Britain doesnt need a public holiday to remember the slave trade – The Spectator

A fair number of episodes in the history of this country are frankly best forgotten. The last thing to do with them, one might have thought, would be to memorialise them with bank holidays. Giving people in Britain a day off to mark, say, Cromwells harrying of Ireland in the 17th century, or the starting of the Boer War in the interest of corporate capital in the 19th, would at the very least raise eyebrows.

Yet yesterday, on Unescos International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade, black studies academic Kehinde Andrews suggested exactly this in respect of one such event: namely, our involvement in slavery. There was, he said, really nothing more important to Britains development. We therefore needed a permanent official public holiday to keep its memory alive, preserve a conscience of the horrors of the transatlantic trade, and to remind us of its direct outcome in the form of continued structural racism, and racial economic and health inequality, in Britain today.

Really? This argument deserves a closer look. For one thing, there is some rather odd historical reasoning going on here.

Nothing more important to Britains development? British involvement in the slave trade lasted about 200 years, until its abolition in 1807 and the final suppression of servitude in 1833. During that time it was largely colonial (and not everywhere: Ontario, for example, legislated to free its slaves in 1793). Although some Britons may have owned slaves or shares in slaving businesses, in mainland Britain its status was always dubious, both legally and socially. Against Lord Hardwickes insistence in 1749 that planters could rest assured that any slaves they brought here remained unfree, we have Lord Mansfields words in 1772 in the great Somerset habeas corpus case that in this country the restraint of a slave was odious, and since it was not allowed or approved by the law of England, therefore the black must be discharged. Even if slave-run plantations contributed some of the capital for Britains industrial development, can anyone seriously see this as the most important feature of nearly a thousand years of British history from the Norman Conquest to 2022?

Again, its all very well to cite Marxist historian Eric Williamss view that we can take no credit for abolition because by 1833 slavery had ceased to make economic sense and abolishing it was therefore financially rational. True, he was probably right on the economics: indeed, Adam Smith had said roughly this in the Wealth of Nations in 1776. But to imply from this that the suppression owed everything to economics and nothing to decent moral sensibility is, unless you are a fairly crude economic determinist, somewhat extreme. There was a large moral side to the abolitionist campaign; furthermore, parliamentarians had to be persuaded to vote for abolition, and not all politicians, even in the 19th century, thought exclusively in money terms. It is also a bit difficult to see how this argument could be applied to the use of the West Africa Squadron to suppress the trade after abolition, where there is no obvious British financial self-interest to be found.

Moreover, while racism does undoubtedly exist against black and West Indian people in Britain today, the argument that it is somehow structural and the product of slavery is by no means obvious. Large-scale immigration started only in the 1950s, 120 years after abolition. Unless one believes in some kind of mystical collective folk memory lasting for four generations or so, that West Indians should be seen by white people in some sense as would-be slaves after such a time is implausible. In other words, the institution of slavery may explain the presence of people of African descent in this country, but it is hard put to it to explain the prejudice they encounter.

Unfortunately, to a select group of the initiated, rationalism of this kind about racism cuts little if any ice. Instead, obsession with the past institution of slavery and its perceived consequences today, together with the modern intellectual edifices of postmodernism and anti-racism, are increasingly morphing into a cult. We have what is close to a new religion, something seen as outside and beyond secular intellectual processes.

Indeed, there is an intriguing parallel. One hundred and seventy years ago Edward Pusey and the 19th-century Oxford Movement saw scripture not as a basis for logical argument but as a support for spontaneous faith inspired by the church fathers. Today anti-racist cultists think in much the same way about history. Listen to members (especially black members) lived experience, they argue, and you will see the light. Do not ask if history shows that Britain is a hotbed of slavery-derived racism inherent in its very structure, but instead accept that it is, and then ask how history supports this view. Only then will you (especially if you are white) be able to accept your collective guilt and work towards allyship with the oppressed. At this point, for the initiated, everything falls into place. If we are all indeed marked with ineradicable racial guilt, what better than to set up an anti-racist day of penitence, in the same way as Christians mark Good Friday?

From the rest of us, the answer must be simple. We should not join this miserabilist cult. We should continue to question its assumptions from a rationalist standpoint. For that matter, we might even go one better. Heres a nice contrary idea. Why not have a new public holiday, but make it a day of genuine celebration? An obvious candidate would be not some dreary Unesco remembrance day, but 1 August, the anniversary of the date when the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 came into effect. It might even help all of us, black and white alike, to celebrate freedom.

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Britain doesnt need a public holiday to remember the slave trade - The Spectator