated by John Julius Angerstein, who had built up his art collection with money made from the slave trade and his activities as one of Lloyd’s underwriters insuring the slavers

In his seminal book ‘Capitalism and Slavery’ Dr. Eric Williams has commented that the origin of black slavery lay with economic, not racial motives: ‘it had to do not with the colour of the labourer, but the cheapness of the labour.’ The economic legacy also points to the origins of Africa’s underdevelopment and the injustices of present day trade rules. The poor economic performance of Africa remains one of the biggest issues facing development and growth economists today. Economic historian, Bairoch has argued that ‘there is no doubt that a large number of the structural features of the process of economic underdevelopment gave historical roots going back to slavery and European colonisation’. It is difficult to see how the UK Government’s recent Commission for Africa could undertake a truly wide-ranging assessment of Africa’s contemporary issues and problems without first acknowledging the devastating impact of slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

Political Legacy

The history of slavery is as much one of rebellion as of enforced servitude. For more than 300 years, slave rebellions and white fears about them were central factors of colonial life. The anti-slavery movement was the first genuine mass movement in Britain and London was the initial focus. The movement employed new methods of mass-communication in an attempt to reach potential supporters. The anti-slavers’ emblem and motto – a chained black man on one knee asking the onlooker: ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ – became a common sight. This device designed and marketed by Josiah Wedgwood, appeared on tableware, jewellery, pamphlets and posters all over the country. Brooches and pendants proclaiming adherence to the abolitionist ideals proved essential in garnering support from sectors of society normally beyond the reach of political ideas.

By the last quarter of the 18th century, London had become the largest Black metropolis outside of the Americas. It was home to an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 people of African origin among its 800,000 residents. This community of servants, sailors, scribes, beggars and former slaves lent their voices to the clamour for abolition growing through the Black world at large. From the beginning of the anti-slavery agitation in Britain in the 1780s the testimonies of former enslaved and free Africans were crucial in exposing the harsh realities of the slave system and galvanising public opinion against it.

A host of Black activists such as Robert Mandeville, Thomas Cooper, my own namesake Jasper Goree and William Greene made their mark on Georgian and Regency London. 1787 saw the first major Black contribution to the campaign for abolition with the publication of Ottobah Cugoano’s ‘Thoughts and sentiments on the evil and wicked traffic of the slavery and commerce of the human species’. For the first time British readers heard the authentic voice of slave witness.

Although Cugoano was the first published African critic of the slave trade, the most widely hailed Black activist was his friend, Olaudah Equiano whose book, ‘The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African’ became a crucial text for the anti-slavery movement. Equiano is often referred to as Britain’s first black political leader and he collaborated with Granville Sharp on a number of black rights issues. This legacy of slavery has created cultures and communities of resistance everywhere, based on political ideas about autonomy and self-determination for people of African descent.
Ideological and Philosophical Legacy

There is a direct connection between the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the development of racist theories and the existence of contemporary racism. The philosophy of white supremacy and black inferiority has its roots in the legal, social, cultural, intellectual, political and religious ideologies were created to justify the enslavement, exploitation and oppression of millions of Africans. During and after slavery, racist practices decided who was human and who was not, who could be a citizen and who could not, and who could enjoy the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Today, different types of racisms exist, Islamophobia being the most current and aggressive form but all contemporary forms of racism draw on ideas that were developed during the era of slavery.

Social Legacy

The principle products of the slave trade, principally sugar, tea, cotton and tobacco and the associated ancillary industries transformed the lives of Britons. For many, alongside the new opportunities which came with the burgeoning cities, the middle classes were able to enjoy personal luxuries that they had not mad or grown themselves. Previously this had been the privilege of the aristocracy. Even the landscape of the country changed as wealthy planters brought home their profits to create vast country estates and new stately homes.

Apologies and reparations for slavery

Slavery’s reality has been increasingly acknowledged outside Britain. The US Virginia General Assembly in 2007 expressed ‘profound regret’ for its role, stating slavery ‘ranks as the most horrendous of all depredations of human rights and violations of our founding ideals’. In 2001 the French National Assembly declared slavery a ‘crime against humanity’.

In 1999, Liverpool council became the first major British slaving city to formally apologise. The Church of England Synod followed suit. The British government’s refusal of such an apology is squalid.
Until recently, almost unbelievably, it refused even to recognise the slave trade as a crime against humanity on the grounds that it was legal at the time. It helped block a EU apology for slavery in 2001. London acknowledged its involvement in Slavery in 2007 when the then Mayor Ken Livingstone formally apologised.
Since Livingstone left office we have seen the total denigration of all things African by London’s current Mayor Boris Johnson. He has refused to acknowledge the 23rd August, has slashed all Black History month budgets and has withdrawn all funding for all African cultural celebrations.

Johnsons contempt for African culture and London’s African community borders represents the worst and most popular form of racism. A peculiar mixture of Eurocentric historical ignorance on the history of black people, a white benign paternalism alongside a degree of undoubted bumbling charm combined with political power and patronage provides cover for a man who presides of the most ethnically diverse city in the world.

His contempt although not aggressively expressed still results in the fact that the all-African cultural references and funding have been brutally cut. The real political narrative of Johnson administration in relation to Africans in London is deeply insidious form of racism characterised by a benign paternalism.
His administration funds and acknowledges all other major ethnic communities in London except the African and Caribbean communities. Boris and his team have no problem with this approach believing that “black history” was in fact the central battering ram of the multiculturalists’ project which they despise.

Their simplistic and uniformed view that such a focus is intrinsically opposed by most white Londoners who don’t see black communities as deserving recognition particularly where doing so forces them to confront their past responsibility for racism. White guilt for the racism of the past and present day has produced a virulent hostility to black culture and history.

Here is an example of this dismissive contempt. At a Young People’s Question Time on 17th September 2009, Munira Mirza, Mayoral Adviser on Arts and Culture said “Sometimes, it can get a bit boring, doing slavery every year”. There are no planned memorial events in London and given London’s history that is not only a disgrace but national scandal.

In relation to a formal apology two arguments against such an approach are usually brought forward — not only by the past government but also by the present PM David Cameron. First, an apology is unnecessary because this happened a long time ago. Slavery was the mass murder of millions of people. Germany apologised for the holocaust. Britain must for the slave trade. Second, that apologising is ‘national self-hate’. This is nonsense. Love of one’s country and its achievements is based on reality, not denying it.
Surely a Britain that contributed Shakespeare, Newton and Bevin to human civilisation need fear comparison with no one.

A British state that refuses to apologise for a crime on such a gigantic scale as the slave trade merely entrenches racism. The deep historical reality of slavery impacts today means that people of colour have never fully secured ourselves or been accepted into the fabric of this country. Britain national narrative ignores slavery, our contributions as slaves and free men and women are dismissed. British white guilt and perpetual shame drives the stubborn resistance to properly record and acknowledge this deep and ugly scar on the metaphorical face of the UK today
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Our starting place as a nation for a discussion on race and the development of the concept of truly inclusive citizenship and historical narrative that includes slavery at its core must begin with apology, acknowledgement and reparations. Our place in the world in future may well be influenced by the way comes to terms with this past the concept of Britain as a country where regardless of race or faith all are equal before the law can never be a reality whilst such a profound injustice remains unacknowledged. That London the nation’s capital should simply ignore the day is a national scandal but of course in the context of a society that increasingly refuses to recognise racism much less slavery no doubt such contempt will go largely unnoticed as did this historic day.