Sir Lenny Henry: Reparations ‘Only Way’ to Address Slavery

For those unfamiliar with the multimillionaire ‘comedian’ Sir Lenny Henry CBE, he is the latest in a long line of non-victims demanding restitution for injustices they never suffered. Having fashioned a career stereotyping his fellow black Britons – a career which arguably only exists because of the colour of his skin – Henry famously once quipped he was prepared to “do anything to make an audience laugh”; anything it seems , except actually being funny. 

Back in 2019 Henry’s wokery was in its infancy, and he was content to demand quotas for BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) in the entertainment industry. “We shouldn’t have to put up with (it) anymore, walking on a set and not seeing people who look like us” Henry carped, as he accepted the Outstanding Achievement Award at the South Bank. The irony was clearly lost on him. 

Fast forward six years however, and Sir Lenny has butched up; maturing from the quota phase to the hardcore push for reparations. “All black British people need reparations for slavery” he claims, adding that “we personally deserve money for the effects of slavery”. Realising no doubt that this is going to be a harder sell than his last tour, Henry argues that reparations are the “only way” for Britain to address its historic crime of slavery. Rough translation: “We’ll agree to stop calling you ‘racist’, but it’s gonna cost you!”

Henry’s case for reparations is conveniently pitched in The Big Payback: The Case for Reparations for Slavery and How They Would Work; a book co-authored with the similarly downtrodden Marcus Ryder MBE, CEO of the Film & TV Charity and former Chair of the Royal Television Society Diversity Committee. In what amounts to possibly the most sycophantic Guardian puff piece of all time, Henry and Ryder are not shy about their motivation for writing the book: 

Henry: My concept was, “gimme some money”. I’m joking, but I kept thinking, is somebody gonna give me a couple of mil? Because I know where I’m gonna live.

Ryder: You wanted a hot tub.

Henry: I wanted the hot tub! But once you start to break it down, it goes beyond getting a cash refund for slavery. It becomes about social engineering, and – it’s going to sound really touchy-feely – but it becomes about healing, and about spiritual healing, rather than just cash. It’s hundreds of years of being oppressed and downtrodden. It’s about mental illness, mental health issues, it’s about society being rigged against you. Even if you don’t see it, the house wins every time if you’re a person of colour, and it’s been happening for 200 years.

If HMS Britain truly is rigged against Henry we must have Jonah at the helm, because the CBE, Knighthood, Chancellorship of Birmingham City University, Fellowship of the Royal Television Society, lifetime achievement awards, honorary doctorates and the Freedom of the City of London would tend to suggest otherwise. 

The figure demanded by Henry and Ryder is a trifling £18 trillion – chickenfeed, considering the overall price tag ‘owed’ to compensate the transatlantic slave trade has been estimated at £103 trillion. And while it is unlikely our woke heroes sat around calculating with their shoes and socks off, the sum is on the excessive side of exorbitant. At roughly five times UK GDP, 18 trillion Sterling would guarantee each of Britain’s 2.4 million Black citizens £7.5 million – almost exactly equal to Henry’s own net worth. This suggests to me that it is not mere avarice on Henry’s part, but a touch of guilt too. Still, £7.5 million will only stretch so far – and I fear it is nowhere near enough to compensate Black Britons who have managed to sit through one of Henry’s ‘comedies’. 

The argument for reparations is of course at once both facile and risible. For a start, the majority of Britain’s black population are of direct African not Caribbean descent, and therefore not the descendants of slaves. Furthermore, Britain was the first nation to abolish slavery – borrowing 40% of its budget in 1833 to do so, a loan which was only just paid off in 2015. Slavery meanwhile is still going strong in countries as diverse as Nigeria, Indonesia and Brazil. Conservative estimates suggest that this afflicts tens of millions of people, though curiously not ones whose plight appears to irk Henry and Ryder.

Even assuming £18 trillion could be found down the back of the Treasury sofa, how precisely would such a policy ever be implemented without instantly turning farcical? Where would you draw the line? Black Britons who could demonstrate their ancestry? Immigrants fresh off the boat with the right degree of melanin? What about those of mixed heritage? What about Black Britons whose ancestors were slave owners, or impoverished Whites for whom ‘privilege’ is just a social construct? And what about the transracial community, whose numbers one suspects would swell overnight?

Farce notwithstanding, reparations it seems are the liberal cause du jour as I wrote back in 2024: 

“Reparations are all the rage across the West at present, however unpopular such a policy might be with the electorate. U.S. states have already begun paying ‘reparations’ to their black citizens. Private companies, universities and even the Church of England are all following suit. Germany has officially acknowledged genocide during its occupation of Namibia, and pledged aid worth close to £1 Billion; Prime Minister Rutte offered a formal apology on behalf of Holland for its historic involvement in the slave trade, and even King Charles has expressed support for research into the monarchy’s slavery ties, while stopping short of an apology.”

The application of justice is surely something most of us could get behind. But what I find particularly galling about the likes of Henry, is the dishonesty of their claims. Contrary to his whining about underrepresentation, it is well-documented that minorities in Britain are vastly overrepresented on television. Like all good lefties, Henry wants the right to spend other people’s money, but he also wants to denounce the form in which it arrives – just as he did when he claimed Comic Relief suffered from ‘White saviour syndrome’. Worst of all, is his portrayal of himself as a victim. Seriously, what more could Britain have done for a man of no discernible talent – award him the Victoria Cross?

Henry is not alone in his propensity to play the victim, nor his desire to profit from slavery without the risk of stigma. Black Lives Matter were famously creative in their accounting, with conservative estimates of the funds embezzled at $10 million. Considering that only 33% of funds were given to charities, I’d say that was conservative in the extreme. Commonwealth countries meanwhile are queuing up to get their slice of the reparation pie. Of course, it has long been argued that reparations are already paid in the form of foreign aid – although even this has been bizarrely criticised as a form of ‘neocolonialism’.

Playing the victim is not the only game in town however. Shifting the focus for a moment to South Korea, a country with which I have more than a passing interest, may help to shed light on the validity of reparation demands. During Japan’s occupation of Korean from 1910 to 1945, hundreds of thousands of Koreans were subjected to forced labour and sexual slavery. This was a prolonged period of severe oppression, exploitation, and cultural suppression, which devastated the country. No compensation has ever been paid directly to the victims, particularly the outrageously termed ‘comfort women’, some of whom are still alive today. Despite this, Korea is now the world’s 13^th largest economy with a GDP of almost $2 trillion. It’s remarkable what can be achieved when you take responsibility for your own success.

Returning to Henry, the most telling line in The Guardian interview was the following: “Money’s not going to solve the actual structural racism” – and therein lies the rub. This is the classic victimhood double-shuffle: we want help, but not as much as we want to be ‘oppressed’.

There is an old saying Sir Lenny would be advised to remember: charity begins at home. Whenever and wherever he spies injustice, perhaps, like other multimillionaires, he might consider putting his hand in his own pocket, before he demands the right to pick the taxpayer’s.

Frank Haviland is the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West and The Frank Report, which you should probably subscribe to.

This piece was first published in The European Conservative and is reproduced by kind permission.

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(Photograph: Dudley Council, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

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