Everything is wrong in this country

You're right Maizie. The talk I attended stressed that very point. There are details of the recipients on the UCL site. Most of the money actually went to people who had never been anywhere near a plantation. People bought shares, which were effectively loans to the plantation owners, and the portfolios were often inherited. There were loads of annuitants and others who discovered they had just a few shares as part of their investments.

Some bedtime reading for you Maizie (and anybody else):

archives.history.ac.uk/history-in-focus/Slavery/articles/emmer.html

For some reason my surgery isn't on the list.

I found mine on the map and clicked on it.

Hi Inkcog, to get back to your question, which has been partially answered, and because you mentioned a cup of coffee, there are Social Bite cafes in some towns where you pay more than the cost of your drink, with the extra money going to pay for food for the next homeless person who comes in and asks.

Chewbacca
My very thoughts. I say to those who persistently run down this country if you can find better what's stopping you ?

sarah you see I actually might prefer to use my vote in the hope that I can change things.

sarah ''I say to those who persistently run down this country if you can find better what's stopping you ?''

Many have - sometimes a case of 'grass is greener' and all that. Some have done so because they felt there were too many foreigners in the UK, too many not well integrated, who did not speak English well, who lived in ghettos among themselves, eating their own foods, with their own shops, their own Churches, etc, etc. So they moved- and did exactly that ... (there are many excellent exceptions). And some - unbelievably, availed themselves of free movement- and then VOTED FOR BREXIT- to stop others from being able to follow. Some are here on GN -and just can't see the hypocrisy and irony of it all.

One thing is for sure, after Brexit- what will stop people will be the changes in permits, visas, exchange rate, availability of healthcare, and possibly a backlash against Brits in some communities.

Personally, I moved to UK in 1970. And I loved it, embraced it, admired it, enjoyed it - London, the West Mids and the East Mids- and travelled all over- and fell in love with it, head over heels. Be it the secret beaches of Corwall, Devon, North Norfolk, or Pembrokeshire, the Dales and the Peaks, the Cotswolds and Rutland- and the large multicutural town where I lived the longest, raised my kids, did my Degree, had a full career. And we moved back to my place of birth on retirement NOT because we had come to hate it - like many who moved- but because we wanted a change, and my very elderly parents desperately needed help- and we fell in love for a very very old wonderful house up in t'mountains.

Kept a property in the UK, have DDs and GCs there, family and friends- and come back very regularly and travel all over.

But what I truly really loved, the mix of people and cultures, the tolerance and love, the GSOH, the care for those less fortunate- is what is all disappearing now- because of the B word- we will be there 2 days after the election- and we so look forward to being with DDs and GCs - but in a way we are dreading it. Even in early November- people felt so divided, that magical, friendly, open and tolerant GREAT Britain just did not feel the same anymore - it felt changed, in a way that we found heart breaking. Not because we don't love it- but because we DO!

Heartbreaking isn't it ...

It's sort of irrelevant whether the compensation money was directly paid in the here and now to descendants of slave owners. It must be the case that at least some very wealthy families owe that wealth to the inheritance across the generations of money given to their forebears as "compensation" for being legally prohibited from owning and trading human beings.

A Mirror article states:

"The government pledged in 1833 £20,000,000.00 million in order to reimburse the owners of slaves when slavery was abolished in Britain. The sum, while big now, was monstrous in 1833, [apparently £2,340,888,484.84] and it took the British taxpayer 182 years to pay off" [apparently in 2015].

Why many people were extremely angry about this is that the government borrowed this huge amount and recouped it via tax payers. Slaves were not compensated for being auctioned off like cattle to the highest bidder and thereafter exploited, physically and sexually abused, and sometimes murdered, by their owners.

Because it has taken over 180 years for governments to pay off this debt, the descendants of slaves have actually been involuntarily contributing, by means of tax, to the compensation paid to the people who enslaved their forebears. How crazy is that!

Indeed! David Olusoga did a documentary about the issue. He interviewed some aristocrat, who was still living in the ancestral home, which had been built with slave compensation.

I don't know what kind of loans the government took out for the compensation money, but it's true that all sorts of debts take decades, if not centuries, to pay off. The UK only finished paying that Americans for WW2 land lease (I think) a few years ago. If you dig deeply, there might even be some loans for WW1 or even Napoleonic Wars. I'm not sure exactly how the post-WW2 spending on the NHS or welfare state was financed either.

I agree that the way slave-owners were compensated were compensated was appalling. At the time it was considered that it was the only way emancipation would get through parliament. Don't forget that, at the time, only a fraction of the population could vote and the ones who did were the wealthiest and the very people who possibly had "shares" in slaves.

www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/29/slavery-abolition-compensation-when-will-britain-face-up-to-its-crimes-against-humanity

Yes WWII was recently finished paid for to the USA- who else??

I do think there is a distinct difference between paying for wars and trafficking humans for personal wealth. Perhaps the very wealthy like Cameron could have picked up their share of the bill and repaid it themselves? Complicated I know but morally right.