Our dreadful duopoly political class seem bent on a "slave-like" existence for Australians: Covid and climate change restrictions of rights, control by racial division, and the threat of official censorship, non-elected 'experts' deciding what we can and can't do; rule of law and innocence until guilt is proven ignored, attacks on property rights, and diminishing opportunities to own property.

We need to spend more time fighting this new slavery - in which we are becoming the slaves - than we do dwelling on history, most of which some of us use to self-denigrate and attack an Empire we were damn lucky to stem from.

We will all finish up being slaves to the "First Nation" if some of our woke premiers have their way.

David

Correct, Graham. As heir we stand almost alone as a country that not only does not have an irrevocable bill of human rights, but successive national parliaments have resisted it to a generic man. Perhaps the voice will change that?

As for slavery, all unpaid endeavour is slavery as is underpaid work. I believe a man is worthy of his craft and in a fair days pay for a fair days work!

I brought home an unopened pay packet which I handed over to my then wife. Which she used as she saw fit. Did that make me a slave to wife and family? Given the way it all ended, maybe.
Alan B.

A competing and perhaps more accurate title would have been "Britain did more to supercharge trans-Atlantic slavery than any other nation".

Before the War of Independence the decadal growth rate in slave numbers in the British colonies was between 50 to 100% leaving the area holding 50% of the slaves in the Western hemisphere. After the war this dropped to 25 to 30%.

It kind of reminds me of the author of Amazing Grace. A slave ship captain who continued his nefarious work transporting slaves for years after his Damascus moment.

Having a change of heart from a principal instigator Britain was welcome but it was more about a self correction than being a leading light.

"When it abolished slavery a new era in human rights had arrived which within another century leads to the United Nations declaration of the Universal Rights of the Human Being".

And now the United Nations are trying to enslave all the western world, & idiots like SR cheer from the side lines, or become involved as useful idiots.

WTF?

There is more to this story than the British Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

The British government borrowed £20 million to compensate slave owners, which amounted to a massive 40% of the Treasury’s annual income or about 5 percent of British GDP. The loan was one of the largest in history.

It was only in 2015 that, according to the Treasury, British taxpayers finished ‘paying off’ the debt which the British government incurred in order to compensate British slave owners in 1835 because of the abolition of slavery.

So for 180 years British taxpayers were paying off that loan so that save owning families and as a result their descendants could be rewarded by financial compensation.

Just another form of slavery.

British actor Benedict Cumberbatch (a descendant of a Barbados slave owning family) said in 2015 that his mother had urged him not to use his last name professionally. She feared it would make him a target of the campaign by the Caribbean to get compensation for the descendants of those who were enslaved