Over the weekend a group of Conservative MPs decided that the most pressing moral crisis facing the nation was the Church of England daring to spend £100 million acknowledging its historical links to slavery. Not on safeguarding, not on poverty, not on the churches they spent fourteen years letting rot, but on the sheer impertinence of an institution looking at its own books and saying, quietly, this money was made from something ugly and we ought to do something decent with it.
The argument, we are told, is legal. The endowment must only be spent on clergy wages and church buildings. This is, at best, selective reading and, at worst, wilful nonsense. The Church Commissioners have always funded mission, education, pensions and social investment. But legal hair-splitting is just the respectable wrapper. What really offends is not the spending but the remembering.
Which brings me neatly to my Facebook feed.
Lately my Facebook feed has taken on a curious Victorian flavour, full of people thumping their chests about Britain’s noble role in ending the slave trade. Wilberforce this, Royal Navy that, and the inevitable flourish about how we, uniquely, stood tall against barbarism. All very rousing if you ignore the three centuries we spent running the largest slave-trading operation on the planet, and the small detail that the only people compensated at abolition were the slave owners. But historical amnesia is a national pastime, so on they march.
What really catches the eye, though, is what lurks directly underneath these patriotic homilies. The comments sections are piled high with the same crowd who can barely utter the word black without reaching for a dog whistle. They celebrate abolition with one hand and type out barely coded racial resentment with the other. It is like watching someone boast about their family’s centuries old vegetarian tradition while clutching a dripping kebab. The cognitive dissonance could power the grid.
And it is everywhere. A preponderance, as my old English master would say. Post after post telling me how proud we should be of our anti slavery heritage, followed by the usual suspects explaining how modern Britain is being ruined by the very people whose ancestors bore the brunt of that heritage. The irony is so thick you could spread it.
The lack of self awareness on these posts is mind boggling. They wield history like a comfort blanket, utterly oblivious to the fact that their own comments would have made Wilberforce choke on his tea. The post declares Britain the heroic slayer of slavery; the replies read like a recruitment pamphlet for the mindset that made slavery possible in the first place.
Let’s be honest. They are not celebrating abolition because they cherish equality. They are celebrating it because it makes them feel virtuous without demanding any self examination. It is a shield. An absolution. If Britain banned slavery in 1807, then how could any of them possibly harbour prejudice now? They tuck themselves into that warm historical duvet and hope no one notices the bile they spill today.
But they are not abolitionists. They are nostalgists for hierarchy, furious that the world no longer organises itself around their imagined place at the top. If you could bottle the sentiment in those comment threads, you would not be sending it to the British Library, you would be locking it in a museum of bigotry with a sign saying Do Not Touch.
This is the great tell. The louder they proclaim Britain’s noble role in ending slavery, the more likely they are to sneer at black Britons in the next sentence. They want the credit for moral courage shown two centuries ago while clinging to prejudices that abolitionists were trying to drag out of society in the first place.
History is not their friend here. It is the fig leaf they hide behind. Scratch it and you expose what was always there. The problem is not that they don’t know our history. The problem is that they know just enough of it to weaponise the comfortable bits while ignoring the humanity of those still on the receiving end.
It would be funny if it weren’t so grotesquely familiar. But there it is, scrolling past my eyes every morning. Britain ended slavery, they cry. Yes. And judging by the comments beneath, too many of them would bring it back tomorrow if they thought they could get away with it.
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