Rosa Moro. june 4th, 2026
On 25 March 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution A/80/L.48, declaring the Transatlantic Slave Trade to be the “most serious crime against humanity.” The resolution was approved by 123 votes in favour, 3 against (Argentina, Israel and the United States), and 52 abstentions—a way of voting “no,” but with embarrassment. Among those abstaining were all 27 members of the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Japan. In other words, the bloc that historically benefited from slavery and continues to benefit from the economic system built upon that great crime against humanity: namely capitalism chose to abstain.
As everyone ought to know by now, although European societies seem reluctant to look in that direction, Europe has ceased to be relevant in almost every aspect of the global arena, including the economic one. It is sidelined and in free fall. Its PlayStation controller, as the meme goes, is not even plugged in. Yet its leaders continue trying to convince their peoples that Europe remains a decisive actor on the international stage, while pushing them towards a war that people should oppose with all their strength in the streets.
One of those warmongering leaders is Keir Starmer, determined to lower the living standards of the British population in order to finance the continuation of the US and EU proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. British intelligence services, military personnel, technicians and media apparatuses are working at full capacity to sustain Ukraine’s Nazi, corrupt and illegitimate elite. This places the British Isles in the crosshairs of possible Russian attacks within this absurd war, in which Ukraine has just attacked a nuclear power plant! This people whom the UK and the EU are arming are terrifying. The danger is becoming increasingly real.
Meanwhile, the British—like much of the rest of Europe—seem largely unmoved by a threat of such magnitude and continue to take refuge in the small, irrelevant pleasures of everyday life. This was evident in the days following the adoption of Resolution A/80/L.48, when they found a perfect distraction: the reactions of Reform UK (a stale right-wing party comparable to VOX or Isabel Díaz Ayuso from Spain) and the counter-reactions of a woke* majority represented by the Labour Party and the Conservatives or Tories, (in Spain would include the PP, PSOE, IU and the broader Podemos universe). All of this served as a comforting exercise in self-affirmation and in reaffirming their supposed civilisational superiority.
The far right demanded reprisals against former British colonies that dared to seek reparations for slavery. Labour, meanwhile, responded with something like: “What a bunch of ignorant fools and fascist you are. As for us, on the contrary … we are not going to accept reparations either, not a chance, but we prefer to call it ‘looking to the future rather than the past.’” And so the crowd remains divided, distracted and agitated during these historic times, before having to set off for World War III.
What the audience fails to consider, because schools, universities and the media ensure it is excluded from public debate, is how this entire system of slavery and reparations has really functioned, both in the past and in the present.
Did You Know…?
On 9 February 2018, the Twitter account of HM Treasury published the following message as part of its weekly #FridayFact series:
“Did you know? In 1833, Britain used £20 million, 40% of its national budget, to buy the freedom of all slaves in the Empire. The amount borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it was not paid off until 2015. This means that living British citizens helped to end the slave trade.”
The tweet was deleted in the early hours of 10 February after the outrage it provoked.
Those who drafted the message—or those who authorised its publication—appeared not to know, or not to consider important, that those £20 million (an amount whose weight in the economy of the time would be equivalent to roughly £100 billion today) were not used to compensate enslaved people. They were used to compensate 46,000 slave owners for the loss of their “human property,” effectively buying those people from them. Not a single penny was paid to any enslaved man, woman or child.
The British Way of abolishing slavery consisted of making already wealthy slave owners even richer, consolidating fortunes whose influence continues today in families such as that of former minister Douglas Hogg, writers such as Graham Greene and George Orwell, and many others, as well as banks including Lloyds, Baring Brothers, P&O and Barclays. And, of course, the country’s largest slave-owning family—the British royal family—also benefited.
Yet perhaps the greatest beneficiary of all was Nathan Mayer Rothschild, whose family bank lent the money to the British government, securing in return a lucrative stream of high interest payments, that would be serviced by British taxpayers for generations.
The Bank of England was tasked with administering compensation payments to slave owners on behalf of the “benevolent” British government. In this way, a vast transfer of public wealth into private hands took place, extending across generations from 1833 until 2015.
I agree with the historian David Olusoga, who wrote during the 2018 controversy: “The real question is: why did anyone think this was okay?” He argued that reducing the complex history of abolition to a simple #FridayFact reflected a “profound misunderstanding” of the entire issue.
A Special Mention Goes To…
Former Prime Minister David Cameron deserves special mention. His family was among those slave-owning families that received indecent sums of money as compensation for their “human property.”
Cameron held positions of political responsibility virtually from birth and served as Prime Minister between 2010 and 2016. While British citizens had not yet finished repaying the Rothschild loan from which his family and thousands of others had benefited, Cameron made an official visit to Jamaica.
There, demonstrating precisely the “profound misunderstanding” described by Olusoga, he declared to Jamaicans that he hoped:
“As friends who have gone through so much together since those darkest days, we can move on from this painful legacy and continue building the future.”
In other words, a descendant enriched by slavery was asking descendants impoverished by slavery to “move on.”
As a gesture of goodwill, he offered the Jamaican government £38 million of British public money … to build a prison.
The prison project formed part of British migration policy, which was already beginning to contemplate deporting migrants to third countries. Cameron’s plan was to use the prison to hold migrants deported from the United Kingdom after committing offences, whether major or minor. One might ask: how many deportation proceedings would be required before British taxpayers saw any return on their investment in a prison in Jamaica?
Again, that was not really the point. It was another transfer of public money into private interests. The management of British prisons and Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) is entrusted to private companies such as Serco, Mitie and G4S, themselves owned by major investment funds whose names are familiar to all of us: BlackRock, JPMorgan, Vanguard Group, Goldman Sachs and others.
Where It Says the United Kingdom, You Could Also Say Spain or Germany
Does it make any sense for the British public to spend millions of pounds deporting a few dozen migrants and building prisons around the world? No. Yet while many people believe their country will improve once there are fewer migrants, what actually happens is that vast quantities of public money end up in the hands of investment funds in which the great fortunes enriched by the 1833 compensation payments may well still have interests.
Those interests are responsible for the deterioration of living conditions for the majority—not migrants.
And yet many ordinary Britons continue voting either for their equivalents of I. D. Ayuso, (a Spanish politician who glorified imperialism and Spain’s colonisation in Mexico whilst on visit there); or for their supposed opposition, who travel to places like Jamaica to display a less coarse and more ‘woke-civilised’ ignorance (such as boasting about having ended slavery, even if it was done the British Way).
The British people believe that by voting for one side or the other they can bring about change. But neither of these two faces of the same system has the slightest intention of questioning, let alone fighting, this enormous and permanent plundering of public resources.
The British, like Spaniards, Germans and many other Europeans, do not seem to be fully grasping that they could end up being sent to a war—one that will be nuclear—precisely because of the same interests: the historical and sustained accumulation of wealth in the hands of a minority at the expense of the vast majority.
Rosa Moro
* I use the term woke for the first time in my life, after having paid close attention to the important critical work of Professor Christian Parenti on this issue: The Cargo Cult of ‘Woke’: A Discussion with Christian Parenti. I strongly recommend everyone to read this interview, which is the transcript of the YouTube video of the same title.