UK brewer Greene King to make slave trade reparations
United Kingdom | The past has caught up with Greene King, a large pub chain and brewer. Addressing its founder’s role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, it will make payments to benefit BAME (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic) communities.
The news, first reported by The Telegraph newspaper on 18 June 2020, comes as people, incensed by the killing of an African American in Minnesota, demand that the UK recognise the ongoing legacy of the British empire’s role in the enslavement of millions of Africans.
What has outraged some people is the fact that in order to win support for the abolition of slavery in the British empire in 1833, the government offered to pay compensation to the 47,000 British slaveholders, but not to the enslaved people.
Greene King’s 18th century founder implicated
Benjamin Greene (1780–1860), who founded the brewery in 1799, held at least 231 human beings in slavery, and was given GBP 500,000 at today’s rate when he surrendered rights to plantations in Montserrat and Saint Kitts in the Caribbean, The Guardian newspaper says.
Greene King was given its current name after a merger in 1887. With over 2700 pubs and hotels, the listed firm is one of the largest beer and pub chains in the UK. In October 2019 it agreed to be sold to Hong Kong investment firm CK Assets, in a transaction valued at GBP 4.6 billion (USD 5.7 billion).
It is on record
The controversy over Britain’s involvement in slavery has been raging for almost a decade, ever since researchers at University College London began putting together a list of the recipients of the compensations.
The issue briefly boiled over in 2015, when a tweet by some member of the UK’s Treasury revealed that British taxpayers had just finished “paying off” the debt, which the British government incurred in order to compensate British slave owners. In 1833, it had to borrow GBP 20 million, which amounted to 40 percent of the Treasury’s annual income or about 5 percent of British GDP. The loan was one of the largest in history. This was reported by the website taxjustice.net.
Nick MacKenzie, Greene King’s CEO, promised that the firm will make a “substantial investment” (no figures given) to benefit the BAME communities and support race diversity in its business. He added that the firm now employs people “across the UK from all backgrounds”, adding that “racism and discrimination have no place at Greene King”.
