March 2007 marked the 200th Anniversary of the British aboliton of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
The issue being debated is: Should the British Government apologise for the Slave Trade?
Quite simply:YES.
Regards digger
I cannot find any excuse for it.
Answer: YES
To whom should the apology be given?
The victims are gone.
An essential point. That’s where the debate begins to open up. 
There are those that believe that they remain victims of its stigma.
Or, should Britain be congratulated for abolishing the slave trade?
FWIW, one of my great-grandfathers was a boy on a Portuguese slaving ship working out of Africa in the second half of the 19th century. He ran away in Australia because he couldn’t stand it. The slave trade went on in various fashions, including in Australia in the second half of the 19th century.
http://www.premiers.qld.gov.au/About_the_department/publications/multicultural/Australian_South_Sea_Islander_Training_Package/history/australia/recruiting/
http://www.abc.net.au/gnt/history/Transcripts/s1197807.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbirding
If their motives for abolishing it were noble.
This is the difficulty where a wrong is acknowledged and contrition and atonement are required, but atonement cannot be provided in any meaningful sense.
Probably the most corrosive example in the modern world is the demands for Japan to apologise to various nations and groups for its wartime conduct, where many people think there is a lack of contrition, never mind the atonement.
Another problem is to separate the symbolic from the meaningful.
There has been a longstanding desire in much of the Aboriginal community in Australia, and large slabs of the white community, for the national government to apologise for past wrongs. http://home.alphalink.com.au/~rez/Journey/
It beats me why it is so hard for governments to say “Sorry.” We say it every day when we almost bump into strangers in the street, but as a nation we cannot find it in the national heart to say “Sorry” for obvious wrongs. When someone apologises we can move on. Sometimes we can’t until they do.
But as for apologising for ancient wrongs, it’s bullshit and meaningless. Much of it drifts into the idiotic realms of political correctness. We might as well demand that the French apologise to Britain for Waterloo.
Oops! Wrong side! The winners are guilty, too. Maybe Britain should apologise to France for Waterloo. Not to mention Trafalgar.
It’s patent bullshit when we go back that far.
Unless I can get my ancestral Irish (or Portuguese or Dutch or French or Cornish - it’s all got a value) lands back. Then it all makes perfect sense, and I want a bloody sight more than just an apology. Villa is a word that comes to mind.
In reality, they didn’t abolish it in 1807 anyway. It wasn’t until ?1833 ? that the legislation got teeth.
The 1807 legislation involved a fine for every slave found on board. So the crews threw them overboard to avoid fines when trouble loomed.
My understanding is that the Anti-Slavery Society (Association?) motives were noble, but I detect some cynicism in your comment.
Was it not that noble?
I think apologies should come from those responsible. Those people are long gone. I think it’s enough to acknowledge that it was wrong and keep teaching history, which is what it is. Where do you draw the line?
That just about sums up one side of the debate.
Good, it’s settled then! 
Couldnt agree more. Slavery is bad…yet it wasnt my generation that did it. Acknowlegde the mistake but every generation is different.
The other side of the argument - briefly - is one of ‘closure’.
By formerly acknowledging that slavery was wrong, and that the slaves were victims of a corrupt system, then, there descendants are able to stand up and say that they were not put on this earth to become slaves, they were enslaved. Then they can ‘move on’.
By the way. The people putting forward these arguments are not necessarily Black British, they appear from all ethnic quarters, for both sides.
I’m not cynical, but I think the juries still out.
C.L.R. James (The Black Jacobins) Writes:
“ A venal race of scholars, profiteering panders to national vanity, have conspired to obscure the truth about the abolition. Up to 1783 the British bourgeoisie had taken the slave-trade for granted. In 1773 and again in 1784, the Jamaica Assembly, afraid of insurrection and seeking to raise revenue, taxed the importation of slaves….Stray members of parliament introduced Bills for the abolition of the slave-trade which the House rejected without much bother (That’s because there were usually around fifty-sh MP’s that were sons of the slave plantation owners, looking after their interests).
The British found that by the abolition of the mercantile system with America, they gained instead of losing. It was the first great lesson in the advantages of free trade. But if Britain gained, the British West Indies suffered. The rising industrial bourgeoisie, feeling its way to free trade and a greater exploitation of India, began to abuse the West Indies, called them “sterile rocks,” and asked if the interest and independence of the nation should be sacrificed to 72,000 masters and 400,000 slaves.
…It was the miraculous growth of San Domingo that was decisive. Pitt found that some 50 per cent of the slaves imported into the British islands were sold to the French colonies. It was the British slave-trade, therefore, which was increasing French colonial produce and putting the European market into French hands. Britain was cutting its own throat. And even the profits from this export were not likely to last. Already a few years before the slave merchants had failed for £700,000 in a year. The French, seeking to provide their own slaves, were encroaching in Africa and increasing their share of the trade every year. Why should they continue to buy from Britain? Holland and Spain were doing the same.
By 1786 Pitt, a disciple of Adam Smith, had seen the light clearly. He asked Wilberforce to undertake the campaign……Pitt was in a hurry – it was important to bring the trade to a complete stop quickly and suddenly. The French had neither the capital nor the organisation to make good the deficiency at once and he would ruin San Domingo at a stroke. In 1787 he warned Wilberforce that if he did not bring the motion in, somebody else would, and in 1788 he informed the cabinet that he would not stay in it with those opposed.
…These then were the forces which in the decade preceding the French Revolution linked San Domingo to the economic destiny of three continents and the social and political conflicts of a pregnant age….”
http://www.dkrenton.co.uk/clr%20james%20black%20jacobins.html
Make of this what you will. The reasons for the abolition of slavery were very strongly debated as a part of my daughter’s Advanced level history syllabus.
C.L.R. James also wrote rather well on matters “cricket!”
http://www.dkrenton.co.uk/clr_james%20beyond%20a%20boundary.html
What is the point? the real victim is long gone and slavery isnt really gone anyways. For example, illegal working aliens in the US
Let alone the REAL slavery that is still going on. In Africa. In many places in Asia.
Slaves was also one of the main issue population of Russia held against Chechnia in the 1990th.
It still exists in Britain, with girls being ‘trafficked’ into the country from Eastern Europe to work as sex-slaves in brothels.
There is also child trafficking. Young African children are brought he re from Africa to work as domestics, and even more ghastly, some have been murdered in some kind of African, pagan ritual.
The 2200th anniversary of the abolitionof the slave-trade, has been celebrated, as R.S. suggested. It is hoped that the publicity that it generated will serve to highlight these latter day forms of slavery and speed the end of them.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/crimewatch/reconstructions_sex_trafficking.shtml