AS REPARATIONS campaigners gathered to mark Emancipation Day, the Bank of England faced renewed calls to reveal the financial institutions behind compensation paid to slave owners.

Loans worth £17 billion in today’s money were handed to just 3,000 claimants after parliament passed abolition laws, but the Bank of England claim they are “unable” to trace the syndicates who stumped up the cash.

Campaigners demanded the firms be publicly named and forced to pay reparations.

The HM Treasury announced in 2018 that British taxpayers had been paying off the debt the British government amassed from a loan worth £20m to compensate slavers who profited from the horrific business.

The controversial post, labelled a #FridayFact, was shared widely on Twitter before it was swiftly deleted and slammed by reparations experts in the UK for its “tone deafness,” including historian David Olusoga who said slavery was “still misunderstood.”

In Freedom of Information Requests sent to the HM Treasury and the Bank of England (BofE), the financial syndicates involved in the loan scheme were unable to be traced despite both institutions aiding the loans distribution.

Paul Crooks, a genealogist who has traced people’s family lineage right up to discovering their former slave owners, told The Voice that the bank’s true intentions over the unknown records could never be know, but warned the debate around reparations could be disingenuous. 

“Whilst I believe that there are some advantages to corporate companies and universities coming out and making the right noises about reparations; the question is really whether there is a sort of umbrella type commitment to try to make reparations,” he said. 

Accountable

“I think the Bank of England would be core to that consideration above all organisations in this country and perhaps elsewhere, because the Bank of England is very much sort of accountable to the government. 

“So, whatever the Bank of England does or doesn’t do probably reflects the government’s sort of attitude and approach to handling the situation.”

The Bank of England has previously faced heavy criticism for its involvement in slavery. 

In April this year, Prince Edward and Sophie, the Countess of Wessex had the Grenada-leg of their Caribbean tour “postponed” in the wake of heightened calls for reparatory justice and an apology for slavery. 

Dorbrene O’Marde, chair of the Antigua and Barbuda Reparations Support Commission, claimed the cancellation to the east-Caribbean island was because of revelations that the Bank of England owned two plantations and 599 slaves from Grenada in the late 18th century.

The research was commissioned in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and found that 25 governors and directors owned slaves. 

Before the findings, the Bank had previously issued an apology for its infamous part in the slave trade.

Complicit

“As an institution, the Bank of England was never itself directly involved in the slave trade, but is aware of some inexcusable connections involving former governors and directors and apologises for them,” a spokeswoman said. 

The bank said “actual payments of compensation were managed by the Bank on behalf of the British government,” where £15m was paid in cash and £5 million was paid in government stock. 

However, the financial institution was accused of “distancing” themselves from their part in the trading of black lives across the Atlantic.

Some of the UK’s biggest high-street banks including HSBC, Barclays and Lloyds Banking Group were all found to have historical connections to Britain’s part in the slave trade.

However, in a Freedom of Information Request sent by The Voice, the BofE was still unable to confirm which syndicates had directly invested in or been involved in compensating thousands of slave owners, but claimed “there is no evidence to suggest that any records relating to the Slavery Abolition Act Loan have been lost.”

Limitations in the BofE archives, the UK’s Debt Management Officer and investors in the gilt which were discovered to be “private” halted the search altogether.

Records

The £20m compensation, which came into force some 30 years after enslaved people were emancipated in 1807, is 40% of the Treasury’s annual income or about 5% of British GDP and today is the modern equivalent of £17bn – the loan was one of the largest recorded in history. 

Jendayi Serwah, co-chair of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March committee, told The Voice that even after BofE’s apology they and other syndicates involved in the landmark debt need to take real accountability for their contribution to slavery.

“People need to understand that you don’t have to be the one who is putting a branding iron on a human being to be complicit in this. You don’t have to be someone who physically was on a ship or visited the Caribbean,” she explained.

“There are many levels to this. We need to understand that Church and state, and state forces and all state institutions, including banks, were legally and immorally propping up this whole trans-Atlantic trafficking and genocide of African people.”

“So, if this is an attempt [by the Bank of England and syndicates to distance themselves from slavery], it hasn’t worked and will not occur even in the absence of particular records.”

The University of Glasgow was one of the latest institutions to lead in work around reparative justice for the slave trade when it published a comprehensive report into their historical links with the practice in September 2018.

Justice

The University acknowledged how they did have a part in the abolitionist movement, but also received financial support from people whose wealth was accumulated through the trading of black people throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. 

They announced academic collaborations with the University of the West Indies (UWI) and a “programme of reparative justice which includes the creation of a centre for the study of slavery and a memorial or tribute at the University in the name of the enslaved” 

Recent years have seen the return of Benin Bronzes to their rightful owners in Africa when Cambridge University’s Jesus College and the University of Aberdeen gave back two of the looted artefacts to the Nigerian High Commission. 

Germany was the latest country to hand-over two more Benin Bronzes after being stolen by British soldiers more than 100 years ago. 

Ms Serwah said that the reparations movement has been making progress, and stressed that striving for reparatory justice “is not just about money” alone while holding financial institutions to account. 

“We keep reducing the whole thing around reparations to money, to compensation and that’s absolutely just a fraction of it. 

Restitution

“Reparations is defined in international law, and there are five principles and compensation is only one of them: The first one is restitution. The second one is rehabilitation. This third one is compensation. The fourth one is satisfaction. And the fifth one and the most important is guarantees of non-repetition,” she explained.

“Because when you talk about how we can ensure this never happens again, you then have to understand what was lost and it wasn’t just income. 

“What was the impact and wasn’t just the fact that other people were compensated and some were not. We’re not talking about the loss of nationhood. We’re talking about the loss of sovereignty and the loss of life, the loss of culture. We’re talking about the psychological impact.”

She added: “It’s correct to say that all areas of people’s activity experienced by African heritage have been impacted by history.”

“So, it’s not just economics, it’s politics, it’s health, it’s law, it’s everything. We need to stop divorcing the past from the present and the present from the past as if the experiences that we are experiencing now have nothing to do with the pseudoscience of the 17th century, the role of the church and their sanctioning and the role of the state.”

As demands for slavery reparations both here in the UK and the Caribbean ensue, Mr Crooks described the progress in the movement as merely “piecemeal.”

Black Report

The Black Report, commissioned in 1977 by Labour’s then secretary of state David Ennals, explored widespread health inequalities across Britain, which Crooks believes were some of the earliest reparations paid.

“The report said if you don’t take care of poor people in the inner cities and in deprived areas, you will get a backlash in terms of uprisings, because people become frustrated by their environment. 

“That report went largely ignored, the Thatcher government ignored it [when it was published in 1980]. It gave rise to the concept of community development and then what happened in 1981 we had Toxteth riots, the Brixton riots, everything was kicking off and it became about something like that never happening again,” he explained.

“What followed this community development was the idea of monies for black and minority ethnic people, but it was really targeted towards black folk. 

“In my mind, that was reparations under another name, because what it said was the reason why these riots broke out was because African-Caribbean people have been damaged by the legacy of enslavement and that these riots were the culmination of those frustrations, decades, generations of being held back.” 

Mr Crooks said that these monies gave room for youth centres and community projects to take shape, but years on from the Black Report the UK still sees African and Caribbean communities suffering the worst inequalities in healthcare, education and housing as one of the many stains of the British Empire’s rule. 

Immorality

The list of families that benefited from slavery, which can be found in public records, still live in the accumulated wealth their slave owner relatives amassed worth up to millions. 

Former Prime Minister, David Cameron, on his father’ side was related to General Sir James Duff, an army officer and MP for Banffshire in Scotland during the late 1700s.

Mr Cameron’s first cousin six times removed was compensated £4,101 which is equivalent to more than £3m today for the 202 enslaved black people he lost, who once worked on Jamaica’s Grange Sugar Estate.

Sir Hilary Beckles, Chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, described it as “the greatest act of political immorality” that the Caribbean diaspora in Britain – many of whom are descendants of enslaved people – would have unwittingly contributed to a loan scheme that left them and their ancestors penniless. 

In the ongoing fight for slavery reparations, Ms Serwah called for grassroots organisations and reparative justice campaigns to be made central to the movement in the UK and throughout the diaspora. 

“What these institutions tend to do, whether it’s Glasgow University, whether it’s the Bank of England, whether it’s Lloyds, they talk about their role and then they decide how they’re going to atone for it. There is no contact with us,” she said.

Exploitation

“There’s a double disrespect going on because you acknowledge what you have done. You acknowledge how you’ve come to this place of power and privilege, but you dare not talk to the people impacted about how this damage can be repaired for prosperity.

“There is an absolute opportunity to stop them. But in reality it means a relinquishment of power. It means facing up to your past. And we know that the British history largely has a past of getting to where it’s gotten to through subjugation, exploitation, through terrorism, through genocide. Through colonialism, through enslavement.”

The families today that live off the wealth of former enslaved black people should be at forefront in the demand slavery reparations, Ms Serwah believes, because they are still “benefitting from unjust enrichment” and the “myth of white superiority.”

Conservative MP Richard Drax, who is understood to be worth £150ml, was the latest public figure to face calls for reparations to Barbados which he rejected, but described his ancestors’ actions as “deeply, deeply regrettable.”

However, Mr Crooks says that the reparations movement is a “conversation that needs to be had with the government who actually represent the people.”

“Part of the problem with reparations part is we could have spent a lot of time trying to make institutions and people feel bad; the emphasis is on you should be apologising to us. But what we’re putting in is a demand. So, we have to make sure that we have a robust case to make the demand to the government so that we’re owed,” he said.

Stock

“I’m less concerned about what the descendants think, because the ones that are actually backing us are the ones that probably don’t have [reparations] to give anyway. We look at the David Cameron’s of this world who are not going to give up what they’ve got easily.”

He added: “It is the government that will have to deal with that and it’s going to take a more robust approach than just making out a simple request and it also requires a grassroots approach. When I say that, I mean the people, the mass of the masses have to be behind it.”

A Bank of England spokesperson said: “The 1833 Slavery Abolition Act provided for compensation to be paid to slave-owners totalling £20 million. As part of this process slave-owners, or their agents, could take the compensation certificates to the National Debt Office for authorisation. The actual payments of compensation were managed by the Bank on behalf of the British government. £15 million was paid in cash and £5 million was paid in government stock.  

“The £15 million of compensation money paid in cash was raised by a loan which was contracted in 1835 between the British government and a syndicate led by Nathan Mayer Rothschild. However, we do not know of any records in the Bank’s Archive which list the syndicate members, and neither are we aware of any research that has been able to establish these names using records in other archives.

“As part of the loan agreement, the syndicate received various types of government stock in exchange, the amounts being determined by the size of individual subscriptions. The Bank’s Archive holds numerous stock registers for this period which contain thousands of individual accounts, but without more specific details and names it would be impossible to link these records to the syndicate.”

The Voice has contacted the HM Treasury for comment.