The United Nations has decided that Britain has not grovelled enough.
After years of toppled statues, boarded-up war memorials and official lectures about “colonialism,” a UN human-rights committee now wants the country that ended the Atlantic slave trade to fill its public squares with statues of “people of African descent,”
The globalist body also suggests Britain should rewrite what children are taught, and treat historic slavery as a live brief for migration policy and hate-speech enforcement.
This comes in the form of formal “reparatory justice” guidance from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, published six months after member states voted in New York to treat the transatlantic trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and to press former slaving nations for apology, restitution and cash.
Britain abstained. The committee has carried on regardless.
The recommendations sit in guidance largely drafted by CERD panellists Gay McDougall, an American lawyer, and Pela Boker-Wilson, a Liberian legal expert. Former slave-trading states, the committee says, have a moral and legal “obligation to repair” the damage of slavery.
The guidance suggests that “Public spaces should honour the contributions of people of African descent and clearly acknowledge the wrongs of those who supported or benefited from historical atrocities.”
That, the authors add, can mean artworks, statues, memorials and “dedications,” and “Satisfaction to people of African descent can include the right to investigation and truth, public judgments and acknowledgements, apologies, acceptances of responsibility and public commemorations.”
Full on virtue signalling grovelling, in other words.
The committee adds that schools “must ensure that schoolbooks and curricula present accurate, unbiased accounts of transatlantic chattel slavery, its aftermath and current realities, based on thorough research.”
It adds that political leaders should “educate the public on the importance of reparatory justice for building a healthy, inclusive society.” And on speech and migration, states “must act early to prevent prejudice and address misinformation about transatlantic chattel slavery and its ongoing harms to people of African descent.”
It further outlines that reparations should include policies “eradicating xenophobia towards migrants and others perceived as such.”
In other words: monuments, classrooms, archives, apologies — and a tighter leash on anyone who objects.
The report even revisits the 2020 Black Lives Matter summer. Protesters who tore down monuments linked to slavery and empire, it complains, were unfairly “disparaged” in the media, their cause painted as “obscure” and “Left-wing.”
Edward Colston, dumped in Bristol harbour, is cited as the exhibit. The vandalism is recast as a moral lesson the United Kingdom has still not learned.
The political class in London has spent years flattering this mood. The public has not.
Historian and GB News presenter Matt Goodwin put the demand in one line: UN lawyers want “British people who never owned slaves and whose ancestors helped end the slave trade to pay people who were never slaves while ignoring the many millions of slaves in non-Western nations today.” His verdict: “jog on.”
Cambridge historian Professor Robert Tombs, founder of History Reclaim, called the campaign “sinister” and aimed at “censoring free discussion and imposing a certain view.”
“Those who supported and benefitted included the predecessors of those who now demand reparations,” he said. An “accurate, unbiased” account, he added, “would mean paying tribute to those in Britain and elsewhere who struggled to end the Atlantic slave trade.”
“On that subject, we hear a lot about how Britain paid compensation to White slave owners in its colonies, but I have rarely if ever heard public recognition of the money paid to black slave traders for the same reason.” His conclusion was blunt: “the whole thing is a huge financial and political scam.”
Professor Lawrence Goldman, emeritus fellow in History at St Peter’s College, Oxford, made the same point from another angle. “It’s ironic that the UN should be telling Britain what to do about slavery. It was in Britain more than 200 years ago that the anti-slavery movement started, and we then led in the fight to end slavery across the world in the Victorian era, long before the UN existed.”
He added, “But millions of people today are modern slaves, unable to live and work freely. Rather than lecture the leading anti-slavery nation about the past, the UN should do something about slavery in the present. That’s its job.”
That job is the one the UN keeps declining. Descent-based slavery still exists in parts of the Sahel. The Arab and East African trades ran for centuries after Britain banned its own. The committee’s guidance barely glances at any of it. The target is always the same short list of Western capitals.
James Kariuki, formerly Britain’s chargé d’affaires at the UN, has said London engaged in talks with the UN but “continues to disagree with fundamental propositions of the text.” The EU’s explanation of vote was even clearer: suggestions of retroactive international law and reparations claims were “incompatible with established principles of international law.”
A UN judge has already floated a figure of more than £18 trillion as Britain’s supposed bill — a sum several times the size of the UK economy. The Brattle Group’s earlier estimate for Western states ran to tens of trillions. Many are adamant that these numbers are a shakedown dressed as justice.
The fashionable story treats Britain as the author of African slavery. The record is the opposite of that cartoon.
Parliament banned the British slave trade in 1807. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 then dismantled slavery across most of the empire, freeing more than 800,000 people in the Caribbean, the Cape and Mauritius.
To force the measure through against the West India interest, the Treasury committed about £20 million in compensation to registered owners — roughly 40 percent of annual government spending at the time.
The debt was financed through gilts. When the Treasury modernised the gilt portfolio in 2015, the last of those instruments was redeemed. That fact is now used as a taunt. It is also evidence of something the UN will not say: Britain paid an enormous price, in cash and in political capital, to end a system it had once joined.
Then came the part no UN committee wants to see on a plinth. From 1808 the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron hunted slaving ships off the African coast. Over roughly half a century it seized around 1,600 vessels and freed some 150,000 Africans.
Sailors died of fever in large numbers doing work no other great power was willing to fund at that scale. At its height the suppression effort consumed a serious slice of national effort — diplomatic pressure, mixed courts, bribes and gunboats — to drag other nations into line.
Wilberforce, Clarkson, Sharp, Equiano and the Quaker networks did not wait for a UN working group. They built a mass movement inside a slave-trading country and won. African brokers and kingdoms, meanwhile, captured and sold people into the Atlantic system for generations.
The trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean trades ran longer still. Will any of these facts be included in an “accurate, unbiased account”?
Instead the official culture treats “colonial” as a magic word that wipes the slate. Nelson, Wellington, Picton, explorers, viceroys, even figures whose later lives were spent against bondage are folded into one smear.
In June 2020, after Colston went into the harbour and “was a racist” was sprayed on Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, London boxed up its own history.
Churchill, a statue of George Washington, and the Cenotaph — the memorial to the British dead — were boarded over before further marches.
Churchill’s statue today in London. I’m speechless. pic.twitter.com/lU6Y37my7e
— Antonello Guerrera (@antoguerrera) June 12, 2020
Robert Milligan was lifted from outside the Museum of London Docklands. Guy’s and St Thomas’ talked of moving figures linked to slavery. Oriel’s Rhodes statue became a permanent siege. Within months the argument had spread from slave traders to anyone who could be tagged “empire.”
Sadiq Khan then appointed a Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm: a 15-member panel of curators, campaigners and cultural operators tasked with reviewing statues, street names and memorials so that London might be ‘corrected’.
The mayor’s office insisted the body was “not being established to preside over the removal of statues.” Khan had already said “there are some slavers that should come down, and the commission will advise on that.” Jacob Rees-Mogg called the exercise a stack of “loony, left-wing wheezes.” Shaun Bailey called the appointees “unelected activists.”
Excited to announce brilliant members for London’s new Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm – we will be working hard to ensure London’s history is fully reflected and celebrated. @MayorofLondon https://t.co/AWd2pe8uZU pic.twitter.com/f2pyVRmJGF
— Justine Simons OBE (@justinesimons1) February 9, 2021
The net widened. Figures whose records included opposition to slavery were swept into the same “contested heritage” files. The point was never a careful ledger. It was to make British history look illegitimate in its own capital.
Wales made the method official. Labour’s devolved government audited commemorations and issued “best-practice” advice that statues of “powerful, older, able-bodied white men” may be “offensive” to a “more diverse” public.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered"
— Martin Daubney ?? (@MartinDaubney) March 12, 2023
Wales: Orwell called it https://t.co/CbFITY7rw8
Councils were told to set the “right historical narrative.” Options included concealing monuments, boxing them, wrapping them in new artworks, renaming streets — or destroying them.
Nelson, Wellington, Thomas Picton and Henry Morton Stanley were named. Diversity, the guidance lamented, was “hardly visible at all in public commemorations,” which risked the “perception that the achievements that society considers noteworthy are those of powerful, older, able-bodied white men.”
That sentence is the tell. A country is instructed to be ashamed of the men who built its navy, won its wars and, in the same era, smashed the trade the UN now pretends Britain never opposed. The term “Colonial” does the rest of the work.
The people who never owned a slave, and whose great-great-grandparents were more likely to have been mill hands than planters, are the ones invited to feel the shame. The governments that still tolerate bondage get a pass. The UN, which cannot keep slaves out of the Sahel or young protesters off Iranian gallows, finds the time to lecture the country that policed the Atlantic.
Britain abolished the trade. Britain spent a fortune and a navy making that abolition stick. The UN’s answer is more statues, more guilt, and a warning to be nicer to the next boat full of illegal migrants. That is not reparatory justice. It is a political project that needs British history to stay on its knees.
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