… … At school I learned about the slave trade. The emphasis was on William Wilberforce and the Abolitionists. In our lessons we compared and contrasted the old English-speaking peoples with the new English-speaking peoples (the new world), and America did not come off well, as we learned of the American Civil War and the Ku Klux Klan, the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior and of Rosa Parks.

What I did not learn about was Britain's own culpability in the slave trade, and there was never any mention of the compensation payment of £20 million (today £17 billion) to the slave owners. Nor were we told that … …