Two hundred years after its abolition, the slave trade will return to haunt Britain in 2007

It is hard to describe the Slave Trade Abolition Bill 1807 as a Labour victory, given that it predates the party by a century. Still, this does not deter Tony Blair or Gordon Brown from staking their claim to it. ‘The reactionaries told us that to abolish slavery was an impossible cause,’ the Chancellor recently declared to Labour members. Abolition was a great victory against ‘Tory money’, said the Prime Minister. On the eve of the bicentennial year of William Wilberforce’s legislation, both men are preparing to take a vicarious (if wholly undeserved) bow.

Set aside the fact that Wilberforce was a Tory MP. Messrs Blair and Brown make a deeper error in presuming that slavery has been banished from Britain. It has come back — and on their watch. It now involves mainly Slavic or Asian woman, rather than African men. The slaves of 21st-century Britain work in bordellos rather than fields, and are bought and sold in airports rather than a Caribbean market place. The price is £8,000 a head rather than £200. And the trade has acquired a new name: human trafficking.

If you define a slave as someone effectively ‘owned’ by a master, then the United Nations calculates that there are 11 million slaves today, more than at any point in human history. The trade thrives wherever immigration controls are lax. So just as London has become a centre for the global economy, Britain’s porous borders have made the city a world capital for the 21st-century slave trade.

There is now more than enough harrowing testimony from the slave trade’s victims to grasp how this deplorable business works. Victims are offered jobs in Britain and told they can repay the transport costs when they start work.