Stop telling Britons to feel guilty about the past
An HMRC course on the ‘guilt of being British’ shows we are a nation gripped by self-loathing.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/12/stop-telling-britons-to-feel-guilty-about-the-past/?
https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/about-history-reclaimed/
From: A Residence at the Court of London, by Richard Rush, American Minister in London 1817...
page 136 He [Lord Castlereagh] next spoke of the Slave trade. Great Britain, he said, had concluded treaties with three of the powers of Europe on this subject, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands.
To Spain and Portugal Britain had paid, from first to last, 700,000/. as inducements to the treaties, the money to be as compensation to Spanish and Portuguese subjects, for the loss of the trade.
The Netherlands had agreed to abolish, immediately and totally, without pecuniary inducement...
The period had arrived, his lordship continued, when it was the wish of Great Britain to invite the United States to join in these measures, and it was his design to submit, through me, proposals to that effect. It had occurred to him to send me, with an official note, authentic copies of the treaties themselves, they would best unfold in all their details, the grounds on which a concert of action had been settled with other powers, and it was on similar grounds he meant to ask the accession of the United States, anticipating large benefits from their maritime cooperation in this great work of humanity. I replied, that I was altogether devoid of instructions on the subject, but would transmit the treaties for the consideration of the President.
The United States, from an early day, had regarded this traffick with uniform disapprobation. For many years it had been altogether prohibited by their statutes. The existence of slavery in several of the states of the American Union, had nothing to do, I remarked, with the slave-trade.
The former grew up with the policy of the parent country anterior to the independence of the United States, and remained incorporated with the domestic laws of the particular states where it had been so introduced, and always existed. Yet, those who could not allow their laws in this respect to be touched, went hand and heart with the rest of their fellow-citizens in desiring the abolition of the slave-trade.
- The British Empire abolished the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1833.
1865: The United States abolished slavery with the 13th Amendment.
