Thread by MandoParty: UK abolished slavery in 1833 by agreeing to pay slave owners for “loss of property” a sum of £20m (£300bn today), a transferral of wealth fr…
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A note on “taxpayers”: government spending isn’t financed by taxes but by issuing gilts/bonds. The tax and spend is economically misleading and politically the terrain of the right. You can tell because the “Taxpayers Alliance” have never complained about paying off slaveowners.
The biggest individual compensation went toJohn Gladstone (Prime Minister William Gladstone’s dad). For the 2,500 slaves on his planations he got - adjusted for inflation - £80,000,000.
When people imagine slave owners, most imaging a Gladstone type planation owner. But slave ownership was rife in the middle class. Many in the UK owned slaves as an investment - “just” one or two who they would rent out to planation owners in the Carribean.
Because women outlived their slave owning husbands and inherited their “property”, 2 out of 5 of those who got a compensation pay out were women.
Abolition compensated slaveowners as it was written into law by the slaveowner class. But we shouldn’t, as racism and self interest are painted as innate traits that must still today be appeased, the solidarity of the British working class in the struggle to end slavery.
Without the vote, workers used the petition to agitate. A petition of Manchester workers in the late 1700s got 10,000 signatures - 1/5 people in the city. In 1794, a mass meeting of Sheffield metal workers demanded "the total and unqualified abolition of Negro slavery”.