[garinda]

Tonight I watched the brilliant BBC2 programme 'This World: Child Slavery', presented by Rageh Omaar.

The W.H.O. estimate there are 8.5 million child slaves in the world today, about 1.5 million of whom work in the sex industry. These aren't children who are having to work to help support their poverty stricken families, these are children who for any number of reasons, are bought and sold as bonded commodities.

I don't care about the colour of their skin, their religion, or culture. These are child slaves, some as young as six, who are living in the world today, and it makes me sick to the stomach to also be living in the same world were this is happening now.

I'm all for remembering the terrible trans-Atlantic slave trade, and celebrating the people who brought about it's ending, including ordinary Lancashire mill workers who came out on strike in protest, but appologising is totally pointless.

I don't hold Germans responsible for killing my twenty two year old grandfather in WWII, nor would an appology make the slightest difference to the past, or be at all relevant today. Remember yes, appologise no.

So, people should stop harking on about the past, and help stop this sickening trade in human slaves, that is still evident today in the twenty first century.

By the way, if people do insist on having appologies for the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, perhaps they should be looking to Africa itself, or Arabia, both of which trading in slaves, before the Europeans even got a look in.