I think that the BBC and IIV often put on a really good programme on Monday evenings, perhaps to help to sustain one through the week. The BBC are offering a series presented by the historian David Olusoga on the origins and history of the slave trade and although elements of this history are starting to percolate throughout the British consciousness, the programme reveals of lot of recent research into this subject matter. Depending on whether you are looking for those who owned plantations or those who financed the transport ships, there are two major databases available (1) The Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Database. If you mean the directory of people who owned enslaved people at the time of abolition, University College London (UCL) launched the Legacies of British Slave-ownership database. It documents over 40,000 slave owners who claimed financial compensation when slavery was abolished in 1833. (2) The Register of British Slave Traders: If you are referring to a more recent project tracking those who financed the ships, the Register of British Slave Traders launched online in September 2026. This comprehensive, three-year research project details 13,000 individuals who invested in transatlantic trafficking between 1563 and 1807. So evidently, the TV series has been launched alongside the release of the latest online database. I think we already knew that the ports of Bristol and Liverpool were largely financed by the profits from the slave trade and the Triangular Trade (manufactured goods to Africa, slaves from the West Coast of Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean, sugar and molasses to Liverpool) In the days when I taught students in higher education, I used to inform them about the Triangular Trade (from which Britain profited on each leg) and I cannot recall a single student who had ever been taught about it in schools. One trusts that this will now change but the British are quite adept at concealing some of the more shameful parts of our island history. The programme last night revealed what I suppose was obvious is that the enormous profits generated from the slave trade were not only invested in properties in Bristol and Liverpool but also in infrastructure that helped to fuel the Industrial Revolution such as the financing of the Leeds to Liverpool canal. It is no accident that the sugar trade was based in the Liverpool area but neither founder of Tate & Lyle owned slaves or ran businesses during the era of legal slavery, but their companies were built on a sugar industry shaped by it. Turning to more domestic matters, there is a great deal of speculation as to the content of Any Burnham’s first speech to the Labour party conference as Prime Minister. In particular, there is a frenzy of speculation that Burnham may well be announcing the end of the triple lock on public pensions to help to finance social care. But there is an argument that the triple lock has served its purpose and the state pension triple lock has successfully eliminated mass pensioner poverty, but it has created severe fiscal unsustainability and intergenerational unfairness, leading experts to argue it has outlived its original design. UK workers have been experiencing unprecedented falls in real wages and living standards. Taking a balanced view of the available data suggests that since 2008 real weekly wages have fallen by around 8 per cent, which amounts to a fall in annual earnings of about £2000 for the typical (median) worker. So the parents in the population who are pensioners have done better in recent year than their sons and daughters who are still in employment.
After I returned home, I made myself a fairly quick meal of a prawn omelette supplemented with some petit pois and this is fairly typical on one of my Pilates’ days as it can be thrown together quite quickly. Turning on the TV, I heard most of the conference speech given by Andy Burnham and in it, I believe that he has actually pulled off a major political coup. Instead of pieties, he announced the end of the triple lock on pensioner’s incomes in the next Parliament, replacing the triple lock with a double lock of either 2.5% or the rise in inflation but dropping the third part of the triple lock which was the rise in average wages. This was a very bold move and no political party, particularly the Conservatives, would have dared to have done such a thing as they rely so heavily upon the pensioner vote. But to have got the new policy greeted with a degree of adulation by the Labour party in conference was no mean feat and Andy Burnham, in a supremely emotional speech, was able to announce that the end ending of the triple lock would help to fund the creation of a National Care Service along the lines of the NHS. I happen to believe that this has been very clever politics because it shows that the Labour party can propose the creation of a National Care Service postponed by politicians for decades, indicate some of the ways it can be financed by the ending of the triple lock and even reassure the bond markets in a perverse way that a Labour Prime Minister would not be averse to taking difficult decisions. At the same time, there were announcements of a greater state involvement (not outright nationalisation) in the ways in which our energy and water markets are organised. Again, the water industry is so discredited since its privatisation that even the Tories seem hard put to defend it. There is no doubt that there will be difficult arguments ahead, not least over the ending of the triple lock, but most neutral economists were of the view that the triple lock is in its present form was unsustainable in any case. It will be fascinating to observe the stance of the newspapers when they are published tomorrow and even the views of the ‘middle ground’ insofar as it is captured in programmes like ‘Question Time‘ broadcast on Thursday evenings. I think it is fair comment to say that Andy Burnham has given the Labour party reasons to be hopeful and there are other parts of his speech which might be termed ‘brave’ such as a commitment to establish a national commission on electoral reform. Debate over the system has intensified since Labour amassed a huge parliamentary majority with a 34% vote share in 2024. Around 100 Labour MPs recently supported a parliamentary amendment in favour of setting up a commission to examine alternative options, a move Burnham himself supported last year when mayor of Greater Manchester. In his speech Burnham told delegates: ‘We will all have failed in our public duties if we carry on as we are and open the door of No 10 to a divisive government on less 30% of the vote or less.’