Generation Gap

The brouhaha over the question of whether or not Britain should apologize over its role in the slave trade, and especially Tony Blair's vacuous expression of his 'sorrow', is all just so much grievance mongering, pandering, issue dodging hooey.

I would have thought that the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery was something to celebrate not beat your breast over. You can tell the extent to which debate in the country has been hijacked by serial loathers, fellow travelers, and sneerers from the fact that this is not acknowledged at all in the meejia.

Are we supposed to imagine that that Abolition was historically inevitable?

It doesn't seem impossible to me that if the Clapham Sect hadn't campaigned (based just up the road from here to my delight) and the Royal Navy's 'preventive squadron' hadn't (unilaterally without a UN mandate) enforced, there could still be a slave trade in the West today.

Oh, by the way even the jealous God who inspired William Wilberforce to take up cudgels against slavery only proposed "punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation".

Two hundred years is eight generations.