Thread by @mediawise

A follower got our attention on this tweet from @LeaveEUOfficial about Britain abolishing slavery. We’ve never heard a claim like this before, so we decided to fact-check it!

https://twitter.com/LeaveEUOfficial/status/1269884427787800578

We're based in the U.S. & we're frankly not familiar with Leave EU, so we went to their Wikipedia to get some broad strokes about what this organization does. Turns out it’s a UK-based political campaign that supports Brexit. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leave.EU

The campaign formed in 2015 with the primary mission to support the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union. It’s a pretty complicated movement, so read this summary from @BBC. bbc.com/news/uk-politi…

They do have a clear motivation to be spreading positive news regarding Britain though, so keep that in mind. But let’s get started. To fact-check, we started with a keyword search for “slavery abolition act 1833.”

This @TheHistoryPress article came up which confirms that Britain *did* in fact end slavery in most of its colonies, like the West Indies, in 1833 with this act, using a loan that constituted 40% of the national budget that wasn’t paid off until 2015. thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/the-s…

The @TheHistoryPress article does note that slavery on English and Scottish soil was illegal as of 1772. And the slave trade had been outlawed in 1807 in the British empire, way before this act was passed.

Also, in the original tweet it’s unclear how the money was used to “buy freedom.” According to @TheHistoryPress article and this @Britannica article, the money was used to compensate slave owners for the loss of their slaves. britannica.com/topic/Slavery-…

It also says that the slaves themselves were not paid at all by this act, and were made to work as apprentices for another 6 years. So, they were technically freed by the act, but the tweet leaves out some important context.

The graphic that @LeaveEUOfficial shared also says that current British citizens were paying this off through taxes up until 2015. And this article from @BristolLive confirms it!
bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-n…

Because they were repaying the loan for so long, even descendants of slaves were responsible for contributing money to this. Again, although the phrasing of “buying the freedom of the slaves” makes it sound like they were paid, it leaves out some important context.

Finally, we’re gonna take a look at whether Britain led the way in abolishing slavery, using another keyword search of “Which country abolished slavery first?”

According to this timeline from Reuters, several other countries banned slavery and the slave trade before this occurred, including Spain in 1811 and the Netherlands in 1814.
reuters.com/article/uk-sla…

This 1833 act just expanded on the 1772 court case that found slavery in England and Scotland had never been supported by English law, but they didn’t pass anything to make it officially illegal until now. Technically, Britain was “first”, but it’s still complicated.

In our research, we also found this article from @ThirteenWNET, which says that all 17 northern U.S. states, including New York in 1799, banned slavery by 1804. Vermont was the first institution in the world to make it officially illegal, in 1777. thirteen.org/wnet/slavery/e….

We rate this claim as NEEDS CONTEXT. This act did occur but leaves out some important context about how it actually worked and the history behind it. It’s important to always #ThinkBeforeYouShare so you can have the full context behind claims like this.