I don't see how Les can say we are 'still benefitting' from slavery when any attempt to assert a humane, not too serious and balanced kind of English identity, and have a good sing about it once a year,is always thwarted by people like himself bleating anxiously about slavery, and the dangers of excessive nationalism and so on and so on, and shouldn't we be ASHAMED? etc, etc. Far from benefitting, we are still paying the moral price for slavery. This is despite us being one of the first nations of the world who had enjoyed the economic benefits of slavery (and there were LOTS)to voluntarily ban it - the trade in 1807 and the institution in (I think)1832. The British Government subsequently spent millions of pounds, and the lives of thousands of British sailors (mostly from disease) trying to stamp out the traffic. Unlike the French we did not drop it with great trumpetings during a violent revolution only to quietly continue it under a subsequent dictator, and unlike the Americans we did not include the rights of man into our constitution while quietly continuing with slavery. We did not need a massive civil war to get rid of it either - the will of the British people was against slavery remarkably early (we can tell from petitions of the time, many marked with a cross by illiterate labourers etc, and signed by the Parish priest for authenticity), and if it hadn't been for slave-owning members in the undemocratic Parliament of the time it could have been banned in the 1780's or 90's. So there!