Category Archives: Government

Arts, Culture, Government, History, Society

The West must deal with the legacy of slavery. Apologies are not enough

DEALING WITH HISTORIC SLAVERY

Intro: It is time Western governments started to talk seriously about reparations

ON December 19, 2022, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, announced his country’s apology for participating in and profiting from the transatlantic trade of enslaved people. This is the first time a Western nation has formally apologised for its role in slavery, an indictment on others who should similarly take the stand and show genuine remorse.

Speaking at the National Archives in The Hague, Mr Rutte said the role of the Netherlands in slavery was “ugly, painful, and even downright shameful”.

“For hundreds of years, people were made merchandise, exploited and abused in the name of the Dutch state,” Rutte said. “For that, I offer the apologies of the Dutch government.”

That the Dutch government found the courage to fully acknowledge and officially apologise for its role in “abetting, stimulating, preserving and profiting from centuries of slave trading” is highly commendable and liberating.

However, the paths to reconciliation and healing suggested by the government are equally underwhelming.  

In his apology, Rutte admitted that “centuries of oppression and exploitation still have an effect to this very day” and talked about “doing justice to the past and healing in the present”.

To start this healing process, the Dutch PM said, his government will work to “enhance knowledge of the history of slavery” and to “ensure more awareness, acknowledgement and understanding”. To facilitate this, Mr Rutte announced the creation of a $216m fund to tackle the legacy of slavery and boost education.

Yet, nowhere in his landmark apology did Rutte express an intention to take the one action descendants of enslaved people have repeatedly said would make the biggest difference in righting the wrongs of the past: by paying reparations.

The Netherlands, like most Western nations, owes the immense economic prosperity it is experiencing today in large part to the profits it made from slavery.

In 2019, a five-year research project funded by the Dutch Research Council, entitled “Slaves, commodities and logistics” concluded that “economic activities related to the slave trade between Europe, Africa and America made a significant contribution to Dutch prosperity in the second half of the eighteenth century”.

According to the study, in the year 1770 some 5.2 per cent of the Dutch gross domestic product (GDP) was based on the transatlantic trade of enslaved people – a contribution that is equivalent to the entire port of Rotterdam today. Rutte did not mention any of this in his carefully curated speech.

Despite offering a historic official apology for slavery, the Dutch government clearly still has no intention to return to the descendants of enslaved people what it stole from them.

Regrettably, the Netherlands is not alone among countries that benefited from slavery in refusing to pay. The governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and others are remaining stubbornly silent in the face of increasingly louder calls for reparations.

The basic premise and defence of governments’ refusal to pay up always offer the same tired arguments when it comes to addressing racial injustice of the past. They claim that “no one alive today is directly benefitting or suffering from slavery”, that it is “a thing of the past”, and that “it would be impossible to determine who deserves to be paid”. Such arguments, of course, do not stand even the most basic of scrutiny. For one thing, people are still clearly benefitting and suffering from slavery.

In the United States, the Brookings Institution estimates that the average white family has around 10-times the amount of wealth as the average Black family. In the United Kingdom, too, people from Black African backgrounds typically hold the least wealth, which equates to around one-tenth of the wealth held by white Britons.

Such inequalities, compounded by systemic racism in all areas of life and society – from health and housing to education and law enforcement – are direct, modern-day consequences of slavery affecting millions of people.

And slavery is hardly just a “thing of the past”. In countries shaped by and built around it, such as in Suriname – one of the smallest countries in South America – where direct descendants of people enslaved by the Dutch were brought to work in plantations now make up most of the population.

In Africa, the immense wealth lost to slavery cannot simply be ignored or forgotten, since its return of what’s owed would resolve most of the continent’s fundamental problems almost overnight.

The question of who should receive reparations is not necessarily complicated either. After the abolishment of slavery, the Netherlands, the US, France, Denmark and the UK all moved to compensate former slavers for so-called “loss of property”. The UK government only finished paying the debts it acquired to pay former slavers in 2015. But all this time, none of the former slave-holding countries paid a single penny to formerly enslaved people or their descendants.

It is therefore high time for compensation to be paid not to those who “made people into merchandise” but to those who continue to carry the pain and the scars of their ancestors.

The Caribbean Community, a grouping of 15 Caribbean countries whose populations are dominated by descendants of formerly enslaved people, created a 10-point plan for reparatory justice for European governments.

The group wants, among other things, a full formal apology, repatriation opportunities, debt cancellation, the transfer of technology, psychological rehabilitation, and African knowledge programmes.

This 10-point plan would be a good starting point for governments truly willing to confront the past and start a healing process.

Any form of economic redress cannot merely assuage the collective conscience of white people in the West: it must be unapologetically substantive and enduring, despite the high costs of financial restitution.

Some 160 years after the abolition of slavery in Europe and the US, Western countries, quite evidently, have an obligation not only to apologise, but also to commit to reparations and by embarking on comprehensive social justice programmes.

Apologies are commendable. But descendants of enslaved people also need proper indemnity and social change.

Standard
Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

UK Government Policy is anti-family

SOCIETY

THE Observer’s editorial, on Sunday January 15, the sister newspaper of the Guardian, concerns how hostile the UK has become in families having children. The editor points to how parents are being forced to bring up their offspring in conditions that will have grave repercussions for society.

According to the old proverb, ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ That will have little meaning for many parents today, but the proper place for institutions outside the family in the birth and upbringing of our children is a pressing matter indeed. Recent evidence suggests that government is grievously failing parents in many ways.

Alarmingly, it starts even before birth. A report released last week from the Care Quality Commission (CQC), highlighted a worrying decline in women’s experiences of NHS maternity services in England. The trend comes in the wake of several inquiries into the very poor maternity care on offer in some hospital trusts, with more than 1,000 babies dying or who are left with severe injuries each year as a result of something having gone wrong during labour. The CQC has found four in ten maternity services are providing unacceptable levels of care. This goes well beyond the general resourcing and staffing issues within the NHS that have created a national crisis; it reflects more directly a cultural under-prioritisation of the care of women and their babies that has not been adequately addressed by successive UK governments.

Government policy, too, has a marked influence on the context within which parents bring up their children: the expense in having a child, the level of support on offer when things go wrong, and the difficulties of juggling childcare with maintaining a career. Political decisions made over the last decade has, undoubtedly, resulted in Britain becoming a more hostile place to bring up a family.

The cost-of-living crisis has pushed up the already high cost of raising a child to the age of 18 even further. An estimate provided by the Child Poverty Action suggest the average figure is now £160,000 for couples and £200,000 for lone parents. Even if both parents work full-time at the minimum wage, it is forecast they will fall more than £1,700 a year short of the income needed to attain a basic minimum standard of living. This reflects the fact that as wages have stagnated over the last decade, the cost of living – including housing, food and energy – has increased, and government support for low-paid parents has been significantly scaled back since 2010 through austerity.

Successive Conservative chancellors have reduced tax credits and benefits for low-income families with children while introducing generous tax cuts that have benefited the better off: a redistribution not just from the less to the more affluent, but from families with children to those without. This has undermined the financial safety net that was put in place for families by the last Labour government. It was a provision in recognition of the fact that Britain has too many jobs that simply do not pay enough for parents to be able to provide for their children. It should come as no surprise, then, that child poverty rates have risen since 2010, with almost one in three children in the UK living in poverty.

Long-term issues in the housing market have also introduced much greater uncertainty in relation to raising children. Rising house prices mean more parents will never be able to afford to buy their own home: one in five households now live in privately rented accommodation, up from one in 10, 20 years ago. This trend will continue to rise, with more children being brought up in rented homes. This not only has a huge impact on living standards – Britain has the most expensive rents in Europe – but on safety and security. More than a quarter of homes in the private rented sector do not meet the government’s minimum “decent homes” criteria. Also, a vast number of renters remain vulnerable to short-term tenancy agreements, at the end of which they can be evicted through no fault of their own. The law in England, in particular, has much to do to protect tenants from the uncertainties they face. The growing numbers of parents who rent property deserve to be able to achieve much greater stability for their children through controlled rents and long-term tenancies.

The other pressing factor for parents is childcare, a huge financial outlay, particularly for young children not yet at school. Recently released data shows that Britain now has the joint-highest childcare costs of any OECD country. Government support with these costs is generally erratic and it is harder still to access quality nursery provision in the least affluent areas. Yet, as studies have shown, high-quality childcare provision is associated with better educational outcomes, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, higher levels of parental wellbeing and better economic outcomes for women. Modelling by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) suggests that investing in universal free childcare for the under-fives would boost economic growth and result in a higher tax take.

The anti-family sheen of government policy and neglect mean that many parents cannot give their children the level of security they aspire to, affecting the rest of their lives. It will also put some people off having children, with wider consequences for the whole of society given the higher tax burden that Britain’s low birth rate will impose on future generations.

Standard
Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Reducing income inequality

INCOME DISPARITIES

Intro: Most people agree that income inequality is too extreme and that it needs to be reduced. But by how much?

INEQUALITY remains a major political issue in the world today. Most people agree that inequality is too extreme and needs to be reduced.

In the UK, the income ratio between the richest 0.01 per cent and minimum-wage workers has reached around 150 to one. Within the FTSE 100 firms, pay ratios between CEOs and lower paid workers hover at about 100 to one. Similar inequalities prevail in many other countries, while in the United States the figures are much worse, with pay ratios and disparities sometimes reaching into the thousands.

There is nothing natural or inevitable about extreme inequality. It is the predictable result of an economic system that distributes income based on who owns the means of production and who has the most market power, rather than according to any common-sense principle of labour contribution, human needs or justice.

Inequality corrodes society and poisons democracy, but it is also ecologically dangerous. The wealthiest in society consume an extraordinary amount of energy, resulting in high emissions and making decarbonisation more difficult to achieve. Recent research by Joel Millward-Hopkins published in Nature Communications shows that if we want to ensure decent lives for everyone on the planet, and by decarbonising quickly enough to feasibly achieve the Paris Agreement goals on the climate, we will need to dramatically reduce the purchasing power of the rich, while distributing resources more equitably.

But how much should inequality be reduced? What is an appropriate level of inequality? Millward-Hopkins’ research shows that if we are to ensure that everyone has access to resources necessary for a decent living, then a distribution where the richest consume at most around six times that level would be compatible with achieving climate stability. This may sound radical, but this distribution is very close to what people around the world say is a “fair” level of inequality. In some countries – such as Argentina, Norway and Turkey – people say they want inequality to be even lower, with ratios less than four to one.

People want to live in a society that is fair. This is apparent when we look at public sector pay scales, the closest thing we have to a democratically determined distribution. In major British institutions like the National Health Service (NHS) and within the universities, where unions representing members have a say over pay scales, the gaps between the highest and lowest salary bands rarely exceed five to one. If we correct for career-stage, the gaps are much smaller: the starting salary for a doctor or a lecturer is only about twice as high as that of a cleaner.  

Click on page 2 to continue reading

Pages: 1 2
Standard