Britain’s lousy record on slavery

Anti-Slavery International estimates that considerably more than 13,000 cases of slavery took place in 2018; considerably more because the 13,000 figure must be a great under-estimate in view of the illegality of the practice in itself and the allegedly ‘illegal’ status of the – usually trafficked or otherwise kidnapped – victims, understandably therefore fearful of the menace of the police and immigration authorities, and, further, the small scale of individual operations.
It is therefore arguable that there are more slaves in the UK this year than there have ever been before, even under the Romans. Their conditions are made worse by the widespread hatred of immigrants carefully whipped up by Labour and Tory parties alike (not forgetting the LibDems’ help – as well as Labour’s -with the 2014 Immigration Act ).
Is it not high time that the LP showed some principle in exposing this scandalous situation and engaged in widespread agitation by our membership, among the customers (often unwitting) of the slaveholders, in such apparently innocuous retail outlets as nailers. The victims must be given immunity from prosecution, even when their owners’ trade is illegal – in, for example, the cultivation of cannabis; they work under duress. Even those most hostile to immigrant labour – such as, for example, Gordon Brown with his BNP-style slogan of ‘British jobs for British workers’ – must be persuaded, perhaps by pointing out that the conditions of enslaved labour depress those of free labour; and the harsher the immigration controls, the worse will be the conditions of the ‘illegal’ migrants, an unavoidable product of gross inequalities on a world scale – and driven also by imperialist wars against Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and probably Iran….and who knows where else.
The UK should offer assured citizenship to all those held in slavery within the UK and guaranteed protection against the depredations of the Home Office, together with abolition of the hostile (Sajid Javid’s ‘compliant’) environment.
Otherwise LP support for Black Lives Matter will be transparent hypocrisy and unworthy of any trust.

“Britain’s role” is an obfuscatory phrase. In his Weekly Worker article of March 2007, Michael McNair points out that agitation against slavery was a class issue at least until the 1860s, when the Lancashire textile workers supported the boycott (oops, excuse me for the naughty word!) of US slave-produced cotton, which was their livelihood…. “St” William Wilberforce, by contrast, introduced the first Combination Act against trades unions….

Earlier on,
At the beginning of the workers’ movement
At this last point – the press gangs – Hochschild has approached closer to the truth, though he insists that “press victims were not only from the working class” (p223). The press gangs were by no means the only way in which British capital sought to use forced labour. Convicts were ‘transported’ to the colonies. Some of the early cotton mills, for example, were supplied by the children of the poor, bound to compulsory ‘apprenticeships’ by Poor Law authorities; justices of the peace had power to fix maximum wages, which they routinely exercised; it was an offence for an agricultural labourers to leave their employer before their contractual term was up.

The other side of the coin, however, was that by 1600, the British economy was dominated by wage-labour, in agriculture as well as in the limited but growing industries. In the 18th century there was a massive growth of towns; and among the artisans differentiation between the proto-capitalist masters and the proto-proletarian perpetual journeymen. Anti-slavery united both wings; but it was the towns, and especially the artisan classes, which provided the campaign with its mass base.
Anti-slavery began before the launch of the formal campaign in 1787. Anti-slavery campaigning was already around on a smaller scale in the 1760s in the run-up to the 1772 decision in Somersett v Stewart that chattel slavery proper did not exist as a matter of English law.24 Earlier traces are harder to find, since the political elite was more firmly in control of ‘public opinion’ before the 1760s. But the traces are there. One aspect is the evidence of resistance, cutting across the categories of ‘enslaved’ and ‘free’, collected in Linebaugh and Rediker’s The many-headed hydra (2000).

Another trace of a very different sort is the evidence of law-cases well before Somersett v Stewart, which focus on the question whether chattel slavery can exist as part of English law, and provide contradictory answers: Gelly v Cleve in 1693, Chamberlaine v Harvey in 1696, Smith v Browne in 1702-5, Smith v Gould in 1706; the need of the slave-owners to obtain an opinion of the attorney general and solicitor general in 1729 which baldly asserted that slavery was lawful, and the decision in Black’s /Cartor’s Case in 1732 that an alleged slave could obtain habeas corpus; lord chancellor Hardwicke’s assertion that slavery was a part of English law in Pearne v Lisle (1749) and lord chancellor Northington’s flat denial that it was in Shanley v Harvey (1762).25
Legal conflicts of this sort are not produced where there is a real social or political consensus over a question – as Hochschild, and many authors, suppose there was before the 1780s. It seems more likely that the ‘consensus’ for slavery before the 1760s is like the ‘consensus’ for ‘market reform’ today: a product of corrupt control of politics and the media which leaves a large part of society grumbling but without a loud political voice.

The other side of this coin is that anti-slavery in Britain commonly rose to high points after slave strikes and revolts in the colonies. This was true in the 1730s, 1760s, 1780s, 1800s and 1830s.
In short, the objective material basis for anti-slavery was growing through the 18th century with the increase both of slavery in the colonies and of the propertyless working class at home. This trend was able to become more than a submerged grumble because of crises in the class elite’s system of control. In the first place, the two-party system broke up in the late 1750s-60s into a confused mess of factions. In the second, the military defeat in the American Revolution at least temporarily suppressed British empire triumphalism.

Anti-slavery, though the formal campaign was led by christians, was at the end of the day about solidarity of the workers – in their simple capacity as humans – across the legal borders of freedom and unfreedom, the geographical borders of the countries, and the boundaries of race. It remained a fundamental element of the politics of the emerging workers’ movement as late as the 1860s, when British trade unionists’ actions in solidarity with the northern, anti-slavery, side in the American civil war were to provide the basis for the creation of the First International.

The movement’s fundamental lessons for us today are simple: the international unity of the class movement, and its role as the standard-bearer of all humanity. The government’s commemoration projects serve to bury this history and these lessons in providing a heritage-industry back-up to multiculturalism and the promotion of ‘faith groups’. Indeed, they may also serve – as Aaronovitch shows – to promote what Gott calls “sanctimonious interventionism”. But the way to oppose these projects is precisely to retrieve and renew the lessons of the early history of the workers’ movement.

Having twice read Adam Hochschild’s book “Bury the Chains”, I find Taylor a bit misleading when he says that that the anti-slavery campaigns of the 1820s and 1830s “should not be confused with the abolition of the slave trade”. In reality they were part and parcel of the same movement.

The campaign to end slavery really started with the Quakers in the colonies (notably Pennsylvania) and the UK, but these had first to eliminate the practice among their own members – with the ultimate sanction of expulsion. In 1783, they started promoting abolition among the wider British public, but encountered a problem; they were a small group, typically seen as oddballs in plain cloth and speaking in ‘thee and thou’, and couldn’t gain traction. They did however make contact with Anglicans who eventually provided the necessary leadership – with Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce emerging as the main figures.

The mass campaign started in earnest in 1787, involved the landmark Zong (insurance) case, massive publicity, 300K people engaging in a sugar boycott, and all sorts of reversals, before it finally bore fruit in 1807. The resistance was even more massive, but those promoting the abolition of the slave trade saw this as the first step in ending the institution of slavery itself. In practice it was the Quakers who provided Clarkson with his campaigning backbone as he travelled around the country on horseback.

I think Hochschild would dispute Taylor’s statement that the abolition of the slave trade “did nothing to remedy the plight” of the Africans who remained in bondage in the colonies. Simply cutting off the flow of new slaves meant that slave owners needed to reduce dreadfully high rates of mortality among their existing slave populations.

When, after the Napoleonic Wars, campaigners took aim at the institution of slavery itself, they again encountered massive resistance from all sorts of establishment figures, and the final outcome was soured by HMG compensating the slave owners rather than the former slave themselves – and the oppressive conditions under which these continued living. However, this does not detract from the heroism of many who, for decades, worked tirelessly to eliminate the horrendous institution. The cases of Granville Sharp, and the women’s leader Elizabeth Heyrick are particularly instructive. I wish those of us who work to end our country’s complicity with the oppression of the Palestinians could do as well.