The private press has always relied on advertising for its very existence. This was what allowed the earliest newspapers to become independent of individual aristocratic owners. Advertising brought about the freedom of the press.
I wasn't surprised then to see that the last two words of last week's London Calling ("boycott Nestl�") were omitted from the final copy. My reflex action was that the words had been censored for commercial reasons. I may be paranoid but I suspect it was too sharp a call to action. It reminded me of the time I went for a job interview at the UK Guardian as an advertising researcher and they asked me whether I thought the organisation should refuse any form of advertising. Nestl�, I replied, and was met by a stunned silence. It was an early introduction to the power of the client in the so-called free press.
In the last couple of months I have written articles sponsored by a multinational electricity and gas supplier and a tobacco giant. The ethics of both are murky, but without sponsors the articles would not have been commissioned.
Journalists don't live in bondage–unless they work for a local rag wringing three stories a day out of reporters in a town where nothing ever happens–we can choose not to work for unethical employers if we want to.
Last week in Jamaica, Portia Simpson-Miller spoke up for the "employees" of unethical employers who were enslaved for two centuries on the plantations of that island by British slave owners. She was summarily and, to quote Danny Glover, "ignorantly" dismissed by British PM David Cameron, whose own ancestor General Sir James Duff–the son of Cameron's great-grand-uncle, the second Earl of Fife–received �3m in compensation when his 202 slaves were freed from the Grange Sugar Estate in Jamaica.
Cameron was not alone in being compensated. In total, the British government paid �17bn to slave owners as part of the agreement to abolish slavery. Ancestors of Graham Greene and George Orwell were among them. Lloyds, Barclays, Barings and HSBC bank as well as the Bank of England and Church of England were also profiteers from slavery. If you want to check your family history to see if the name you carry was once the family name of slave owners, you can do it by searching the database University College London has set up using the original archives of the slave records at the Web site www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs
The British Empire and its continuing legacies were largely built on slavery. As the Cambridge University lecturer, Priyamvada Gopal, writing in the New Statesmen in April 2014 put it: "The Industrial Revolution would have been impossible without the wealth generated by slave labour. Britain's major ports, cities and canals were built on invested slave money," as were hundreds of Britain's great houses.
Cameron, the conceited Old Etonian, offered Jamaica a new prison as some kind of pay-off. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn on the other hand suggested the more appropriate idea of increased trade and investment to assist Jamaica's beleaguered economy which never really recovered from the ravages of the sugar trade and its demise after independence.
When I interviewed historian Prof Bridget Brereton in 2013, she told the T&T Guardian there is a "very compelling moral and legal case for Britain and other countries to pay reparations for slavery," but noted: "The difficulty will be conceptualising how reparations should be made."
Ralph Gonsalves, the Vincentian PM wants a development fund rather than payments to the descendents of victims.
Khafra Kambon, of the Emancipation Support Committee said each Caricom country had appointed its own reparation committee and that the format of reparations was still to be worked out, "The critical thing is that people accept reparations in principle and that we get our society to understand why it is necessary. Not just the cruelty... That period reshaped the world in terms of economic power, psychology and in human and material terms."
Kambon says the reparations to Jewish people after the Holocaust–including the creation of the state of Israel–is a precedent.
On the streets of Paris, you see poignant reminders of the legacy of slavery every day in the African nannies pushing the strollers of young, white blonde-haired children. It's a compelling sight, sweet yet also troubling. In Britain, nannies are Polish, Swedish or French. In Paris they are exclusively African.
Last weekend we went to visit the vast sprawling chateau and gardens of the Palace of Versailles. Halfway around, we stopped suddenly, alerted by a black face in one of the grand paintings on the wall, Robert Hubert's Vue du bosquet des Bains d'Apollon, painted in 1775.
"Should we have paid to come here, given all the reparations talk?" we wondered aloud. "France wasn't as bad as Britain was it?" we scraped the barrel, knowing full well that France was made rich by Haiti and that Haiti is now 165th out of 184 in the league table of the world's richest and poorest countries.