Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade

I do not want to stretch the thought too far; I just put it to the House that if we read the accounts not just of the work that slaves did, but of the extraordinary brutality of the punishments and the torture that they had to endure and of a life where, at the height of the slave trade, the only people a slave was legitimately allowed to love were the children of the slave master, we have to say that 200 years later, that sort of experience must have affected the societies that we see around the Caribbean today.