No, Britain doesn't need to pay reparations for the slave trade

A Jamaican official has called on David Cameron to ‘personally atone’ for the slave trade, and especially for his ancestors’ involvement in it.

I hope Cameron tells this guy to do one. The PM has nothing to apologise for, far less self-flagellate for. He bears no more guilt for the slave trade than Justin Bieber does, or Mother Teresa, or Barack Obama, or any of the other millions of people born years after the slave trade ended. The pressure on Cam to weep publicly over the sins of his forefathers, to atone for a wrong he did not commit, is an ugly, medieval spectacle.

Cameron’s trip to Jamaica is being overshadowed by the slavery issue. Jamaican leader Portia Simpson-Miller has formally raised the question of reparations, the idea that Britain should pay Caribbean nations millions in compensation for the hell we put their people through 200 years ago.

And in the wake of revelations that Cameron’s first cousin six-times removed was involved in the slave trade (seriously: a man who snuffed it in 1839), Bert Samuels of Jamaica’s National Reparations Commission says Cameron must ‘apologise personally’ because ‘his lineage has been traced and his forefathers were slave-owners’.