Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. That is another part of the great history that surrounds today’s debate. I am learning an enormous amount that I did not know before. I want to say a little about the bicentenary celebrations in Hull, and also about the present situation in relation to slavery. First, however, let me say something about William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was born in 1759, in a house in the high street in Hull. His father died when William was quite young, so he spent much of his early life with his aunt, who was under the influence of John Wesley and the Methodist movement. It is significant that the religious element continued throughout Wilberforce’s life. At 17 Wilberforce went up to St John’s college, Cambridge. Reading a bit about that time, I noted that he was shocked by his fellow students’ hard drinking. Not much has changed about young people going up to university! He went on to represent the city of Hull as its Member of Parliament, having been elected in 1780 at the tender age of 21. It was a hard-fought contest, and Wilberforce’s election cost the exorbitant sum of £9,000. I found that interesting, especially in the light of Hayden Phillips and our current discussions of how elections are paid for. When Wilberforce entered the House he supported the Tories, although he was an independent. In 1784 he converted to evangelical Christianity, and joined the ““Clapham set”” referred to by the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks. At that point he decided to follow the social reform agenda in Parliament, and was asked to campaign particularly against the slave trade. It is estimated that between 1776 and 1807 Britain trafficked about 1 million people. Wilberforce had a huge issue to tackle, and was up against the establishment view. That was described eloquently by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington when she spoke of banks and Members of Parliament with an interest in the slave trade. The Society of Friends had been campaigning against the trade for some time, and had presented petitions in 1783 and 1787. Wilberforce introduced his Bill against the trade in 1791, but it was easily defeated. We must not dwell only on Wilberforce, however, because many other parliamentarians—and people outside Parliament—were instrumental in the abolition campaign. In an intervention on the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks, I mentioned the sugar boycott. That was of particular interest to me because Hull contains Wilberforce House, the first museum in the world to be dedicated to the anti-slavery movement. It is about to be reopened following the investment of a huge amount of money to prepare it for the 2007 celebrations. There is a stand providing information about the sugar boycott and the role played by women in choosing not to buy or cook with sugar. Thomas Clarkson, whom many Members have mentioned, said that when he travelled around the country,"““there was no town, through which I passed, in which there was not some one individual who left off the use of sugar””." That shows that action was not taken just in Parliament, and that ordinary people, when they heard the facts about the slave trade, were so appalled that they wanted to do their bit. For the first time, a campaign for the boycotting of a commodity was initiated by ordinary people. Of course, it was to happen again in years to come: I remember the boycotting of products from South Africa in the 1980s in support of the anti-apartheid movement. The success of the sugar boycott eventually led to the establishment in the 1820s of female anti-slavery groups in many British cities, involving notable female abolitionists such as Elizabeth Heyrick, who called for a total ban. The slave trade was abolished in 1807, and a month after William Wilberforce died in 1833 Parliament passed the Abolition of Slavery Act, which gave all slaves in the British Empire their freedom. As well as campaigning against slavery, Wilberforce had a range of other interests, including animal welfare. He was involved in the setting up of the charity that is now known as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Having described William Wilberforce’s role as a Hull MP and his pivotal role here in Parliament, I want to say something about Hull. As a port city with a strong maritime and trading background, it has always had an eye to the rest of the world. William Wilberforce stood up to the slave trade, but Hull was different from Bristol and Liverpool, much of whose wealth was built on the trade; Hull did not have that slave-trade background, so it came to the issue with clean hands. Obviously, that might be because Hull is on the wrong side of the country, but I like to think that there was some principle behind that, too. Those principles have been followed in some of the work done in the past few years. In 1982, Hull became the first city in the west to twin with a third-world city, Freetown, in Sierra Leone. My right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister talked about his recent visits to Sierra Leone and what is going on there. The right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks, mentioned that the world’s first colony for free Africans was set up in Freetown in 1792. To return to Hull in the 1980s, the then leader of the council, Alderman Patrick Doyle, thought that it was important to build a link with Sierra Leone, and so he twinned Hull with Freetown. That link has gone from strength to strength over the years; eight of our schools are now actively twinned with schools in Freetown, and there are further links with churches and hospitals. Hon. Members will know that Freetown is still recovering from a lengthy period of considerable turmoil, and there is much scope for development in Sierra Leone. Later, I shall talk about one of the projects taking place in 2007 to link further children and young people in Hull with those in Sierra Leone. Hull was the first local authority to sign up to Amnesty International, and Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela are freemen of the city.