Petition to Repeal the Slave Compensation Act of 1837.

The Slave Compensation Act 1837 was an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom, signed into law on 23 December 1837.

After decades of campaigning, the Slavery Abolition Act had been passed in 1833. The plantation owners in the Caribbean, represented by the London Society of West India Planters and Merchants (now the West India Committee), had opposed abolition. This Act paid substantial money to the former slave owners, but nothing to the newly liberated people.

The Act empowered the Commissioners for the Reduction of the National Debt, under the direction of the Treasury, to either pay the compensation that was still owing to slave owners out of the West India Compensation Account, or to transfer a proportionate amount of 3½% government annuities.

Slave owners were paid approximately £20 million (that is the equivalent of £150 billion in today’s terms) in compensation in over 40,000 awards for enslaved people freed in the colonies of the Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape of Good Hope according to a government census that named all owners as of 1 August 1834. We (as UK taxpayers) finally finished paying off this compensation debt in 2015 after 181 years.

Let’s petition parliament to repeal the act and get the beneficiaries to repay £150 billion as reparations to the Caribbean nations, even if it takes 181 years!