The Guardian’s self-laceration is embarrassing to watch

The Guardian is currently engaged in an orgy of sanctimonious breast-beating. After two years’ research commissioned by its proprietor, the Scott Trust, it has discovered that its founding editor John Edward Taylor and some of his backers had ‘extensive links’ to slavery. This has caused something like a nervous breakdown in the paper’s York Way offices. The editor, Katharine Viner, writes that the revelation made her ‘sick to my stomach’. The paper’s staff are said to be ‘tormented’ by the thought. There have been abject public apologies, promises of amendment, and all the usual apparatus of cringing self-laceration.

What is the problem? The Guardian was founded in 1821 as a radical Manchester paper. Nineteenth century Manchester was the great boom town of the British industrial revolution. It was also the chief home of British political radicalism. Its fortunes were built on textiles, and in particular cotton. John Edward Taylor had been a partner in a successful firm of Manchester cotton merchants. Much of the initial investment in the paper came from his personal wealth. He was an opponent of slavery. He never owned or traded a slave. The paper consistently supported the abolition of slavery.

The men who backed the new paper came from the same background. They were cotton brokers, merchants and manufacturers. Most of them were active abolitionists. With one exception, they had nothing whatever to do with slavery or the slave trade. The exception, Sir George Philips, was a dealer in cotton and sugar who was also a partner in a slave estate growing sugar cane in Jamaica. Like many Manchester cotton magnates, he dabbled in banking. His only connection with the Manchester Guardian (as it was then called) was that Taylor borrowed £100 from him when setting it up.

The supposed offence of these men was to have derived most of their supplies from the United States, then by far the largest producer of raw cotton in the world. Other sources included Brazil, Central America and the West Indies. In 1821, almost all the world’s internationally traded cotton came from estates in the Americas which were worked by slaves. The implicit suggestion is that Taylor and his backers should have boycotted the American cotton sector and presumably shut down the textile factories. It would make as much sense to accuse the entire population of early nineteenth century Europe of complicity in slavery because they wore cotton clothes, sweetened their food with sugar or smoked tobacco.

The Guardian’s current editor asks: ‘Why was this issue not considered until now, even under the editorship of CP Scott who turned the Guardian to the anticolonial left?’ I think that I can answer that question. Katherine Viner’s predecessors had some sense of proportion. CP Scott was more interested in the issues of his own day, on which he had some influence, than in taking over the distant past which he could do nothing about. Those fine journalists did not share the current obsession with eighteenth and early nineteenth century slavery. Nor did they regard it as their function to manufacture artificial grievances against their own age.

The reason given by the Guardian for raising this issue now is that slavery is a ‘central and indisputable fact of the nation’s past’, which we are failing to confront. The whole issue is said to be ‘deeply unexamined’. This, we are told, is critical for modern Britain because past slavery contributes to modern racial tensions.

This kind of statement is a mixture of fact and distortion. The Atlantic slave trade and the exploitation of slave labour in the British West Indies were unspeakably wicked. They were justified by a terrible lie, namely that Africans were not really human. These are indisputable facts about Britain’s past. But all historical facts, however indisputable, have a context.

Slavery has existed for almost as long as humanity. Britain was the last of the Atlantic countries to participate on a large scale, and was the first to suppress it. Far from being ‘deeply unexamined’, this episode in our history has been constantly examined by historians and commentators ever since. There are countless books and articles on the subject. The fact that Manchester’s textile industry depended on American cotton was not discovered by the Guardian’s team of researchers. It has always been known.

It is patently untrue that Britain has failed to confront its part in slavery and the slave trade. It was confronted by the evangelical movement which rejected the whole idea of African non-humanity in the late eighteenth century. It was confronted by William Wilberforce and later by the radicals of Manchester when they campaigned against it. It was confronted by Parliament when they abolished the trade in 1808 and slavery itself throughout the empire in 1834. It was confronted by the overwhelming majority of the population which endorsed these acts. It was confronted by the statesmen who deployed Britain’s immense diplomatic and naval power to help suppress slavery worldwide in the decades which followed. That was a far more effective form of atonement than the empty gestures which the Guardian offer us now.

Modern Britain has real issues about racial prejudice and inequality. But these problems have nothing to do with past slavery. They originate in the large-scale migration after the Second World War, long after Britain’s slaving past had become a bad memory. We have not always coped well with the racial prejudice and discrimination which followed. But our institutions have made honourable efforts and have achieved a larger measure of success than the United States or European countries facing the same problems.

Their cause is not helped by the advocates of a new and pernicious form of racism – the peddling of a notion of hereditary white responsibility for slavery, which requires one to recognise an entirely artificial class of modern victims defined by race. That can only perpetuate grievances on account of past events that have no practical relevance to modern lives.