Apologise - who, me?

There's a great fashion across the world for apologising right now for things that went wrong in the past, so I wasn't too surprised to see writer Chris Dolan suggesting it's time Scotland apologised for its role in the 3-way traffic that took people - black people - as slaves from Africa to the Caribbean and the southern US states and brought sugar and tobacco from there to Bristol, London, Liverpool and Glasgow. With these, the UK got rich. Very rich. It was able to expand its empire across 4 continents and made unbelievable amounts of money for a small number of people.

My family comes from a long line of people who were basically little more than slaves themselves: indentured servants working on farms and in other people's houses, miners who could only spend their wages at the company store, labourers in factories across Scotland, who chased work to England, Northern Ireland and then to Canada, the US and finally Australia and New Zealand. As far from home as you could get and with little hope of ever returning to your family - or even of keeping in contact with them.

Any chance any of them will get an apology? Maybe for their early deaths in shipyards, rope factories and locomotive works, where they inhaled asbestos, got 'white finger' which meant their hands didn't work so they couldn't work, developed miners' lung, lived in overcrowded slum housing, got the minimum of education and less opportunity, gave up their lives in two world wars, went hungry in the bad times, and thought they'd gone to heaven when the Welfare State and comprehensive education came in.

Just as black people are still paying the price of slavery, the working class in the UK are paying for the British Empire: early death is common in the former industrial areas like Belfast, Liverpool, Corby, Teesside and central Scotland. And the people are all being treated just as badly: as if they are poor because they are shiftless, lazy skivers, not survivors of an awful inheritance.

I for one don't want apologies.  Prof Tom Devine is right when he says you can't apply 21st century rules to 18th century morals. In any case, that's not going to put bread on the plate, as the French say. I want us all - especially the Tories currently in government - to understand that there's no such thing as a 'self-made millionaire' and start redistributing wealth - and we still produce plenty of it in the UK - a bit more fairly.