Sam Ashworth-Hayes

It had to end this way. Whatever else we might say about the English weather, it is deeply in tune with the national psyche – the emotions of the people over innumerable generations have taken on the grey, leaden cast of their skies – and there could be no more fitting day after that final than torrential rain and thunder driving the few mournful shadows from the streets. The fact that mere defeat has left our faith in football coming home unshaken can be slightly confusing for foreign observers. While American journalists and the Croatian national team seem to believe it’s a triumphalist brag, we know that it’s about always losing and remaining hopeful despite that.

Under other circumstances I wouldn’t mind living in the American empire here in Britain. The tithes are reasonable and the legal structures hardly onerous. If Washington were content to simply dispatch its governors, collect its money, and crush the occasional revolt in the Celtic provinces I don’t think I’d have any complaints to make. The missionaries, though, I could do without. It says something about the pace of change that I barely raised an eyebrow at Sadiq Khan’s Pride tweet choosing to reference the Stonewall riots – a series of demonstrations in New York – rather than select an episode from British history. How assimilated by another country are you when its history is better known to you than your own?

It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for Bill Michael, who recently resigned as UK boss of KPMG. While he could have softened the blow, there’s little to find disagreement with in his words:  'After every single unconscious bias training that’s ever been done nothing’s ever improved. So unless you care, you actually won’t change.' Fighting bias is big business. Over the last three years, diversity and inclusion professionals have enjoyed a surge in demand for their services. In the United States alone, organisations now spend billions of dollars a year on diversity programmes. And it's a practice which is rapidly making its way across the Atlantic.

Should Britain return colonial artefacts? For some, the answer is easy: of course. But these people must also be consistent and realise that the arguments posed for the return of stolen goods cut both ways. Just as they can be applied to make the case that the United Kingdom should pay out where it has plundered, they can be used to argue that Britain should be compensated where it was wronged. While we might want to return the Benin bronzes – plundered in a punitive expedition after the massacre of an unarmed British delegation – we should also be looking to reclaim the various treasures stolen from us. The idea of compensating a country with the world’s sixth largest economy might take some time for people to adjust to, so I’m going to suggest we start small.

On the third day after his cancellation, Ted Hughes rose again. Having published a spreadsheet listing his possible association with 'wealth obtained from enslaved people or through colonial violence', the British Library backed down, making a public apology to his widow and withdrawing 'unreservedly' the reference 'to a distant ancestor'.

It's all change at Jesus College, Cambridge. The marble memorial to Tobias Rustat is coming down. His portrait is no longer displayed. And his name has been removed from the conferences held at the college. Yet for one emeritus fellow of Cambridge's Magdalene College, these steps do not appear to go far enough. Colin Kolbert, a retired judge, said: 'If he (Rustat) was so abhorrent, they should liquidate the present proceeds of his benefaction and give it to the descendants of the people he was oppressing.' Is this really a wise idea? That Tobias Rustat dealt in slaves is not disputed. He made the majority of his wealth as a courtier, and invested £400 in the Royal African Company.

Last April police officers found the bodies of two women, Mihrican Mustafa and Henriett Szucs, stored in Zahid Younis’s freezer. Before their murder Younis had served two jail sentences. The first came in 2005 after he married a 14-year-old in a Walthamstow mosque, got his child bride pregnant, and assaulted her. For this he was given 30 months. In 2008 he was jailed again for breaking the arm of a 17-year-old girl he was dating. For this he received nearly five years. Think carefully. Was there anything in his previous actions that suggested Younis might not become a safe and upstanding member of society? How about Usman Khan? Khan was jailed in 2012 for a terror plot involving a string of bombs.

Until relatively recently I was under the impression that preventing people breaking the law was the primary job of a police officer. But is this always the case? Or is tackling crime sometimes substituted for a form of morality-based policing? The protest for reparations in Brixton last Saturday – and the reaction of the police – is an excellent example of what morality policing looks like in practice. The event – a gathering of considerably more than 30 people in an apparent breach of the Health Protection (Coronavirus) regulations – was not, it would seem, authorised by the police. It was instead a planned protest with an arranged policing plan and conditions on attendance (including an 8pm curfew).

Why should we leave memorials to evil men standing? Even for those who oppose the toppling of statues like Edward Colston’s, it’s a hard question to answer. But one reason to stand against the destruction of memorials to those who have come before is because of what it might mean for those who come after us. While some wealthy people make donations or leave bequests to good causes out of a simple desire to build a better future, others are motivated more by the selfish, vain, and utterly understandable desire to be remembered, or to add a gloss to a life that would otherwise be viewed as without redeeming features. Believing that the future will despise and erase you does not leave a strong motive for donations of this sort.

Should Britain have compensated slave-owners? At first glance, the question seems ridiculous. Comedian London Hughes asks if we think it’s ‘disgusting that when slavery ended, the UK government paid out millions to former slave owners as a way of saying sorry’. Academic Jason Hickel notes disapprovingly that British taxpayers ‘were paying reparations from the abolition of slavery in 1833 all the way to 2015...but to the *owners* of slaves rather than to former slaves themselves’. Even the BBC is questioning the ‘whiff of self-congratulation’ around the abolition movement. But while nuance may be unfashionable, some issues deserve careful treatment.

'It’s a sad truth that much of our wealth was derived from the slave trade', said London’s mayor Sadiq Khan. Others agree: for Al Jazeera's Imran Khan, ‘Britain was built on the backs, and souls, of slaves’. But there is a problem with this analysis; it’s wrong. Just like the story told of an island nation standing alone since 1066, it’s a myth that the monstrous evil of the slave trade made Britain the wealthy country it is today. Slavery and sugar did not provide the sinews of finance that drove industrialisation. Total profits from the slave trade, had they been invested entirely in Britain, would have accounted for about three per cent of all capital formation in 1770.