A fairly decent attempt by the Jamaicans to skim a few quid from HMRC I thought

“We ask not for handouts or any such acts of indecent submission. We merely ask that you acknowledge responsibility for your share of this situation and move to contribute in a joint programme of rehabilitation and renewal. The continuing suffering of our people, Sir, is as much your nation’s duty to alleviate as it is ours to resolve in steadfast acts of self-responsibility.”

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/jamaica-calls-for-brita in-to-pay-billions-of-pounds-in-reparations-for-slavery/ar-A AeTzdS?ocid=spartandhp

It's an absurd request after 3-400 years.
Besides, how much do the Romans owe on that basis :rubchin:

taking there visigoths and huns as slaves!

I think the head of the reparations committee has actually said an apology would suffice.

The comparison with the Romans is a bit much, mind. As far as I'm aware they didnt uproot us from a completely different continent, cart us the breadth of the known world whilst a high percentage perished along the way, and then make us work as slaves until we died.

I mean, I may be wrong, but as far as I'm aware they didnt.

ill get some no win no fee chappies onto it now

The idea that people in this country - many of whom are the descendants of relatively recent immigrants themselves and thus have no historical link whatsoever with the slave trade - should be made to pay for something that ended nearly two hundred years ago is utterly absurd and unjust. Indeed, the whole idea is redolent of the repellent concept of racial guilt, whereby a group can be held guilty of the 'crimes' of its ancestors simply by virtue of their heredity. Such a concept ought to have been thoroughly discredited by now, one would have liked to think,

Indeed, such a proposition raises the absurd possibility that descendants of slaves living in the UK should be out of pocket in order to enrich white Jamaicans who are the direct descendants of slaveowners.

Are the Germans expected to apologise to the jews for Nazi atrocities in the year 2300 ?
Does there not come a point when people respect the past but ultimately move on.

My conscience is 100 per cent clear as regards our Jamaican chums, thanks. :thumbup:

I think apologising might be the right thing to do and would also at least start to allow some moving on.

Mind you, we've a ridiculous amount of apologising to do given our bloody track record.

you are all over dem Jamaican bad boyz imo

the empire and 'carted off' to other parts of it with plenty of them dying on the way and when they got to where they were going. The same went for the Greeks.

Slavery in one form or another is pretty much a constant in human history up until pretty damn recently. Us throwing our hands up in horror at it now simply displays our lack of perspective.

wd us..and judging from yardies in Brixton I think if they had had the boats n navy n ting and found us first then we would have a bloody hiding tbh nooooo remorse or respecting us from dem imo

Quite a few of the stately homes were built on slaver's sugar money and half the hereditary peers in the house of lords are there because of some ill-gotten colonial gain or other.

thing for which to apologise. And I, for one, am not prepared to bear some supposed burden of guilt on behalf of other people's ancestors thank you very much. Besides, all these people want is to see whitey grovel and maybe get a few quid into the bargain. They can poke that up their racist arses. f**k that.

Besides, once you get started, everyone has plenty to apologise for. Human history is a bit too complex for this sort of simplistic gesture to have any meaning.

back of our coal and mines..poor bloody Myther with that big bloody house at top of valley looking down on the poor cnuts below...English f**kers...say sorry now

and even he is dead

you very much. The whole argument is very silly and doesn't stand up to a moment's intelligent scrutiny.

Equally, plenty of captives from elsewhere ended up in Britain as slaves - the free movement of labour was a big part of the Roman Empire, too :-)

so like a battered child "we" were more likely to carry on that sort of behavior. Bascially the Normans should have put us in psychoanalysis sometime about 1136

And even says "thank you very much" a lot in the same indignant, jowley fashion too. The whole thing brings to mind that Galbraith quote.

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

Just apologise, be the bigger man.

enslaved, subsumed or scattered to the Celtic fringe by the Saxon invaders, it all gets a bit complex deciding which 'we' is innocent and which 'we' is guilty imo.

And if you're using the behaviour of the romans as a moral yardstick I'm not sure anybody will come out of it well.

Cameron his self is the descendant of slave owners

slaves, I'm really not sure you want to get into the question of scale, to be honest. Equally, people tended to take slaves away from their home country to stop them running back to their homes, so transportation was very much part of the deal.

I'm not using any moral yardsticks, simply pointing out that everyone has something to whine about if you go back far enough, which makes special pleading such as that from the Jamaicans pretty redundant.

the Saxons for the Massacre of Verden. You can if you like.

And Jamaica wasnt independent until the mid-60s, which is roughly a decade before either of us were born, so it's hardly the same is it?

And your other point seem to be confusing colonialism and slavery, j, which is shifting the goalposts rather a lot. But even so, colonialism had f**k all to do with me, so why should I apologise?

Nice try, though. :hehe:

I dont think you should apologise, you arent representing our country on a diplomatic visit. Dave is and he should but instead he'll do that lovely walking out thing he does to look strong.

I used to know two old jamaican brothers called kingsley and st john.

as much as our beloved national icon Gary Winston Lineker

That's quite a significant difference, I'd have thought.

And since I am a British subject, Dave would be apologising (were he to do anything so f**kwitted) on behalf of everyone currently alive in the UK, not one of whom bears any responsibility for slavery or colonialism. How is that fair?

And, obviously our thoughts about colonialism differs, but we wer claiming dominion over them in most people's living memory, which was sort of the point.

about it and I don't think they felt terribly oppressed by that status.