A s a matter of purely practical politics, there is nothing that any British monarch or prime minister can say or do to extinguish the moral shame of slavery and its associated barbarities by way of making an apology or paying reparations .

A formal apology is, to many, problematic, in the sense that the British people of today, living in a multicultural society, cannot be held responsible for things that may have been done centuries before by long-dead, distant relatives.

As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby , puts it in his intervention in The Independent today : “The treatment of slaves in slave ships, and of slaves on plantations, is much the same as the treatment of prisoners in Auschwitz. And it came from the same basic sin. They were considered not to be human”.

Yet, as Welby adds, “the Bible talks very little of reparation – but it talks a lot about repentance.…