Britain doesn’t need a public holiday to remember the slave trade

A fair number of episodes in the history of this country are frankly best forgotten. The last thing to do with them, one might have thought, would be to memorialise them with bank holidays. Giving people in Britain a day off to mark, say, Cromwell’s harrying of Ireland in the 17th century, or the starting of the Boer War in the interest of corporate capital in the 19th, would at the very least raise eyebrows.

Yet yesterday, on Unesco’s International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade, black studies academic Kehinde Andrews suggested exactly this in respect of one such event: namely, our involvement in slavery. There was, he said, ‘really nothing more important to Britain’s development.’ We therefore needed a permanent official public holiday to keep its memory alive, preserve a conscience of the horrors of the transatlantic trade, and to remind us of its direct outcome in the form of continued structural racism, and racial economic and health inequality, in Britain today.