Paid for their own freedom

The room

Second question, same video: was the government doing anything to stop racism? I answered with a tax receipt.

In 1835 Britain borrowed the money to compensate slave owners for the loss of their property — the owners, not the enslaved — and the country kept servicing that debt until the last of it was redeemed in 2015. The Treasury said so itself in 2018, as a Friday fact, and then deleted the post. So I said it the only way it can be said: Black people in this country have paid, through their taxes, for their own freedom. And it’s embarrassing.

The point was never the sum. It was the direction the money flowed: in 1835 to the people who had owned human beings, and for a hundred and eighty years afterwards out of the pockets of everyone who paid tax here — including the descendants of the people who were owned. It stopped six years before I said this on camera.

On 1 September 2026 I wrote it down with the footnotes attached — the loan, the Treasury’s own words, and the honest caveat that nobody can now say exactly how much was still outstanding at the end. I called it a freedom we have paid for and not yet received. The tape is where the idea was first said out loud.