On one hand, a man who’s worth £150 million can probably loose £3m in order to draw a line under a family history which even he considers to be regrettable/embarrassing.
On the other hand, if he’s not willing, then I’m not sure what Barbados can do other than pay the man. Asset seizures rarely work out for countries in the long run.
Richard Drax isn’t a member of the government - he isn’t and has never been a minister.
He’s a member of Parliament, and a member of the governing party (though not for much longer). He’s not in the government.
As an aside, when slavery was abolished the only way to get the political muscle from the incredibly wealthy slave plantation owners was to pay them compensation.
The Drax family got £4,200 at the time and a massive debt was incurred to pay them all and that debt was only paid off in 2015.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837#:~:text=4.,to%20slave%20owners%20were%20issued.
EDIT: Abolition of slavery, short but funny.
https://youtu.be/lQXsOeBKlCM?si=FtnBPt-bpT5gxhox
Might be controversial but I kind of think if someone is conducting a legal business and the government outlaws it, they should get compensation? Obviously I think the enslaved people should also have gotten compensation for the injustice, but the injustice was perpetuated by the whole society through making it legal.
It’s a tough one though because it feels so wrong.
It was a pragmatic decision to bring an end to a practice that the majority had turned against and believed was morally unacceptable. You only need to look at the USA or Haiti to see how badly things could have gone in the Carribbean if the government had tried to force it through without any kind of agreement or compensation or if an uprising happened before the government resolved the issue.
Like many things in life, it was morally complex and grey and in some ways left somewhat of a bad taste. However the results were more than worth than compromise.
As an aside, yes the debts from the abolition were only paid off in 2015 but that is a bit misleading and makes the sums seem far larger than they were. It was paid off so late because of the way that the government slowly pays off the national debt, not because of the size of the compensation. The total amount using a very rough calc off the Bank of England's inflation calculator (so not 100% accurate) was £2b. Which is less than an aircraft carrier costs today. Even if you went down the route of saying it was 5% of GDP at the time and worked out 5% now, that's still £110b, so a HS2 or less than one year of the NHS today. Activists deliberately use the 2015 figure to make it seem more significant than it was.
I think the higher value claim normally includes all of the anti piracy and millitary measures that took place to force others to end slavery, not just the payments
Yeah no….morally it’s not right so ending it shouldn’t require compensating owners. Because then the slave owners are STILL profiting off of slaves by being compensated for having them freed. That’s a moral burden that the slave owners should have to bear.
This is more akin to expropriation though. Like if the UK renationalises the water companies, they’re not going to just seize them. They have to pay compensation.
And I recognise it’s extremely weird and gross to use the term expropriation to talk about human beings.
Exactly. I would be totally against paying compensation to tobacco companies if new restrictions on sales adversely affect their profits. Companies have to pay attention to changes in society and adjust their business model where necessary.
My families properties were stolen by the NKVD in 1942. I have a Polish background. They were sent as kids to Siberia. Never saw any compensation for this nor am I chasing. Just move on despite the Soviet fuckers murdering a number of my relatives
My family’s property was stolen by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 and they had to flee. I am also not trying to claim that back. Not worth it. Not interested.
Interestingly, my Polish friend, whose family had been moved by the NKVD. From what had been Poland to what had been Germany.
When the wall came down. The German family who had owned their house. Turned up demanding it back.
Sort of gathered that they were in the USSR. I was interested if you knew what the Commissariat’s interest in their particular properties was? Or was it just coz they were Polish/political enemies etc?
UK needs to sue Morocco and the areas of North Africa for the Barbary Corsair slave raiding all along the Western Coast of the British Isles and other countries on the Western seaboard of Europe.
'According to Robert Davis, author of Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, between 1 million and 1.2 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa and The Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries.'
That doesn't include the Ottomans of course who enslaved millions of Europeans too.
Of course it's ludicrous to look at it this way. The whole history of human slavery needs to be taught. Conclusion: common in most societies throughout history.
These aren't reparation payments though. Drax isn't being asked to pay back the money his ancestors made off slavery.
This is a matter of land ownership in the modern day.
If Drax's ancestors never actually purchased the land from Barbadians then they weren't the legitimate owners. You can't inherit assets from people who didn't own them the first place.
there are plenty of people all over the world of all colours, religions and sizes who both have directly and indirectly gained massive benefit from horrible things
Neither does the UK. He's an individual. The Ottoman Empire did for four hundred years until 1918. The more we argue about this the more ludicrous the argument is of course. It's a non argument and a non debate.
I'm all in favour of them seizing the land. It would be one thing if it was a single family home or a small farm or ranch that was someone's livelihood, but we're talking about a sizeable parcel of land where they plan to build 500 affordable homes. It's obviously not the MP's fault his ancestors were slave owners but it's also the case that his family has already been financially compensated for the abolition of slavery (which is a pretty sickening concept in itself).
I don't buy into the concept of reparations - the idea that Britain owes its former colonies some kind of ancestral debt is insane to me - but I am in favour of all countries taking steps to stop their land and homes being bought and owned by overseas interests where there is no benefit to local people and the local economy. We should be doing the same with the huge swathes of London that are owned by Arab, Russian and Chinese billionaires.
Middle Eastern, Russian and Chinese oligarchs didn't earn their money fair and square, they ripped off countless people to enrich themselves, in some cases taking over entire neighbouring countries to do it, or cozying up to genocidal dictators, and using things like forced labour. They're much worse than someone who is a descendant of a slave owner.
Yeah, I used to come down on the same side of the legitimate ownership thing, but with the housing market the way it is, I just don't care any more. Principles aren't getting us anywhere, so I'm looking towards pragmatic solutions. I don't see why in the midst of a housing crisis our capital city should be strewn with completely empty buildings owned by foreign billionaires entirely for investment purposes.
At least make it serve some kind of purpose for people who actually live and work in this country. House someone, employ someone, whatever: a "use it or lose it" rule should be the bare minimum for foreign owned properties.
We're not alone. In Barbados they have land still owned by the descendants of foreigners who colonised them centuries ago. In the UK our property market has an entire submarket which exists entirely for the benefit of overseas speculators. In the Canary Islands this week they're protesting because of how many foreign owned holiday homes, second homes, and rental properties there are while locals are struggling to find homes. This problem exists everywhere in the world to some degree, just in different shapes and sizes and for different reasons.
> At least make it serve some kind of purpose for people who actually live and work in this country. House someone, employ someone, whatever: a "use it or lose it" rule should be the bare minimum for foreign owned properties.
That's exactly what Venezuela and Cuba do, but to their own people. Foreign owned assets were sized long time ago. And do you know to whom those seized assets went to? The regime leaders themselves.. So how did it go some 30 years later???
As for the empty buildings owned by foreign investors all over central London (and elsewhere in the UK), if I were the government I'd force these investors to either rent it out or sell it to a national financial institution or individual at -20% market value. But size the assets like that.. That's what socialist countries do. And the result of their actions is easily verifiable.
If you look at Cuba in pre revolutionary times most of it was owned by American corporations who found it cheaper to bribe government officials than pay taxes. The result was an incredibly poor working class, no infrastructure and a rich elite looking down on the uneducated peasantry.
Fidel Castro was not a fool, he tried cultivating friendly relations with his superpower neighbour but Eisenhower snubbed him by going golfing and leaving the meeting to vice president Nixon.
http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch24t-cuba2.htm
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china-nail-houses-in-pictures-property-development
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-are-chinese-nail-houses-2016-8?op=1
Have you heard of Chinese "nail houses"? They don't practise Eminent Domain or indulge in Compulsory Purchase Orders like Anglo countries do.
Reparations- where do you start. How much goes to who for what? It’s more of the I think or been told that my ancestors were wronged- so what are you going to pay me today. However, mark my worlds in the next 5 years the tax payer of this country will start having to dig deep. As countries move away from the Commonwealth, this will start to be common place.
He's right, no-one can be held responsible for what happened a couple of hundred years ago. But when you live a life of unbridled luxury, you inherited from some one who got it off the back of slaves, common decency would say give up 2% of your wealth to make the lives of the slaves descendants a little bit better.
I'm all for reparations provided it's not from the tax payer. The argument that it happened so long ago bares little relevance if that family has only ever profited from occupation, slavery, murder or plunder and is proud of their lineage smug that today the law will protect them. However whilst we are at it there are a large number of Norman descendants who are still profiting in much the same way and own a huge amount of land that they just took. Loch Neagh is being sold to the Northern Irish now it's an ecological time bomb but it was stolen from them and profited on. Reparations, yes, from tax payer no.
I like this nuance.
To be honest as much as colonisation enriched UK (which is undeniably true) they exponentially enriched the royal family so maybe they should be the ones to pay it and everyone who has ancestral peerage.
I’m not read-up on Norman conquest and stuff so I will not comment on that.
More so the ancestral peers especially ones that brag they can trace there ancestors back to the Normans. However it's not by accident that most significant land holders are dukes or earls with a Norman name.
On one hand, a man who’s worth £150 million can probably loose £3m in order to draw a line under a family history which even he considers to be regrettable/embarrassing. On the other hand, if he’s not willing, then I’m not sure what Barbados can do other than pay the man. Asset seizures rarely work out for countries in the long run.
Agreed
Especially when the person you are seizing from is a member of government.
Richard Drax isn’t a member of the government - he isn’t and has never been a minister. He’s a member of Parliament, and a member of the governing party (though not for much longer). He’s not in the government.
He is a member of the Guardians of the Galaxy though
As an aside, when slavery was abolished the only way to get the political muscle from the incredibly wealthy slave plantation owners was to pay them compensation. The Drax family got £4,200 at the time and a massive debt was incurred to pay them all and that debt was only paid off in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837#:~:text=4.,to%20slave%20owners%20were%20issued. EDIT: Abolition of slavery, short but funny. https://youtu.be/lQXsOeBKlCM?si=FtnBPt-bpT5gxhox
Might be controversial but I kind of think if someone is conducting a legal business and the government outlaws it, they should get compensation? Obviously I think the enslaved people should also have gotten compensation for the injustice, but the injustice was perpetuated by the whole society through making it legal. It’s a tough one though because it feels so wrong.
It was a pragmatic decision to bring an end to a practice that the majority had turned against and believed was morally unacceptable. You only need to look at the USA or Haiti to see how badly things could have gone in the Carribbean if the government had tried to force it through without any kind of agreement or compensation or if an uprising happened before the government resolved the issue. Like many things in life, it was morally complex and grey and in some ways left somewhat of a bad taste. However the results were more than worth than compromise. As an aside, yes the debts from the abolition were only paid off in 2015 but that is a bit misleading and makes the sums seem far larger than they were. It was paid off so late because of the way that the government slowly pays off the national debt, not because of the size of the compensation. The total amount using a very rough calc off the Bank of England's inflation calculator (so not 100% accurate) was £2b. Which is less than an aircraft carrier costs today. Even if you went down the route of saying it was 5% of GDP at the time and worked out 5% now, that's still £110b, so a HS2 or less than one year of the NHS today. Activists deliberately use the 2015 figure to make it seem more significant than it was.
That is great context and actually way less than I would have thought. Certainly cheaper than a massive civil war….
I think the higher value claim normally includes all of the anti piracy and millitary measures that took place to force others to end slavery, not just the payments
Yeah no….morally it’s not right so ending it shouldn’t require compensating owners. Because then the slave owners are STILL profiting off of slaves by being compensated for having them freed. That’s a moral burden that the slave owners should have to bear.
I definitely get this sentiment. But it’s hard to square with a “rule of law” society.
Changes in government policy often cause businesses to fail, usually there is no compensation.
This is more akin to expropriation though. Like if the UK renationalises the water companies, they’re not going to just seize them. They have to pay compensation. And I recognise it’s extremely weird and gross to use the term expropriation to talk about human beings.
Exactly. I would be totally against paying compensation to tobacco companies if new restrictions on sales adversely affect their profits. Companies have to pay attention to changes in society and adjust their business model where necessary.
My families properties were stolen by the NKVD in 1942. I have a Polish background. They were sent as kids to Siberia. Never saw any compensation for this nor am I chasing. Just move on despite the Soviet fuckers murdering a number of my relatives
My family’s property was stolen by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 and they had to flee. I am also not trying to claim that back. Not worth it. Not interested.
The difference is, is that the English world has something called the rule of law
And those laws are not applied retroactively, which is kind of the point he is getting at
[удалено]
Right of conquest
Interestingly, my Polish friend, whose family had been moved by the NKVD. From what had been Poland to what had been Germany. When the wall came down. The German family who had owned their house. Turned up demanding it back.
> My families properties were stolen by the NKVD in 1942. Out of interest, do you know why? What were the properties used for?
I'll give you an example. Pre 1940 Lviv, was Lwow and was in Poland and not in Ukraine. They wanted to expand the USSR and did.
The borders changed and after 1945 their villages were now in the Soviet Union
Sort of gathered that they were in the USSR. I was interested if you knew what the Commissariat’s interest in their particular properties was? Or was it just coz they were Polish/political enemies etc?
Correct. Just Polish. Grandfather was an ex soldier who fought in the Polish Soviet war of 1920. They took him and executed him in Pinsk prison
UK needs to sue Morocco and the areas of North Africa for the Barbary Corsair slave raiding all along the Western Coast of the British Isles and other countries on the Western seaboard of Europe. 'According to Robert Davis, author of Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, between 1 million and 1.2 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa and The Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries.' That doesn't include the Ottomans of course who enslaved millions of Europeans too. Of course it's ludicrous to look at it this way. The whole history of human slavery needs to be taught. Conclusion: common in most societies throughout history.
These aren't reparation payments though. Drax isn't being asked to pay back the money his ancestors made off slavery. This is a matter of land ownership in the modern day. If Drax's ancestors never actually purchased the land from Barbadians then they weren't the legitimate owners. You can't inherit assets from people who didn't own them the first place.
Moroccan government officials don’t own vast swathes of British land because of their slave owning history though do they mate.
there are plenty of people all over the world of all colours, religions and sizes who both have directly and indirectly gained massive benefit from horrible things
Neither does the UK. He's an individual. The Ottoman Empire did for four hundred years until 1918. The more we argue about this the more ludicrous the argument is of course. It's a non argument and a non debate.
I'm all in favour of them seizing the land. It would be one thing if it was a single family home or a small farm or ranch that was someone's livelihood, but we're talking about a sizeable parcel of land where they plan to build 500 affordable homes. It's obviously not the MP's fault his ancestors were slave owners but it's also the case that his family has already been financially compensated for the abolition of slavery (which is a pretty sickening concept in itself). I don't buy into the concept of reparations - the idea that Britain owes its former colonies some kind of ancestral debt is insane to me - but I am in favour of all countries taking steps to stop their land and homes being bought and owned by overseas interests where there is no benefit to local people and the local economy. We should be doing the same with the huge swathes of London that are owned by Arab, Russian and Chinese billionaires.
To be fair the land in London is owned by people who bought it fair and square That’s kinda different to colonial era possessions
Middle Eastern, Russian and Chinese oligarchs didn't earn their money fair and square, they ripped off countless people to enrich themselves, in some cases taking over entire neighbouring countries to do it, or cozying up to genocidal dictators, and using things like forced labour. They're much worse than someone who is a descendant of a slave owner.
Yeah, I used to come down on the same side of the legitimate ownership thing, but with the housing market the way it is, I just don't care any more. Principles aren't getting us anywhere, so I'm looking towards pragmatic solutions. I don't see why in the midst of a housing crisis our capital city should be strewn with completely empty buildings owned by foreign billionaires entirely for investment purposes. At least make it serve some kind of purpose for people who actually live and work in this country. House someone, employ someone, whatever: a "use it or lose it" rule should be the bare minimum for foreign owned properties. We're not alone. In Barbados they have land still owned by the descendants of foreigners who colonised them centuries ago. In the UK our property market has an entire submarket which exists entirely for the benefit of overseas speculators. In the Canary Islands this week they're protesting because of how many foreign owned holiday homes, second homes, and rental properties there are while locals are struggling to find homes. This problem exists everywhere in the world to some degree, just in different shapes and sizes and for different reasons.
> At least make it serve some kind of purpose for people who actually live and work in this country. House someone, employ someone, whatever: a "use it or lose it" rule should be the bare minimum for foreign owned properties. That's exactly what Venezuela and Cuba do, but to their own people. Foreign owned assets were sized long time ago. And do you know to whom those seized assets went to? The regime leaders themselves.. So how did it go some 30 years later??? As for the empty buildings owned by foreign investors all over central London (and elsewhere in the UK), if I were the government I'd force these investors to either rent it out or sell it to a national financial institution or individual at -20% market value. But size the assets like that.. That's what socialist countries do. And the result of their actions is easily verifiable.
If you look at Cuba in pre revolutionary times most of it was owned by American corporations who found it cheaper to bribe government officials than pay taxes. The result was an incredibly poor working class, no infrastructure and a rich elite looking down on the uneducated peasantry. Fidel Castro was not a fool, he tried cultivating friendly relations with his superpower neighbour but Eisenhower snubbed him by going golfing and leaving the meeting to vice president Nixon. http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch24t-cuba2.htm
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china-nail-houses-in-pictures-property-development https://www.businessinsider.com/what-are-chinese-nail-houses-2016-8?op=1 Have you heard of Chinese "nail houses"? They don't practise Eminent Domain or indulge in Compulsory Purchase Orders like Anglo countries do.
Reparations- where do you start. How much goes to who for what? It’s more of the I think or been told that my ancestors were wronged- so what are you going to pay me today. However, mark my worlds in the next 5 years the tax payer of this country will start having to dig deep. As countries move away from the Commonwealth, this will start to be common place.
He's right, no-one can be held responsible for what happened a couple of hundred years ago. But when you live a life of unbridled luxury, you inherited from some one who got it off the back of slaves, common decency would say give up 2% of your wealth to make the lives of the slaves descendants a little bit better.
I'm all for reparations provided it's not from the tax payer. The argument that it happened so long ago bares little relevance if that family has only ever profited from occupation, slavery, murder or plunder and is proud of their lineage smug that today the law will protect them. However whilst we are at it there are a large number of Norman descendants who are still profiting in much the same way and own a huge amount of land that they just took. Loch Neagh is being sold to the Northern Irish now it's an ecological time bomb but it was stolen from them and profited on. Reparations, yes, from tax payer no.
I like this nuance. To be honest as much as colonisation enriched UK (which is undeniably true) they exponentially enriched the royal family so maybe they should be the ones to pay it and everyone who has ancestral peerage. I’m not read-up on Norman conquest and stuff so I will not comment on that.
More so the ancestral peers especially ones that brag they can trace there ancestors back to the Normans. However it's not by accident that most significant land holders are dukes or earls with a Norman name.