They're demanding reparations from the royal family, not the british empire. Apparently, they can trace financial benefits from the 1700s to King Charles III.

Your proposed defense is basically that the practice of theft has been discontinued and that others were also thieves at that time.

This is just ridicolous. The british royal family was massively involved in the slave trade.

Also claiming the british empire was the first "major world power to abolish slavery" is rich, given that the empire became a world power because of slavery and genocidal colonization. Also it nicely ignores, that the british were still well involved in slave trade outside the mainland. A slave trade that was also genocidal, as hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans died even before reaching America.

But British people skewing and denieing their history of slavery, genocide, robbery and brutal opression is typical. I hope the fallout of Brexit finally gets them off their high horse and onto the ground of reality.

Are you fucking serious? You really can't be that fucking daft.

The debts incurred by the British Empire from buying the slave’s freedom

Yo, what the actual fuck!? This is literally what the claim is. The British government paid back all the slave owners for their loss of human property. Meanwhile, the slaves themselves were kidnapped, tortured, raped, stripped of their language, their religion, their culture, their history, their dignity, their family, their children, their labor, their sanity, their liberty, and they get worse than nothing. They get "liberated" into a legal regime that explicitly denies them the same rights as everyone else, a legal regime that assume everyone is starting on even footing with equal opportunity, a legal regime that refuses to prosecute crimes against black people, and a legal regime that commits crimes against black people.

Trillions of dollars were appropriated through slave labor. Trillions more were extracted directly from the African continent. And you want black people to be happy that Britain thought slave owners should get reparations for their loss of human property but that slaves don't deserve reparations?

You are fucking disgusting.

The British started half-heartedly "fighting the slave trade" as a calculated political/economic move after losing their biggest slave colony, the USA. For 200 years slavery built their empire, then they decided that depriving their rivals of more slaves was more beneficial. Literally nothing about this was "moral". They still maintained hundreds of thousands of slaves in their own colonies, such as in the Caribbean. "Fighting the slave trade" actually just meant not letting their competitors, the Spanish, Americans, and French, import more of them.

The slaves the British lost in the USA were replaced with workers in India who for all practical intents and purposes were practically enslaved. Without Indian workers to replace their lost American slaves, Britain never would have "abolished" the slave trade.

The biggest opponent to the abolition of the slave trade was the royalty of Lagos,

My man never heard about the USA? They had a civil war about it, made the news at the time. ( Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and international...)