Miliband vows slavery apology will not cost UK taxpayers

Ed Miliband has a blunt message for anyone worried that saying sorry for slavery will come with a bill: it won't. The foreign secretary insisted the government's willingness to consider a formal apology for Britain's role in the transatlantic slave trade will not mean higher costs for UK taxpayers. He made the case on the BBC's Newscast podcast.

Miliband aimed fire at past administrations, saying they preferred to sweep the pain and consequences of slavery under the carpet. His exhibit A: Sir Tony Blair's remarks nearly two decades ago. Miliband described it as a kind of sorry-not-sorry moment, where sorrow was expressed, an apology followed, and then Number 10 walked it back. That episode still gets dragged up, Miliband said, and it surfaced again recently in a conversation between Andy Burnham and Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley.

He also said he and Burnham inherited a fresher mess from the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Samoa two years ago. In diplomatic speak, Miliband said, it turned into a verbal punch up over the whole issue. The subject has been hanging around the Commonwealth for roughly 20 years, he added, and it has only grown.

Now Burnham says the government is open to formally apologising. Ministers are kicking off what they call a structured dialogue with affected countries, with the expectation the apology could land around November 2027, when the prime minister hosts the G20 Summit of world leaders in Manchester.

Miliband rejected the idea that apologising looks weak. He said fragile, weak countries can't face up to their past, and that being proud of Britain means being willing to confront things you didn't personally do. He has asked for a historical digest of the UK's involvement in the trade, and described reading about it as harrowing: more than three million people shipped with the British state's complicity over a couple of centuries, hundreds of thousands of whom died before arriving.

The hope in government is that dealing with the apology head-on creates space for the Commonwealth to finally turn its attention to other things.