Different and Better Times

As we are all aware by now, what the Vicar of Downing Street lacks in repentance for his own derelictions, he is more than happy to make up in moral fervour over other people's. Accordingly, his reverence intends to inflate his humanitarian credentials with a bit of hot air about the British Empire's slave trade, which was officially abolished in 1807 and has evolved unto the present day under various rubrics, notably "aid to Africa". During the British Empire, certain Africans joined enthusiastically in the noble cause, selling their enemies for transportation across the Atlantic; nowadays we content ourselves with letting certain Africans sell us their peoples' water and other resources, and leave the people where they are. As his reverence recognises, progress is a wonderful thing: "It is hard to believe that what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time"; harder still to believe when so many acts which used to be legal - demonstrating against racism within earshot of the Houses of Parliament, for instance - are now criminal. Personally, his reverence believes "the bicentenary offers us a chance ... to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was", no chances having been previously available, particularly when his reverence's lord and master was democratising those uppity niggers in Haiti. Now that the chance has arrived, "we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition", as is only fitting at a time when next year ends in the same two digits as the year the abolitionists won. One day, no doubt, the Holocaust will be recalled to mind only during years ending in -45. His reverence will also take the opportunity "to express our deep sorrow that it ever happened, that it ever could have happened and to rejoice at the different and better times we live in today". Today's humanitarian alternatives, such as mass starvation, cluster bombs and uranium poisoning, were not available in those different and less respectful times; although perhaps, on the whole, it would have been better - more economically viable, more culturally sensitive, more Christian - to leave all those Africans where they were and make slaves of the redskins instead. If that had happened, for example, New Orleans might not have needed God to clean out the riff-raff. But we should not judge too harshly. The slave traders had no Tony to advise them.