UK slavery reparations are a grift - but there is something positive the EU could do

Current attempts to get Britain to pay "reparations" for its slaving past are nothing but grift I'm afraid. Grift attached to a monumental grievance of course, but grift nonetheless.

One seemingly certifiable judge at the International Court of Justice has suggested the UK should pay $24trillion - or, if you prefer, two thirds of all the money in the entire world - as a punishment.

So, that's you and me paying literally impossible amounts of money for something we didn't do, 200 years ago. Seem reasonable to you? No, me neither.

Don't know about your folks but mine were starving to death in the west of under the jackboot of the English crown at the time. The time Britain was getting around to abolishing the slavery which had served a small number of very evil people extremely well, that is.

And of course that small number of people were not just British but Portuguese, French, Dutch, Swedish, Danish... And that's before we get to the Ashanti Empire in Ghana, the Dahomey Empire in Benin, the Yoruba of what is now Nigeria, the Imbangala in Angola, and on and on... all of whom got rich from selling their fellow Africans as slaves.

So again, I'm really not sure quite why those long-dead slavers' grotesque wickedness makes me - a poor pleb of Irish ancestry - personally, financially, or morally culpable for arguably the greatest human evil the world has ever seen.

And, you know what? I really, really don't like the implication that I am culpable.

"Yes Paul, but you have gained from slavery tacitly, simply by being born British..." I hear the Left's self-hate society cry.

Well, maybe if you're posh like the journalist Laura Trevelyan, whose family really did own more than 1,000 slaves and six sugar plantations on the Caribbean island of Grenada - then you might well wish to make a donation - as Laura did to the tune of £100,000.

But my lot arrived in at the back end of the 19th century to work in the dark satanic textile mills of the North. It wasn't slave labour, but they lived in poverty, the children indentured and the legal property of the mill-owner from the age of nine until the age of 21.

Again, it's quite hard to see how that is in any way profiting from Empire or slavery. Even more insane, my best mate's folks are from the Caribbean island of St Vincent...

How, in the name of God, can he be asked to pay a penny piece? Surely he, and many, many other Brits, should be the recipient of reparations, not paying them!? Which brings me to the meat of today's piece.

I was recently in speaking with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, the head of a nation whose people were indeed trafficked for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years in both the trans-Saharan (or Arab) slave trade and trans-Atlantic slave trade.

And, make no mistake, slavery and Britain's part in it does lurk in the shadows during every conversation we have.

Uganda was forcibly made a "protectorate of the British Empire" from 1894 to 1962 and there is little deference to Rule Britannia, at least not from Museveni, a one-time Marxist now fully converted to capitalism and growing a Ugandan middle class ... er, rather on the British model.

He is 80 years old and while perhaps not the rabble-rouser of his youth, he is nonetheless sharp as a razor and not a man to suffer fools or indeed chase chimaera like multi-trillion dollar hand-outs which will clearly never happen.

He will however look to foster trade, and wealth-creation, wherever he can, unhindered by dogma and a refusal to become a pawn in the West's geo-political game (and for West, read America).

He knows Africa's time is coming and is smart enough to keep and onside even at risk of putting the West's nose out of joint.

"Look," he says, "By 1900 the whole of Africa had been colonised... and we weren't colonised by Russia, or China, or North Korea but buy European countries who took slaves from here for 400 years. It was you guys.

"For us the Europeans are not serious. They are full of themselves and we just ignore them. You must think I am an idiot to come and tell me I must be automatically against the Russians who stood with my grandfathers since 1912 or the Chinese who stood with our fathers since 1949."

But he adds with a grin, "I have forgiven you, we must move forward of course," and a more diplomatic "we can even be against Russia if we are persuaded."

He knows only too well too that the EU still sponsors colonial-era protectionism, allowing easy trade in raw coffee beans (Uganda's biggest export by far) but slapping crippling taxes on any finished roasted product which might compete with Illy, or Lavazza or Nescafe.

"This is modern slavery," he says bluntly, "this is the selfishness of the western countries. The global value of coffee is $460Bn but out of that the coffee producing countries of the world get $25Bn - and Africa only takes $2.5Bn of that. It is parasitism and European countries should stop."

And there's the rub. While pushy politicians in the Caribbean make political capital calling for reparations they know will never be paid, Uganda - which actually continues to be a victim of an insidious form of colonialism - is pushing not for a handout but a fair shake.

It's rather about time Brussels gave them one.

I think Museveni knows that Africa's time is coming, the continent has the fastest growing market in the world with household consumption set to top $2.5Trillion by the end of the decade.

If the West wants a slice of that market it will have to come to Africa's table with its own begging bowl. And that is perhaps the ultimate reparation.