Britons are widely ignorant of the scale and legacy of Britain’s involvement in slavery and colonialism, a survey has found, with the vast majority unaware how many people were enslaved, how long the trade went on for, or for how long UK taxpayers were paying off a government loan to “compensate” enslavers after abolition.
The poll, released to coincide with Tuesday’s UN International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, was commissioned by the Repair Campaign, which is working with Caricom to secure reparatory justice for member states through health, education and infrastructure projects.
The sample of more than 2,000 people representative of the UK population found 85% did not know that more than 3 million people had been forcibly shipped from Africa to the Caribbean by British enslavers.
I think most nations have similar lapses. I attended university in my late 40’s and none of my younger classmates had ever heard of the October crisis that led to “Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (to invoke) the War Measures Act for the first time in Canadian history during peacetime.”