Lenny Henry’s Calls for Slavery Reparations are the Most Insane Yet

Alleged “comedian” Lenny Henry has come up with his best joke yet: that Britain should pay £18 trillion to black people living in Britain as reparation for slavery. He outlines this in a book, co-written with his long-term friend and media diversity campaigner Marcus Ryder, entitled The Big Payback.

Henry is best known for his association with Comic Relief and Premier Inn adverts, as opposed to his actual comedy, and his joke writing could clearly do with some work, as his demands are six times the size of the entire UK economy.

Economic ruination of the country aside, it is worth noting that most of Britain’s 2.4 million black residents are of recent African extraction, not descendants of slaves. In fact, it is possible that some of them could be descendants of the very people who enslaved those traded by Europeans in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the first place. Historians widely agree that the capture and sale of African slaves was largely carried out by Africans themselves. Europeans rarely ventured inland to seize captives directly.

Britain, by contrast, is known for its historic and unprecedented moral crusade against the practice of slavery globally, expending much blood and treasure to eradicate it. It is now a well-publicised fact that the loans drawn to pay for this venture were only paid off in 2015, meaning that most Britons have already contributed, through their taxes, to the cost of ending the slave trade.

What Henry is demanding would effectively be a vast transfer of wealth from people who never enslaved anyone to people who have never been slaves, or, in the vast majority of cases, whose ancestors were never enslaved by the British at any point in history. Henry argues that black people living in Britain today may not be the descendants of slavery but they suffer from the legacy of slavery as he believed that “modern racism is rooted in the slave trade”. One need only look at how East Asians view Sub-Saharan Africans, despite never participating in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, to dismiss this view out of hand.

Henry’s demand is not unique; it is part of a broader trend. Calls for reparations have become fashionable across the West, particularly in the United States, where activists insist that modern taxpayers must atone for sins committed centuries before they were born. The same rhetoric is now echoed in Britain, despite the fact that Britain not only abolished slavery earlier than most but also spent enormous sums and countless lives stamping it out across the world.

Curiously, none of the loudest voices calling for reparations ever mention the Arab slave trade, which predated and outlasted the transatlantic trade by centuries. Millions of Africans were captured and transported across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean, with some historians estimating the death toll to be higher than that of the Atlantic trade. Yet there are no demands for reparations from the Middle East, no campaigns for apologies from Arab states, and no bestselling books calling for compensation from oil-rich Gulf nations. The selective outrage suggests that the issue is less about justice and more about both ideology and extracting wealth. Reparations are only demanded where there is perceived Western guilt to exploit.

Even today, linguistic traces of this historic practice remain. In Arabic, the word “abd” means both “black person” and “slave”, a reminder of how deeply servitude was bound to skin colour in those societies. Yet this reality receives almost no attention from the Western commentariat or diversity activists who claim to speak for “black dignity”. It’s as if acknowledging the full, global history of slavery would complicate the narrative of uniquely Western guilt. That, apparently, is rather inconvenient.

The hypocrisy becomes even harder to ignore when one remembers that open slave markets still exist in parts of North Africa today. As recently as 2017, footage emerged showing black Africans being sold in Libya for as little as a few hundred dollars. Where were Lenny Henry and his co-author then?

According to the Global Slavery Index, there are currently an estimated 50 million people trapped in forced labour or human trafficking around the world. There are more slaves today than at any point in history. Yet those calling for reparations seem uninterested in these living victims. Theirs is not a campaign against slavery itself, but a campaign to monetise ancestral guilt. The moral energy that could be directed toward ending real slavery is instead spent on imaginary debts and performative offence.

Reparations politics has become a lucrative business. There is status, funding, and influence to be gained from perpetual victimhood. It is a kind of moral currency in a culture that rewards grievance, victimhood and, ultimately, weakness. Figures like Henry present themselves as spokesmen for the oppressed, but in reality they are extracting resources not from oppressors, but from ordinary citizens who had no part in the crimes they denounce. This is not justice; it is using the language of morality as a form of blackmail. The more society indulges it, the more we entrench a culture in which outrage is profitable, and victimhood is a form of capital.

This selectiveness can be explained by the fact that the West is currently, in a general sense, undergoing a period of moral insecurity and uncertainty. This vulnerability has been exploited. Campaigns that promote diversity initiatives, special funding schemes, and a host of other advantages for non-natives residing in majority-white countries are rife. As the psychologists Ok, Wazlawek, and Plaks (2020) observed, some individuals strategically signal both virtue and victimhood to secure financial benefits from others. In other words, moral identity and perceived suffering can be leveraged as social currency to facilitate non-reciprocal resource transfer. The same research also noted the role of collective narcissism — where groups maintain an inflated sense of their own moral worth and entitlement to compensation, demanding recognition and reward as a cynical strategy to improve their own situation.

Within this framework, the modern reparations movement fits perfectly. It is not about redress, but about extracting advantage through moral coercion. The louder one proclaims historical victimhood, the more one can demand from those cast as oppressors, regardless of the facts of ancestry or responsibility. It is a cynical game, dressed in the language of justice, sustained by a culture that mistakes guilt for goodness and compensation for compassion.

Until Western societies rediscover the confidence to reject this emotional blackmail, the practice will continue. The reward for claiming grievance will always outweigh the reward for taking responsibility for one’s own successes or failures, and moral virtue will remain a resource to be mined rather than a principle to be lived by. We have a way of life we should be proud of. Even today, in deeply troubled times, the Western world is a beacon of light in a dark world. A bastion of civility, decency, and morality. We should not feel guilt for our past but pride that we have always been at the forefront of morality, philosophy, art, literature, music, technology, and the benchmark for all aspiring developing nations.

A West that is confident in its identity, unapologetic about its heritage, and committed to the wellbeing of its people will not even entertain calls for reparations. If we wish these calls to cease, as all reasonable people should, we need to strengthen these virtues in our civilization and within ourselves.