Slavery memorial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Jeffery DelViscio/Flickr. Creative Commons.
Tony Blair’s tenure as the prime minister of Britain was a tremendous disappointment. While most people now remember Blair as a key champion of the catastrophic invasion of Iraq, this foreign policy disaster counts as only one of many times when he failed to do the right thing. One less high profile example came in late 2006, when Blair published a now infamous article in New Nation—a community newspaper geared towards Africans and peoples of African descent living in Britain—concerned with the role of slavery in British history.
In this article, Blair expressed “deep sorrow that [the slave trade] ever happened”, and also stated that it was “hard to believe that what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time”. While Blair’s article was initially welcomed in some circles, it is now primarily remembered for what he didn’t say, since Blair deliberately refrained from offering an apology for centuries of slavery. The chief reason that was given at the time for this failure to offer a “full apology” was that it would leave “the state open to claims for reparations”.
