FRANK HAVILAND
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 13th 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.
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Frank Haviland is the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West and The Frank Report, which you should probably subscribe to.
This article (Sir Lenny Henry: Reparations ‘Only Way’ to Address Slavery) was created and published by The New Conservative and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Frank Haviland
See Related Article Below
Lenny Henry’s Calls for Slavery Reparations are the Most Insane Yet
A West that is confident in its identity, unapologetic about its heritage, and committed to the wellbeing of its people should not ever entertain calls for reparations
JOSH FERME
Alleged “comedian” Lenny Henry has come up with his best joke yet: that Britain should pay £18 trillion to black people living in Britain as reparation for slavery. He outlines this in a book, co-written with his long-term friend and media diversity campaigner Marcus Ryder, entitled The Big Payback.
Henry is best known for his association with Comic Relief and Premier Inn adverts, as opposed to his actual comedy, and his joke writing could clearly do with some work, as his demands are six times the size of the entire UK economy.
Economic ruination of the country aside, it is worth noting that most of Britain’s 2.4 million black residents are of recent African extraction, not descendants of slaves. In fact, it is possible that some of them could be descendants of the very people who enslaved those traded by Europeans in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the first place. Historians widely agree that the capture and sale of African slaves was largely carried out by Africans themselves. Europeans rarely ventured inland to seize captives directly.
Britain, by contrast, is known for its historic and unprecedented moral crusade against the practice of slavery globally, expending much blood and treasure to eradicate it. It is now a well-publicised fact that the loans drawn to pay for this venture were only paid off in 2015, meaning that most Britons have already contributed, through their taxes, to the cost of ending the slave trade.
What Henry is demanding would effectively be a vast transfer of wealth from people who never enslaved anyone to people who have never been slaves, or, in the vast majority of cases, whose ancestors were never enslaved by the British at any point in history. Henry argues that black people living in Britain today may not be the descendants of slavery but they suffer from the legacy of slavery as he believed that “modern racism is rooted in the slave trade”. One need only look at how East Asians view Sub-Saharan Africans, despite never participating in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, to dismiss this view out of hand.
Henry’s demand is not unique; it is part of a broader trend. Calls for reparations have become fashionable across the West, particularly in the United States, where activists insist that modern taxpayers must atone for sins committed centuries before they were born. The same rhetoric is now echoed in Britain, despite the fact that Britain not only abolished slavery earlier than most but also spent enormous sums and countless lives stamping it out across the world.
Curiously, none of the loudest voices calling for reparations ever mention the Arab slave trade, which predated and outlasted the transatlantic trade by centuries. Millions of Africans were captured and transported across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean, with some historians estimating the death toll to be higher than that of the Atlantic trade. Yet there are no demands for reparations from the Middle East, no campaigns for apologies from Arab states, and no bestselling books calling for compensation from oil-rich Gulf nations. The selective outrage suggests that the issue is less about justice and more about both ideology and extracting wealth. Reparations are only demanded where there is perceived Western guilt to exploit.
Even today, linguistic traces of this historic practice remain. In Arabic, the word “abd” means both “black person” and “slave”, a reminder of how deeply servitude was bound to skin colour in those societies. Yet this reality receives almost no attention from the Western commentariat or diversity activists who claim to speak for “black dignity”. It’s as if acknowledging the full, global history of slavery would complicate the narrative of uniquely Western guilt. That, apparently, is rather inconvenient.
The hypocrisy becomes even harder to ignore when one remembers that open slave markets still exist in parts of North Africa today. As recently as 2017, footage emerged showing black Africans being sold in Libya for as little as a few hundred dollars. Where were Lenny Henry and his co-author then?
According to the Global Slavery Index, there are currently an estimated 50 million people trapped in forced labour or human trafficking around the world. There are more slaves today than at any point in history. Yet those calling for reparations seem uninterested in these living victims. Theirs is not a campaign against slavery itself, but a campaign to monetise ancestral guilt. The moral energy that could be directed toward ending real slavery is instead spent on imaginary debts and performative offence.
Reparations politics has become a lucrative business. There is status, funding, and influence to be gained from perpetual victimhood. It is a kind of moral currency in a culture that rewards grievance, victimhood and, ultimately, weakness. Figures like Henry present themselves as spokesmen for the oppressed, but in reality they are extracting resources not from oppressors, but from ordinary citizens who had no part in the crimes they denounce. This is not justice; it is using the language of morality as a form of blackmail. The more society indulges it, the more we entrench a culture in which outrage is profitable, and victimhood is a form of capital.
This selectiveness can be explained by the fact that the West is currently, in a general sense, undergoing a period of moral insecurity and uncertainty. This vulnerability has been exploited. Campaigns that promote diversity initiatives, special funding schemes, and a host of other advantages for non-natives residing in majority-white countries are rife. As the psychologists Ok, Wazlawek, and Plaks (2020) observed, some individuals strategically signal both virtue and victimhood to secure financial benefits from others. In other words, moral identity and perceived suffering can be leveraged as social currency to facilitate non-reciprocal resource transfer. The same research also noted the role of collective narcissism — where groups maintain an inflated sense of their own moral worth and entitlement to compensation, demanding recognition and reward as a cynical strategy to improve their own situation.
Within this framework, the modern reparations movement fits perfectly. It is not about redress, but about extracting advantage through moral coercion. The louder one proclaims historical victimhood, the more one can demand from those cast as oppressors, regardless of the facts of ancestry or responsibility. It is a cynical game, dressed in the language of justice, sustained by a culture that mistakes guilt for goodness and compensation for compassion.
Until Western societies rediscover the confidence to reject this emotional blackmail, the practice will continue. The reward for claiming grievance will always outweigh the reward for taking responsibility for one’s own successes or failures, and moral virtue will remain a resource to be mined rather than a principle to be lived by. We have a way of life we should be proud of. Even today, in deeply troubled times, the Western world is a beacon of light in a dark world. A bastion of civility, decency, and morality. We should not feel guilt for our past but pride that we have always been at the forefront of morality, philosophy, art, literature, music, technology, and the benchmark for all aspiring developing nations.
A West that is confident in its identity, unapologetic about its heritage, and committed to the wellbeing of its people will not even entertain calls for reparations. If we wish these calls to cease, as all reasonable people should, we need to strengthen these virtues in our civilization and within ourselves.
This article (LENNY HENRY’S CALLS FOR SLAVERY REPARATIONS ARE THE MOST INSANE YET) was created and published by Courage Media and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Josh Ferme
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