| Guardian article A voice in the crowd, 17 May 2005 |
Channel 4
Broadcast on Monday 15 August 2005, at 8pm.
Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was a triumph for the forces of progress, as 200th anniversary commemorations are likely to remind us in a couple of years time. Many will argue that a line should be drawn under that unsavoury aspect of the nation's colonial past - surely multicultural 21st century Britain should no longer be made to feel bad about its history. Wrong, say some historians, community leaders and churchmen, including Robert Beckford, who presents this provocative film.
"I believe that when a wrong has been done in the past there is a moral obligation to atone for it in the present. And it is not just a religious argument. You can take a cosmological framework and show that past, present and future are all connected. We can't just sail off into the future while forgetting everything that happened in the past."
Beckford's film sets out to assess the extent to which Britain profited from the transatlantic slave trade, and asks a team of financial experts to put a monetary figure on the amount that could be owing to the descendants of slaves.
"Never before has it been nailed down to a figure", says Beckdord. "After all, how do you measure trauma? But we have come up with an amount that would bankrupt the country if it was paid out. And that's based on the most conservative figures available."
The blame, adds Beckford, doesn't rest entirely with the state. Institutions including the Bank of England, the National Gallery, Guy's Hospital and the monarchy all have links to slavery in their pasts.
While Beckford admits that the payment of reparations directly to slaves descendants is now largely impractical, he points to precedents elsewhere in the world. "The German government and some companies recently paid a settlement to survivors of slave labour. And the American bank JP Morgan Chase put $5 million into a scholarship scheme for African-American students to compensate for its links to slavery in the 19th century. That's the kind of thing we should be thinking of doing here."
(Channel 4 publicity information)
16 Aug 2005