Is there really slavery in the UK?

I was reading about a report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) today that talked of contemporary slavery in the UK. According to the report, slavery still exists in this country, two centuries after the trade is slaves was banned.

For the report’s authors, “all forms [of slavery] share elements of the exploitative relationship which have historically constituted slavery: severe economic exploitation; the lack of a human rights framework; and control by one person over another through the prospect or reality of violence.”

There is no doubt that the above conditions do exist within the UK – particularly, but not solely, in the areas of people trafficking and work-gangs – and such egregious practices should be vigorously stamped out by the government.

But I am not clear that these three conditions alone justify the label “slavery”. Leave aside for a moment elements of the report that seem to imply that a combination of low wages, illegal management practices and a fear of loss of employment constitutes slavery. To my mind, there is a fourth key ingredient to slavery that marks it out from other forms of enforced servitude. It is the common thread that links together the slave owning states of Greece, Rome, the early modern European monarchies and many pre-civil war American states. It is legitimacy.

This is implicitly recognised in the 1926 Slavery Convention, which defines slavery as “… the status and/or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised” (my emphasis). The fundamental difference between the Roman Servus, the Viking Thrall and the Georgia cotton-picker on the one hand, and the trafficked Latvian factory worker or Cambodian prostitute on the other is that the former were owned by their masters as legal property. The owner was free to do with them as they wished – not merely de facto, but de jure. The slaves could hope for no help from the state. Until the Age of the Emperor Claudius, it was entirely legal for a Roman citizen to kill his or her slaves; in the plantations of the West Indies, slaves were whipped until the flesh came away from their bodies.

By comparrison, the modern “slavery” that is described (and decried) by the JRF, among others, is an entirely illegal practice. In this sense, it is no different from any other form of coercion. It differs only in duration from being forced to do something at knifepoint by a robber or a rapist. It is more akin to kidnapping, assault (real or threatened) and various other illegal practices, including paying below the minimum wage, illegally deducting wages, threatening to withdraw employment or accomodation without notice, and so on. All these are wrong and many of them are wicked, but they do not in themselves constitute slavery.

Perhaps the key point is that if the trafficked sex-worker were to approach a policeman and ask for help, she would be protected and her tormenters jailed. The same could not be said for a Greek σκλάβος.

One might argue that this does not matter. The use of the term “slavery” is a deliberately emotive gesture to focus our attention on what are, nonetheless, terrible crimes. If fewer people are trafficked and fewer labourers bonded, then it is a good thing. Furthermore, language is commonly evolving (“nice” used to mean wanton and dissolute, while one would be wary of using “gay” to describe any old happy and joyful state of being), and as legal ownership of people does not exist anymore, it is reasonable to shift the definition to where it is most useful.

I find this unsatisfactory, however. Partly this is because it remains useful to have a term that specifically defines the legal status of ownership of another human being. But it is also because slavery does still exist in its traditional sense. There are still societies where people can be legally owned, or at least where they can to all intents and purposes. In Burma, for example, tens of thousands of forced labourers work on road-building for the military junta; in southern Sudan there are slave markets openly selling captives. Whether the right to own another human being is written in the statute books is irrelevant (purists may disagree!). What matters is that the authorities not only turn a blind eye but actively uphold the process.

This is an intolerable abuse of liberty. It should be noted, therefore, that where the machinery of the state acts not to protect the liberty of individual but to help strip it away, the state can no longer be said to exist by the will of the people (having the consent of the majority of the people is not sufficient), and so can no longer be taken to be sovereign. We should not only treat such states as pariahs, but be willing to force them to comply with international norms and humanitarian principles – as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which proclaims (Article 4) that “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms”.

And what of our modern, British victims, from whom I would remove the title “slave”? The key is also in the question of legitimacy. Because they are not the legal property of their persecutors, their salvation lies not in manumission but in education and understanding.

As JRF notes with justifiable disapproval, “although the police see trafficked people as victims, the immigration service sees them as illegal entrants.” For my mind, they should at least be returned home with dignity, but we might even consider granting them (at least temporary) immigration status. There is of course moral hazard in allowing them to stay simply because they have been victims. Yet if the victims fear that the authorities will return them home – to a place from which they were clearly prepared to risk and suffer great hardship to escape – they may not come forward, which makes apprehending and prosecuting the perpetrators harder, and will therefore also exacerbate the illegal immigration problem.

While we are at it, we should make great efforts to convey to potential victims that they have rights in law that will be upheld, and that the authorities are sympathetic to their suffering and not in the pockets of their persecutors. I have often wondered why the authorities do not (perhaps they do!) distribute leaflets in many languages to prostitutes telling them that if they are being threatened, the police will help them and turn a blind eye to the fact that they have been prostituting themselves (which anyway is a victimless crime).

Where forced servitude is supported by the very authorities that should be stamping it out, we should use diplomatic (and, if necessary, not-so-diplomatic) pressure to see that it is eradicated. Where it is illegal, authorities should work with the victims to apprehend and prosecute the criminals responsible for their hardship. Whether or not we call it slavery, there is a great deal of suffering here and across the world.

The road-user pricing to serfdom

Gridlock is coming, is both a literal and a figurative sense, and only Douglas Alexander can save us. If that doesn't send a shiver down the spine (or perhaps send you off into peels of laughter), the alternative should cause you to break into a cold sweat.

The petition to “Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy” has now received over 1.4m signatures. It says something of the pace and popularity of this petition that the editorial in today’s Times referred to just 1.3m signatories. Like the proverbial snowball, this is gathering ever more size and momentum as it cascades downhill.

I have explained before that the thinking behind this petition is confused and wrong. At the time I also warned, in passing, that no government could ignore a petition that garnered more than 30m signatures: the majority would have spoken, and to deny it its head would be all but impossible. The question, however, is whether a government can even ignore one with 3m signatures, or (the imminent test) half that. The pressure is clearly great: how often have opponents of the war in Iraq – Liberal Democrats among them – argued that the government should have changed its policy when a million people marched through London on 15 February 2003. But where would such a policy lead us?

If just 3.5 per cent of the voting public – just 2.5 per cent of the population – can divert a democratically elected government from its course, is this a sign of direct democracy in action, or is the government caving into a well motivated and vocal minority. It strikes me as no surprise that millions of people object to this, or indeed any other, government scheme – especially one that involves taxation. Every change has winners and losers, and both winners and losers will be numbered in millions. The question should not be whether the losers bleat most loudly, but whether the overall social benefit is greater than the cost, and (for those of us of a liberal bent) whether the proposal represents an abuse of the minority by the majority. Where road-user pricing is concerned, it is clearly a case that the social benefit outweighs the cost without the minority being unduly coerced. The government (in the form Mr. Alexander) should continue to make the case for road-user pricing and face down the protest.

This move towards “Direct Democracy” is in fact a dangerous trend. There is a good reason why we practice an alternative, “Representative Democracy”. We cannot all be experts in every field; decision-making is a full time business, and few of us have read the parliamentary committee reports, research institute papers and academic studies that underlie much of the decision making of government. Government also needs to be strategic, whereas the will of the majority (an amorphous body, constantly in flux, the make-up of which is constantly changing as it coalesces around new ideas and opinions) is momentary and fickle, precisely because the majority has no permanence.

More sinisterly, it can be anti-democratic. As both public choice theory and the petition about road-user pricing tell us, it is easier for minorities to mobilise than for majorities. Because minorities are smaller, they are easier to pull together, while the benefits of successful lobbying are shared less widely, so for any individual the spread between cost and benefit is closer than for a majority, where the benefits are spread broadly and the costs of mobilising high. This is why single-issues of dubious popularity often capture the media’s attention and bend governments to their will.

But if Direct Democracy lends itself to minorities, it lends itself to populist demagoguery even more. Caesar dominated Rome through plebiscites, a practice that was aped my Mussolini. To this day the German constitution bans federal referenda because they were the tools of Nazism.

And here I can see the real nightmare emerging. If the government backs down in the face of opposition form just a tiny fraction of the polity, it will set a trend that will lead to more than just motoring gridlock. Almost all important government policy is controversial, and all controversial policy will be paralysed by petitions and polls. A situation akin to that in Switzerland, where votes for women were blocked until 1973, or the United States, where differently-constituted majorities simultaneously try to cut taxes and increase public spending, would be the least of our fears. A government unable to legislate has a certain appeal to the libertarians among us, but it would undoubtedly be only the beginning.

As important and popular social and economic reform was stymied, and the government was rendered increasingly unable to respond to real problems, a new popular opinion would rise: that a strong government, a strong leader, was needed to push through change; to break the gridlock. We have seen it before. Popular frustration leads to the election of a strongman who offers to over-rule petty objections and push through progress. At first it is welcome, and the benefits are tangible: Hitler built the autobahns and Mussolini made the trains run on time; no need for road-user pricing when you have slave labour and threaten to shoot the train drivers! The benefits of today are paid for tomorrow, as freedom is lost and democracy forgotten. It is the road to serfdom.

British government timorous in the face of death

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Labour government has no sense of principle or decency. Nevertheless, I am saddened to read that British diplomats have been ordered to torpedo plans in Europe to propose the abolition of the death penalty to the UN General Assembly.

That it would have been an example of gesture politics is without doubt. There is no likelihood that the General Assembly, where unanimity is required, would have passed such a motion. The death penalty remains popular in much of the globe; tyrannical regimes use it as the ultimate deterrent against dissent; and nations without a Christian heritage have entirely different underlying views of punishment, retribution and the sanctity of human life.

It is also true that the proposal has more to do with Romano Prodi’s efforts to shore up his fragile coalition than it does with evangelical zeal.

Yet neither of these are reasons not to promote our values abroad. While we may question the right of nations to dictate to one another by what standards they should live, spreading our beliefs by peaceful means is both a right and an inevitable consequence of interaction. There is an ocean of difference between the work of missionaries and that of conquistadors (to wit, the Atlantic!).

Slavery had a longer history in Africa and the Middle East than it did in Britain and America, but was largely stamped out when Britain and later America banned the practice (though even today there are thriving slave markets in Southern Sudan, among other places). And by-and-large, action on the international stage may be legitimised by international law or natural justice, but it is fuelled by the private interests of the actors: the efforts by 34 countries to liberate Kuwait in 1991 were no less justified because selfish interests motivated their involvement.

The case against the death penalty is strong, and we should consider it a duty to share that case with our neighbours. Admittedly, last month I sounded a note of caution around the time of the execution of Saddam Hussein. I argued that the moment when a nation emerging from tyranny executes its tormentor is not the best time to lecture them on the limitations of the state – the state did not appear very limited under Hussein! As Shami Chakrabarti has commented (in a different context), just because one has a right to say something does not mean one always should.

It does not follow, however, that because there are times when one would be wise not to hector a particular nation, one should hesitate to make a general point to a wide audience. It will always be a difficult moment for somebody. There is in fact a rather pusillanimous air to the government’s reluctance to bring this proposal to the General Assembly on the grounds that it might create difficulties for the Americans.

Britain should welcome an opportunity to advocate, along with our European partners, a noble cause. Sadly, the present government is suffering from a peculiar form of self-censorship: afraid to upset the American administration despite there being no indication from America that they do, in fact, object.

Anyway, the government should not be shaping its foreign policy purely on the basis of American opinion. As I have argued before, a true friend is one that tells you when you are wrong; we will not be doing either the United States or any other country a favour if we keep our counsel to ourselves because of concern that the truth might hurt. This takes courage, however, as well as honesty. Neither of these are virtues associated with the Labour government.