The government paid out £20 million to 3,000 slave-owners (worth around £2,300,000,000 in today’s money) whilst around 800,000 slaves received a pat on the back and a ‘go on then, off you fuck’, which you’d have difficulty trading for food. £20 million at the time, to put it lightly, was a buttload of money. The government borrowed this money (40 per cent of their national budget) to pay off slave owners, and we paid it off only 182 years later in 2015.
