Andy Burnham, the current British Prime Minister, has published a piece this morning in The Guardian which evolves the way that the British state has tried to deal with the ‘difficult past’ that the United Kingdom’s prominent role in slavery and slave trading represents. It is interesting on so many levels but ultimately disappointing, and more an evasion than an opening-up of possibility, it seems to me.

It is important to see shifts taking place at the leadership level of the British state and it will be interesting to see how this plays out. This could be the beginning of something important.

It is also instructive to explore ‘uses of the past’ that this statement of position makes and to consider how aspects of the past and its legacies are selected and deployed to try and manage the legacies of those pasts and shape futures.

Burnham seems to want to foreground, claim and use some facets of this past and they figure prominently in his ‘history-making’ here: British abolitionism has an important ideological / cultural / moral legacy, he wants to say, and he wants it to be consciously carried forward into the future.

He doesn’t, however, acknowledge British abolition’s limitations (the ‘apprenticeship’ and indentured labour systems that followed it, the one-sided compensation for slave owners only – something we finished paying off only in 1815 – the violence that the plantocracy continued to inflict on the ‘emancipated’, for example during and after the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 – and so on).

He also has nothing to say about abolition’s many forms and actors, and his account ignores the role of the resistance of enslaved peoples – from the Haitian revolution (1791-1804) to the Christmas Rising of 1831 – in driving change where British and European abolitionists had failed to achieve it.

There is denialism here as well as a rhetoric of acknowledgement and responsibility. Of course British people now are not morally responsible for past actions of dead people – they neither ‘did’ or ‘intended‘ them. However, the United Kingdom and its institutions and peoples have benefitted and continue to benefit from the economic legacies of slavery and the slave trade, just as the countries whose resources and people were exploited to enable aspects of British capital accumulation during the Industrial Revolution still suffer the cumulative consequences of the exploitation that Britain’s wealth-accumulators inflicted on them. The world also continues to feel the effects and the presence of the racist ideologies the British and others elaborated to justify their dehumanisation and exploitation of enslaved Africans in the long centuries of enslavement. These things are not simply and not only pasts. They have shaped and they continue to shape presents and futures.

Talk about apology for past actions that is (1) selective about which legacies of the past are acknowledged, (2) that silences and thus in effect denies some of the most enduring ways in which that past lives on in our present, (3) that ignores the agency of enslaved people in emancipating themselves, whilst (4) seeking to find national self-affirmation whilst apologising cannot really be described as honest talk. It is hard to see how this strategy can help shape a fairer future if it stops here.

Perhaps, this evolution in the British state’s position is the beginning of a process and one that will lead to further and more significant change. That it is a change – compared, say, to how the Home Office has dealt with these issues in the past – however, does offer some hope.