Now Ed Miliband piles into slavery row – this virtue-signalling fool just made it worse

This is actually a serious subject, so I’ll start with the serious bit. Slavery is an abomination. Snatching fellow human beings from their families and working them to death for your own financial gain is as low as it gets. In ancient times, it was endemic. The Romans did it. The Greeks did it. The Vikings did it. The Egyptians, Persians, Arabs and Africans did it, and in parts of the world some people still do. The Americans did an awful lot of it until relatively recently. So did the Europeans, and yes, so did we.

We traded slaves for almost 250 years, and we can’t claim that was okay just because it was the done thing. Plenty of our fellow countrymen thought it was an abomination, including William Wilberforce, who fought for two decades to get it banned. After 1807, we sent the Royal Navy after the slavers of the world and helped stamp out the trade. Nobody did that before. We should be proud. But for a while, we were up to our necks in it. And it wasn’t good.

This has fuelled growing demands for reparations, with campaigners putting the bill at anything up to £20trillion. Our economy is just £3trillion a year, so I’m not sure how they expect us to find the money. Perhaps we can pay in instalments over the next few centuries. They’ll no doubt try to take us to court. Which is madness. We can’t relitigate history, or we’d end up in an excruciating debate over whether descendants of the Romans should compensate us for invading ancient Britain, or whether we should pay them for the roads.

It was always going to cast a shadow over King Charles’s Royal tour. Former PM Tony Blair tried to put the whole thing to bed in 2006, expressing “deep sorrow and regret” over Britain’s involvement, while stopping short of a full apology. It wasn’t enough.

Now Andy Burnham stepped up, burbling on about offering a formal apology. But what use is that? He’s never owned slaves. No Briton alive has held slaves. The guilty parties are long dead. Which makes a formal apology completely insincere and in practical terms, totally useless. Like Blair’s non-apology, Burnham’s won’t be enough either.

Campaigners at Caricom want debt relief, investment in health and education, cultural restoration and other measures. We have close historical links to the Caribbean and could do more to help. But they also want financial compensation and we can’t do that. Chancellor John Healey cut his fiscal headroom to just £15billion last week. We’re a few trillion short.

Even if we did, any payment would disappoint and simply invite further demands. Once you establish the principle that people should pay for misdemeanours committed hundreds of years ago, there will be no end to it.

Which makes Burnham’s suggestion of a formal apology empty virtue signalling. Naturally, foreign secretary Ed Miliband liked the sound of that. As energy secretary, he based our policy on that exact principle and left us with some of the highest bills in the world. Today, he’s been publicly beating himself up about “difficult chapters in our past” and the need to discuss whether an apology might help “heal the division”.

To be fair, he also said financial reparations are not the “right or feasible answer to transatlantic slavery”. That may be the first sensible thing he’s said since entering politics. But in that case, an apology, formal or otherwise, amounts to the same thing: nothing.

Here’s the reality. If we’re not going to pay compensation – and we’re not – no amount of word salad will do the job. We can’t undo historical slavery, but we can avoid looking like blustering hypocrites in the here and now.

Britain has enough problems. If we’re going to wring our hands over historical events we can’t change, we’ll never get anything done. But that won’t stop this clownish government trying.