Pay attention: Britain did not get rich from slavery

A few years ago a minicab driver hailing from somewhere arid, benighted and aggressive informed me that the English were the most wicked people on God’s earth because we had invented slavery. Intrigued, I asked him when we had done this and he replied, “A few hundred years ago.” I wondered for a moment if he meant that we had invented cutlery, and had used “wicked” in its modern, counterintuitive sense. But I don’t think that was the case. He sat there, hands gripping the steering wheel too tightly, in a miasma of infuriated stupidity.

“Quite ingenious of us, though, you must admit,” I said to him. “Imagine how powerful the Roman empire might have become if it’d thought of using slaves. Not to mention the Egyptians, the Ottomans and the Umayyads. Bet they’re absolutely kicking themselves.”

I half thought of saying, when he asked for a tip, “Yeah, here’s one — don’t diss your customers, you halfwit. Also, those red lights on poles are not generally intended as an injunction for drivers to speed up.” But he was bigger than me so I gave him two quid instead.

I suspect an awful lot of people share my driver’s berserk conviction about slavery, probably including several million young British people. It is one of those easily disprovable lies that, having been granted official sanction, have become a modern truth. That we were the first country to abolish slavery, that we exploited slaves for only a couple of hundred years or so and were preceded in doing so by more civilisations than there is space here to record and that slavery continued unabated among Africans and Asians cuts no ice at all. It is preferable to believe that we were not merely wicked — which our involvement in slavery undoubtedly was — but uniquely wicked.

There are many other idiotic shibboleths about slavery that are similarly disprovable by empirical means, but to advance them risks bringing about a howl-round of wounded outrage and almost certainly a bellow of “white supremacist”, if the person advancing the argument is white, or “Uncle Tom” if the person happens to be black. The reason these empirical arguments arouse such ire is simple. You start demolishing these lies, one by one, and the whole Jacob’s ladder of acquired victimhood eventually collapses, taking a fraudulent, corrosive and divisive ideology with it. The greater the truth, the greater the fury in response to it.

So good luck to the historian Kristian Niemietz and the Institute of Economic Affairs for having ventured into this fraught territory with a book entitled Imperial Measurement: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Western Colonialism. It is a fascinating exploration of the economics of colonialism, which, as Adam Smith pointed out as early as 1776, was of no great benefit to the British crown or its people: “Under the present system of management … Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies.”

Niemietz concludes that colonial trade contributed only a “small proportion” of Britain’s economy — at its absolute zenith, between 7 and 15 per cent of our GDP — and that much of that trade might have occurred anyway without the imposition of British rule. Slavery was even less lucrative for the nation as a whole. At its peak, the income from our sugar plantations contributed no more than 2.5 per cent to the economy of the UK — substantially less than that accrued from sheep farming, as Niemietz points out.

The notion, then, that our present comparative wealth is the direct consequence of thieving and oppressing, or enslaving, is utterly untrue. One might point to good governance, entrepreneurship, a rapid improvement in general education and literacy, the Protestant work ethic and a primacy placed upon inventiveness as being far, far more important to the success of our nation.

The trouble for Niemietz and the IEA is that, while his account is entirely factual, it will be ignored, because to engage with it is to risk the complete demolition of the victimhood argument. If we didn’t make our wealth primarily by thieving from other countries, then why are we so well off? It gnaws away at the generally believed assumption that the poverty and chaos of much of Africa is a direct consequence of our imperial perfidy — an assumption easily refuted by examining the cases of Ethiopia and Liberia, two countries that were not formally colonised (Italy was driven out of Ethiopia after just five years) and that today face exactly the same problems as their neighbours, which were.

But this is the problem with an institutionally approved sense of resentment: it cannot be banished by truth, because the only truth is one’s “lived experience”, which is of course one of unrelieved subjugation.

Do you remember Lord Sewell’s report of three years ago, which suggested there was little structural or institutional racism in the UK? Never heard of since. I fear Niemietz’s excellent work will meet the same fate.

Clergy unite

Exciting news: Leicester diocese has become the first in the country to sign a trade union agreement. All 170 Church of England clergy and staff will be represented by Unite.

I look forward to them picketing members of the congregation when they’re out on strike over the “Tory cuts”. If they still have what could be called a congregation.

And now let us recall Ephesians 16: 8-10. “If thine workmate should venture to his place of employment when you are out fighting the cuts, smash a lump of concrete through his car windscreen.”

The plane’s landed but he’s still flying

What has happened to our criminal classes? Once, they could be relied upon for a certain rough ingenuity and cunning, which often enabled them to evade capture. But something has happened to them down the years: sadly, they are going the same way as our universities, into a pit of unrelenting dimwittedness.

Take Jamie Swain, 29, from Enfield. He allegedly attempted to smuggle some drugs into Thailand. And where did he choose to hide his bag of cocaine, according to the Thai immigration authorities? Yes, inside his passport.

There may be an entirely innocent explanation, of course. But if not, Jamie faces a possible ten years in a prison that — without casting aspersions on the Thai criminal justice system — may not be entirely to his liking.

Human swingers trump orangutans

A wild orangutan has been observed applying a chewed-up medicinal plant to a wound on its face, leading zoologists to claim the creatures are incredibly clever, just like us.

A gobbet of plant doesn’t impress me much. When animals construct a fully functioning free-at-the-point-of-delivery health service, complete with doctor’s receptionists installed so that you can never see a doctor, then I might take notice.

In the US surgeons are charging more than £10,000 for something called a phalgina, which bestows upon confused human beings both a penis and a vagina. That’s the benchmark, ape. Up your game.

How safe is Rwanda?