9 Sept 2026

Fraiser Is RIGHT

“I think it’s just a dodge”

By Steve Watson: During a recent interview, actor Kelsey Grammer roundly rejected the idea that people alive today should apologise or pay for slavery, asserting that he does not have to apologise for his grandparents, pointing out that America fought a war over the institution, and calling the demand for ‘reparations’ from later generations “a dodge.”

On Piers Morgan Uncensored, the topic came up and the Frasier star put it in plain terms.

“I don’t have to apologize for my parents. I don’t have to apologize for my grandparents,” Grammer said. “My grandparents were extraordinary people. They survived the Depression. They fought World War II. My grandfather was away from home for 28 months in the South Pacific. This is not a man who has to apologize for who he is.”

“He stood up for this country,” Grammer said, “even against his will.” The man “understood that this country was the best shot we have. We may fall short sometimes, but we aim high.”

He then asked questions the reparations industry never considers.

“Do the people who have ancestors who were killed in the Civil War owe reparations? Do the Italians who came after the Civil War owe money? Do the Irish who came through Ellis Island owe money?”

“We’re just going to throw more money and more money and more money at the fact that, yeah, there was a dark chapter in our past. But we fought a war over it. That did happen,” Grammer further stated, adding that the “I Have a Dream” speech now sounds, in too many mouths, like “I have a scheme.”

“I think it’s just a dodge,” grammar urged.

That dodge is now official business on both sides of the Atlantic.

Jamaica’s culture minister, Olivia Grange, is in London this week with a petition asking King Charles — still Jamaica’s head of state — to send three questions to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council: whether the enslavement of Africans in Jamaica was legal under English law, whether it broke international law, and whether Britain now has a legal duty to provide redress.

Grange has insisted the filing is “not focused on monetary value at this time.” Then she pointed straight at the cheque. “Up to 2015, Britain was paying the slave masters, because we were being considered property,” she said. “The question really should be: if in modern times we’re still paying back the slave masters… then why shouldn’t we be pursuing some remedy at this time?”

The 2015 date is real. After abolition in 1833, the Treasury paid about £20 million to registered owners — roughly 40 percent of annual government spending — and financed it with gilts. The last of those instruments was redeemed when the portfolio was modernised in 2015. Campaigners treat that as a taunt. It is also the receipt for the largest state-funded dismantling of slavery any European power ever undertook.

Buckingham Palace said Charles “has on many occasions expressed his personal and wholehearted commitment to promoting greater understanding around the issue of slavery and finding ways to address historic wrongs for the benefit of communities today.

The King has no personal say on whether the questions go to the court. The political point of the exercise is obvious: turn a moral campaign into a legal foothold, then talk about “next steps.”

Good Morning Britain put the same argument on air this morning. Journalist Nelufar Hedayat said British people should show “some humility” over what was done. Political commentator Albie Amankona said no one whose life was directly touched by slavery is still alive.

Four days earlier, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination told Britain it had not grovelled enough. Former slaving states, the committee said, have a moral and legal “obligation to repair.” 

Public spaces “should honour the contributions of people of African descent and clearly acknowledge the wrongs of those who supported or benefited from historical atrocities.” That can mean statues, artworks, memorials and “dedications.”

Schools, the same lawyers added, “must ensure that schoolbooks and curricula present accurate, unbiased accounts of transatlantic chattel slavery.” Leaders should “educate the public on the importance of reparatory justice.” States “must act early to prevent prejudice and address misinformation” — and reparations should include policies “eradicating xenophobia towards migrants.”

In other words: monuments, rewritten classrooms, official apologies, and a tighter leash on anyone who objects.

Historian Matt Goodwin boiled the demand down to one sentence: UN lawyers want “British people who never owned slaves and whose ancestors helped end the slave trade to pay people who were never slaves while ignoring the many millions of slaves in non-Western nations today.” His verdict: “jog on.”

Cambridge historian Professor Robert Tombs, founder of History Reclaim, called the campaign “sinister” and aimed at “censoring free discussion and imposing a certain view.” 

“Those who supported and benefitted included the predecessors of those who now demand reparations,” he said. An “accurate, unbiased” account “would mean paying tribute to those in Britain and elsewhere who struggled to end the Atlantic slave trade.” 

He added, “we hear a lot about how Britain paid compensation to White slave owners in its colonies, but I have rarely if ever heard public recognition of the money paid to black slave traders for the same reason.” His conclusion: “the whole thing is a huge financial and political scam.”

Professor Lawrence Goldman, emeritus fellow in History at St Peter’s College, Oxford, made the same point from another angle. “It’s ironic that the UN should be telling Britain what to do about slavery. It was in Britain more than 200 years ago that the anti-slavery movement started, and we then led in the fight to end slavery across the world in the Victorian era, long before the UN existed.” 

Rather than lecture “the leading anti-slavery nation about the past,” he said, “the UN should do something about slavery in the present. That’s its job.”

That job is the one the UN keeps declining. Descent-based slavery still exists in parts of the Sahel. The Arab and East African trades ran for centuries after Britain banned its own. The committee’s guidance barely glances at any of it. The target is always the same short list of Western capitals.

The fashionable story treats Britain and America as the authors of African slavery. The record is the opposite of that cartoon.

Parliament banned the British slave trade in 1807. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 then dismantled slavery across most of the empire, freeing more than 800,000 people in the Caribbean, the Cape and Mauritius. 

From 1808 the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron hunted slaving ships off the African coast. Over roughly half a century it seized around 1,600 vessels and freed some 150,000 Africans. Sailors died of fever in large numbers doing work no other great power was willing to fund at that scale.

Wilberforce, Clarkson, Sharp, Equiano and the Quaker networks did not wait for a UN working group. They built a mass movement inside a slave-trading country and won.

African brokers and kingdoms, meanwhile, captured and sold people into the Atlantic system for generations. That is not a talking point invented on talk radio. It is the part of the record the grievance industry treats as unmentionable.

As Tim Sargent wrote, Europeans did not invent African slavery. It was “an ancient and widespread African custom, established many centuries before Portuguese and Spanish sailors hesitantly began to explore the coasts of West Africa.”

When trade was possible, “what the local traders were keen to exchange for European products were other Africans who had been enslaved.” Some European sailors may have had doubts. “Not so the African traders, or the tribal chiefs who pocketed much of the proceeds.”

The trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean trades ran longer still. The Atlantic traffic lasted about four centuries. The African and Muslim trades ran for a millennium. None of that produces statues in London, petitions to the King, or lectures about “humility” on breakfast television.

Britain has already said no, in the language of law rather than sentiment. After a UN vote this year that branded the trade the “gravest crime against humanity” and pressed former slaving nations for apology and cash, London abstained. Ambassador James Kariuki said the UK “continues to disagree with fundamental propositions of the text.” 

The government’s line is blunt: there is “no duty to provide reparation for historical acts that were not, at the time those acts were committed, violations of international law.” 

U.K. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said paying the sums demanded “is not something that this Government will be doing.” Opposition leader Kemi Badenoch has called the arguments a “scam.”

Figures floated by campaign lawyers still run to the grotesque — more than £18 trillion in one UN-adjacent estimate, several times the size of the UK economy. That is not justice. It is a shakedown with a curriculum attached.

The modern ritual requires the West to aim low: to apologise in perpetuity, to rewrite the schoolbook so that abolition becomes a footnote, to treat the Royal Navy’s dead as an awkward detail, and to pretend African kingdoms were bystanders while European ships did all the hunting.

The Americans who died to break the Confederacy are written out. The Irish and Italians who arrived after Appomattox are told they still owe, while the African trader who sold the captives is airbrushed into a victim of “colonialism.”

If “reparatory justice” means statues, speech codes and a claim on the Treasury of people who were never there, it is not justice. It is a political machine that needs the wounds of the past to remain open in order to profit from them.

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