The 1700s called to discuss my outstanding invoice

The Guardian ran it again the other week. You know the one; white Europeans should pay massive compensation to the descendants of enslaved Africans. It comes round more reliably than my tax bill, and unlike my tax bill it arrives with a comments section. Several thousand furious replies later, everyone goes home cross and nothing whatsoever happens. Rinse, repeat, engagement metrics up and to the right. Lovely business model if you can get it.

Now, in the interests of not being a complete curmudgeon, let me concede the bits where they've got a lot right. The transatlantic trade was monstrous. The wealth was real. Britain was up to its neck in it. All true, all well documented, no argument here. If the article stopped there I'd nod along and get back to my coffee.

It's the next step where the wheels come off. And they come off in a way I find genuinely fascinating, because the argument fails its own test. I shall now ruin the fun with inconvenient facts.

Follow the money (bring a sick bag)

When Britain abolished slavery in 1833, Parliament paid out £20 million in compensation. Guess who to. Go on, guess.

Not the enslaved. The 3,000-odd slave-owning families, compensated for the loss of their "property". That was around 40 per cent of the government's annual budget, which even by government procurement standards is a fairly eye-watering line item. The Treasury borrowed the lot, rolled it into gilts, and per their own FOI response the last of that debt wasn't redeemed until 2015. (Full Fact notes nobody's quite sure how much of the original loan was left by then, records being what they are, but the debt instrument itself soldiered on for 182 years. They built things to last in those days.)

Chew on that for a moment. British taxpayers, including immigrants who arrived last decade, including descendants of the enslaved themselves, spent nearly two centuries quietly servicing a debt raised to compensate slave owners. We have, in fact, already paid reparations once. To the wrong side. You'd struggle to make it up.

And who foots the bill this time round? Everyone, via general taxation. The care worker in Sunderland whose ancestors were down a mine. The plumber who arrived from Krakow in 2005 and whose connection to the Royal African Company is, at best, tenuous. Most Europeans alive today descend from farm labourers and mill hands who were living in conditions Dickens didn't need to exaggerate whilst the sugar money flowed elsewhere. The actual beneficiaries were a narrow, well-documented lot; plantation dynasties, merchant houses, banks, insurers, the odd Oxbridge college with a suspiciously nice quad. We know their names. UCL keeps a searchable database of every single compensation claimant, which must make for awkward reading at certain family reunions.

One of the Guardian's founding backers, Sir George Philips, co-owned a Jamaican sugar plantation and tried to claim compensation for 108 enslaved people. His claim failed; his business partner's succeeded, to the tune of £1,904, around £200,000 in today's money. So the plantation got paid, just not through Sir George. Small mercies, very small.

If there's a moral debt, it has traceable debtors. Billing an entire skin colour for the doings of a rich minority isn't justice; it's sending the invoice to everyone in the postcode and hoping. (Mind you, sending the bill downwards is hardly a new trick; it's been the playbook since 2008, whatever your complexion, and they're starting to wonder why there's no juice left in the lemon.)

Original sin, now with worse theology

Here's the bit that properly gets my goat.

The one thing liberal ethics was supposed to have nailed down is that guilt is personal. You answer for what you do. Not for what your great-great-great-grandfather may have done, and certainly not for what total strangers who happened to share his complexion got up to. The reparations framing quietly reintroduces heritable sin, allocated by race at birth. The medieval Church at least offered indulgences; the modern version doesn't even tell you the price, just that you owe.

Run the consistency test. We would never accept "your ancestors did X, so pay up" applied to any other group on earth, and quite rightly, because collective blame by ancestry is precisely the thing anti-racism exists to reject. You don't get to smuggle it back in through the tradesman's entrance because the arithmetic happens to point somewhere convenient.

And if you doubt where ledger logic leads, look at who else keeps one. The identitarian far right has spent years pushing "remigration"; the idea that immigrants and their descendants, citizens included, belong back in their "racial origin" countries, however many generations ago that was. It's the exact same premise wearing a different rosette. People as entries in an ancestral account, identity assigned at birth, obligations inherited by blood. Accept that premise for reparations and you've done the far right's philosophical homework for them. The only safe move is to reject the ledger entirely, whoever's holding it.

The slave trades that don't sell papers

A caution before this section, because it's the one most easily misread, and I'd rather do the misreaders' job for them. This is not "everyone did it, so it doesn't matter". Slavery was vile wherever it occurred, full stop. The point is narrower; if the principle is "descendants of enslavers owe descendants of the enslaved", it's remarkable how the principle only ever seems to fire in one direction.

The Barbary corsairs of North Africa enslaved, on historian Robert Davis's estimate, somewhere between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans between the 16th and 18th centuries. They raided coastal villages from Italy to Ireland to Cornwall, which rather complicates the tidy racial framing. (Davis's methodology is debated among historians, as these things always are; nobody disputes the trade ran at serious scale.)

The Arab trades across the Sahara, Red Sea and Indian Ocean ran for roughly thirteen centuries, which makes the Atlantic trade look like a horrific pop-up shop. The Franco-Senegalese anthropologist Tidiane N'Diaye put the figure around 17 million deported Africans, though estimates vary a fair bit. One reason that trade left far fewer descendant communities is grim, and I'll deliver it without a joke because there isn't one; the widespread castration of male slaves. Some communities exist, the Afro-Iraqis and the Siddi among them, but nothing like the scale of the Americas, largely because the victims were prevented from having descendants at all.

I've searched, and I cannot find the Guardian long-read demanding Gulf states pay up, nor the one invoicing the successor polities of the African kingdoms that captured and sold most of the people shipped west. Perhaps it's stuck in the drafts folder. Someone could consistently say "those claims may be valid too", and fair enough, that's at least coherent. But that piece never actually appears. One trade, one direction, one skin colour. When a moral principle only ever fires at a single target, you're entitled to wonder whether it's a principle or a preference.

Right then, let's implement it

Even if you swallowed all the above, have a go at actually building the scheme. I do a bit of solution design for a living, so humour me while I sketch the requirements.

We need to sort 750 million Europeans into "descendant of beneficiaries" and "descendant of victims" after several centuries of migration and intermarriage. As an example plenty of Britons are both. Plenty are neither. Half of us can't trace the family tree past a great-grandmother who was wistful about the backstairs. The edge cases alone would keep a consulting firm in billable hours until the heat death of the universe, and the end state is taxing the grandson of a Ukrainian refugee to compensate someone whose family arrived from Lagos in 1985. I've seen some doomed projects in my time. I'd rate this one somewhere below the SharePoint 2019 migration where the backup turned out to be a shortcut to the backup.

The version actually worth arguing with

To be fair (damn my honest nature), the serious reparations case, the Ta-Nehisi Coates version rather than the comment-bait version, doesn't argue personal guilt at all. It argues that states and institutions have continuous identity; the Britain that profited is legally the Britain of today, the profits compounded into infrastructure everyone inherits, and the harms are ongoing rather than merely historical.

That's a proper argument and deserves a proper hearing. But clock what it concedes; the claim lies against institutions and traceable wealth, not against white people as a category. Which is roughly where I came in. Run the debate on those terms, tracing endowments, naming names from that UCL database, and you'd have a harder, more honest conversation. You'd also have fewer clicks, which may explain why we never get it.

So no, I shan't be accepting my allocation of original sin, and I'd gently suggest you decline yours too. If the Guardian does want to raise an invoice, the addresses of the 3,000 families are in the database. Heck, I'll even help them with the mail merge ;)