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Anti-Slavery Day Bill

My Lords, I am delighted to support the noble Baroness, Lady Young, who has just spoken, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and those in the House of Commons who brought this Bill forward. I do that for two reasons. The first has been amply explained by the noble Baroness in her opening comments and I do not wish to repeat them. Everything she said about what is happening these days is very important and we need to draw attention to it and keep campaigning against it. The second reason for having an anti-slavery day is to learn from our history—not only our own history in this country but the history of humanity. Slavery has defaced every society that we know about anywhere in the world at any time. That is an important issue in its own right. I have drawn attention to this in the past. If you go a little way down the road to Artillery House in Artillery Row, there is a plaque inside to the 4,000 Scots who were captured during the Civil War and then exported as slaves to the Caribbean. That is amazing. We do not recognise what has happened in our own history. At the same time, pirates from what was then the Ottoman Empire in parts of North Africa were taking slaves from the southern British coast to the Ottoman Empire. Slavery has been around in every society for all time. That is why we need people to understand that this is not just something that happened in a bad way during the transatlantic slave trade, to which I will return in a moment, and something good that we did when we ended that trade. It is endemic and it goes on today, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young, said. We need to keep working to defeat it. I drew attention to this when I got involved in the Mary Seacole memorial statue appeal. It made me look at how black people got involved in the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. If you step into the Royal Gallery, there is a picture of Nelson on the flagship "Victoria". There are a number of black people on that ship, as well as women. We forget that women served on those ships. When I talked to the Navy about this, I was told that there were close to 200 black people in Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar. Although one cannot know this, one assumes that not only were they being picked up from port to port, but if they got on to a British ship at that time, they were no longer slaves, so for escaped slaves, it was a good way out. As the industrial revolution developed, the sudden horror of slavery really took off. Britain took over from Portugal, Holland, France and all the other nations that were involved in the slave trade and became the biggest slaver on the transatlantic route in the 18th century. That was not just the result of the power of the fleet we had then but also of the power of industrialisation. If you look at it, it becomes close to being—indeed, in many ways it was—similar to what was happening in some of the camps in Nazi Germany because the treatment of the slaves on those ships was horrendous. Throughout that period, slavery was seen not only as something normal but, more importantly in the context of Britain’s experience, as something that made an enormous profit. It was done with a degree of brutality and insensitivity that was hard to imagine. It is very easy to damn the whole of the society that was doing that, but growing numbers of people were rising up in revolt against that process and that became the world’s first modern political campaign lead by Wilberforce, the Quakers and others in Britain. It had everything from lapel badges to window bills and posters decrying the transatlantic slave trade. When they succeeded in getting the Bill through Parliament the British Government did an about-turn and instead of simply turning a blind eye to the slave trade they suddenly said, "We’re going to stop this", and there was the first example of a war of intervention in which we said we would stop the slave trade regardless of the illegality of stopping ships on the high seas. However, we again saw the brutality of the trade because when a Royal Navy ship chased a slaver, in order to avoid being fined by the Royal Navy captain if he was caught, the slaver would throw the slaves overboard. There was extreme brutality. It is not well known, but one reason for having an anti-slavery day and to learn from the history of the campaign to end the transatlantic slave trade is that some 16,000 British sailors gave their lives. It was a bizarre situation: Britain turned round from being the world’s biggest slaver that introduced some of the most appalling methods—not the Government because these things were done by individuals and companies in the 18th century—to saying that we would stop it. We see the really black side of human behaviour in the way that we managed the slave trade, or allowed it to continue, and the good side when we suddenly switched over and tried to stop it. One of the messages that should come through on an anti-slavery day is that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young, has already indicated, slavery has always been with us and is still with us today. If we look back, we can see how blind we were to the awful tragedy and horror of the transatlantic slave trade, yet we can admire those people, whether from Africa or from Europe, who rose up, organised and fought against it. That is the message in the Bill to us today: if we have an anti-slavery day, not only do we campaign on this, but we say to others that people in the past did this very successfully and that is what we ought to do today. That is why the Bill is important.