Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband has insisted the government’s willingness to consider formally apologising for the UK’s role in the transatlantic slave trade will not lead to higher costs for the British taxpayer.
The prime minister has said the UK will not pay reparations to affected countries, but declined to say whether his new approach could involve additional taxpayer money.
Speaking on the BBC’s Newscast podcast, Miliband said previous British governments had a “sweep it under the carpet” attitude to the pain and consequences of slavery, citing what he described as former Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair’s “sorry not sorry” remarks on the issue nearly two decades ago.
In 2007, Sir Tony said the UK’s involvement in the slave trade was a matter of “deep sorrow and regret”.
“Tony Blair did sort of do a kind of sorry not sorry situation. He kind of expressed sorrow, and then said sorry, and then it was walked back by number 10,” Miliband said.
Miliband said the former prime minister’s approach was still referred to and came up in a recent conversation between Andy Burnham and the Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley.
In addition, Miliband claimed, he and Burnham inherited a more recent mess, which is how the last Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) played out in Samoa two years ago.
Miliband said: “On the second day as my time as foreign secretary, I was told, ‘look, one of your tasks is CHOGM 2024, which happened in Samoa, didn’t go well.’ To use sort of diplomatic speak, it ended up in a sort of punch up, a sort of verbal punch up about this whole issue.”
He added: “This has really been hanging around as an issue for the Commonwealth for sort of 20 years, really. But it’s grown and grown.”
Given that, Miliband said, “we thought it was right to confront this issue and not to just try and sort of pretend that it didn’t exist”.
