By Benny Schaft

A historic resolution was passed on 25th March 2026  (A/RES/80/250) when 123 member states voted “Yes” during a United Nations General Assembly to recognize the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity”. This non-binding vote was a formal acknowledgment of criminal actions taken by European nations and the USA against the people of Africa.

The criminal states of the USA, Israel and the lackey regime in Argentina were the only ones to vote “No”. Not surprising, there were 52 abstentions from some other countries, a majority belonging to the EU, plus Australia and Japan, that refused to take a position either way. Among them was Britain, whose role in this “gravest crime” deserves a closer look.

James Kariuki, the British Chargé d’Affaires to the UN, stated after the vote was taken that the UK continues to disagree with the fundamental propositions of the resolution, adding that Britain is “firmly of the view that we must not create a hierarchy of historical atrocities that should be regarded as more or less significant than another”.

Kariuki also acknowledged that Britain “recognised the gravity of the issues addressed in the resolution and the untold harm inflicted on millions of people over many decades”.

This is a complete contradiction and a revealing one. These words represent the same hollow gestures that Britain has been offering for years, paraded as progress while the country refuses to take any meaningful accountability for its crimes. To understand why Britain took this position we have to look honestly at its history.

Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade began under Queen Elizabeth I of England, who in 1564 supported Captain John Hawkins’ voyage to West Africa, where he kidnapped approximately 400 Africans from Sierra Leone and Guinea. Hawkins also abducted 600 more Africans through trades and raids on Portuguese slave ships. Hawkins was known as the “father of the English slave trade”.

The Tudor crown was satisfied with this criminal trade as long as Queen Elizabeth and the emerging capitalist class received their share of the profits. Elizabeth even granted Hawkins a royal ship, the Jesus of Lubeck. During her reign she also ordered the expulsion of Black Londoners – a policy that ultimately failed, as the Black population remained in the city even after her death.

The Scottish House of Stuart that followed ruled over Scotland, England and Ireland; it deepened Britain’s role in this trade considerably. James I granted merchants connected to the English ruling class a major role in this trade, through the Guinea Company, which facilitated both the colonisation of what is now the USA and the transportation of the first enslaved Africans to Virginia in 1619.

His son Charles I expanded the Guinea Company’s charter, giving it official legitimacy and overseeing the kidnapping and transport of Africans to the then English colonies and the Caribbean, particularly Barbados.

After Charles I was overthrown and executed in 1649 by the British people during the English civil war, the slave trade did not slow down. Under Oliver Cromwell and the parliamentarians this trade expanded, most brutally in Jamaica, where the Indigenous population was massacred and enslaved Africans were brought to the island to replace them.

Following the restoration, Charles II and his brother James II both backed the Royal Adventures of England and later the Royal African Company, of which James served as governor. Slaves were physically branded as property with the initials “DY” for James II when he was the Duke of York. Even his overthrow in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 – led by the British bourgeoisie, not a people’s revolution – brought no end to Britain’s support for the trade.

The death of Queen Anne ended the Stuart line and brought in the House of Hanover, the ancestors of the current Windsor monarchy. They held shares in the South Sea Company and resisted abolitionism fiercely. George III, George IV and William IV all worked to delay and obstruct the abolition movement even as Black freedom fighters and their allies pushed for it from below.

This history matters because it connects directly to the British Museum, which today holds thousands of artefacts stolen from Africa, the Caribbean and beyond and tied to the very same centuries of colonial plunder and enslavement. The Museum’s refusal to return these precious objects to the peoples they rightfully belong to is not a separate issue; it is the same logic by which Britain continues to benefit from what was exploited, whether stolen labour, land or cultural heritage, and refuses to give any of it back.

This is the real reason why Britain abstained during the UN vote. It was not because of any principled concern about “hierarchies of atrocities” but because recognising the slave trade as a crime against humanity would create a foundation for reparations or payment for unpaid wages.

Britain, like the USA, continues to uphold the legacy of enslavement with its prison industrial complex, its support for the ongoing genocide in Palestine, its hostile posture towards Iran and its fundamental role in supporting the dying US empire as it exists today. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 brought a legal end to the slave trade in Britain, 32 years before the Southern slavestate Confederacy was defeated in the American civil war.

Meaningful reparations are owed to the descendants of those enslaved. But full reparations cannot be achieved within a white supremacist, capitalist system that was built on slavery – along with the stolen land of Indigenous nations – and continues to profit from this legacy.

Real change requires replacing capitalism with socialism, establishing genuine power in the hands of the working class and building a united front across the proletariat, one that refuses to allow the ruling class to continue benefiting from centuries of stolen lives and labour.

This is not wishful thinking. Socialist revolution is materially the only path forward to achieving true reparations for centuries of unpaid and underpaid labour.