NEWS that the family of Victorian-era prime minister William Gladstone will travel to Guyana, South America to issue an apology for the part played by their ancestor in the slave trade is to be welcomed.

Charlie Gladstone will reportedly travel with five other family members to make an apology for what he himself describes as a “crime against humanity” committed by his ancestor John Gladstone.

They are also, it seems, intending to pay reparations to fund further research into the impact of slavery.

I will return later to the vexed (for some) issue of what reparations might look like and who should get it.

John Gladstone was a Scottish merchant who made a fortune as a Demerara sugar planter and had hundreds of enslaved people working in plantations in the decade before emancipation.

After the abolition of slavery in 1833, he received the largest compensation payment made by the ridiculous Slave Compensation Commission which compensated slave owners for the crime of slavery rather than giving money to slaves or the descendants of enslaved people.

He received around £93,000, which is the modern equivalent of about £10 million.

In 1831, William Gladstone, who was Liberal prime minister on four occasions in the 19th century, used his first Commons speech to argue in favour of compensation for slave owners including, of course, his own family.

It barely needs me to relate the disgust I feel over not just the compensation paid to the Gladstones for the so-called loss of “property” but also the fact that someone who was going to directly benefit from the payment was able to stand up and argue for the taxpayer to give him their money.

Of course, he would not have been alone. I understand that scores of MPs and members of the unelected House of Lords also benefited financially from the decision they took to outlaw slavery.

Having paid themselves and their slaveholding mates thousands of pounds they then instituted an “apprenticeship” system to extend the bondage of Africans to continue to work the still lucrative plantations.

While Charlie Gladstone told the Observer newspaper that his slave-owning ancestor was “a vile man” who was “greedy and domineering” it would be a huge mistake to believe that the institution of slavery was just a case of the further enrichment of an already hugely rich set of families.

The institution of slavery was the biggest business of its day and was carried out by firms that served as the vehicle from which those families were able to accumulate immense wealth on the backs of enslaved Africans.

The major world powers largely followed the same template of creating “front” companies to carry out their business of human bondage.

The German slave business was run through their very own Africa Company while the Portuguese, who it should be remembered enslaved by far the most Africans, mostly in Brazil, ran the Company of Guinea to be their particular gangster operation.

The French ran the Company of Senegal while the Dutch did their wicked business through the Company of the West Indies.

The British followed the same path with the Royal Africa Company (RAC) which was set up by the royal family in 1662 in collaboration with the City of London to trade along the West African coast.

The royal family firm was given a monopoly on all trade with Africa and the enslavement of Africans was by far its largest trading line.

The British, like all their other fellow slave trading nations, saw the trade in Africans as nothing more than a means of being able to abstract the resources needed to enrich their nations.

Africans simply didn’t count as human beings to any of them.

In the 1680s, the RAC was transporting about 5,000 enslaved people a year primarily across the sacred burial grounds commonly known as the Atlantic Ocean to the immensely profitable Caribbean islands.

According to records, between 1672 and 1731, the RAC were directly responsible for the forced transportation of around 187,697 enslaved people on 635 voyages of company-owned ships to English colonies in the Americas.

This company alone was able to report the death of just shy of 40,000 enslaved people en route. A figure no doubt placed under the loss column of their ledgers not in terms of any human cost but purely as lost property.

When we talk of involvement in the horrific transatlantic slave trade we must all make it clear that there is no place to hide.

Individuals cannot get away with hiding behind companies they may have somehow tripped over and accidentally invested in whilst not noticing that they were piling up the cash from the past enslavement of human beings.

Neither can the companies, wherever they are in the world and whichever government they fronted, get away with saying it wasn’t them but it was all down to their predecessors from hundreds of years ago and they should not be held accountable.

In the end, they are all liable to pay reparations for the wealth that they inherited off the backs of one of the gravest crimes ever committed against humanity.

What should those reparations look like? I think that’s up for negotiation but the ultimate decision over the shape of reparations must be made by those of us who very literally have skin in the game.

It simply can’t be the decision of someone who suddenly develops a sense of guilt after all these years.

As I said earlier I welcome the history-making apology from the Gladstone family. History-making because not many beneficiaries of the Slave Compensation Commission have felt the need to apologise for anything much less suggest paying some reparations.

But I do wonder whether his reparations to pay for research into the impact of slavery is what’s needed. After all, we are not short of research on the topic, especially from black academics who find it hard to get an airing of their work.

I also wonder if anyone in the Gladstone family bothered to even ask whether this is what is really needed — and who did they talk to if they did?

There needs to be serious discussions over direct payments to descendants of enslaved people — as a commission in California recently did.

There should also be discussions about how the legacies of enslavement, felt through employment, education, housing and health to name but a few, can be properly compensated.

These discussions should not close off areas because they fall into the “too difficult” bracket.

How will any decision-making take place? No idea — but we can work that out during the process.

But the discussions must take place after the guilty individuals and companies are finally forced to “fess up” to the historic and most brutal of crimes they continue to benefit from.