"I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was - how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition - but also to express our deep sorrow that it ever could have happened."
With these words Tony Blair yesterday denounced the slave trade in a black community newspaper, the New Nation, ahead of the 200th anniversary of its abolition next March. He accepted that Britain's rise to global pre-eminence depended substantially on colonial slave labour.
While stopping short of an apology, his article goes a long way to acknowledge the inhumanity of slavery, as well as the broad based movements which supported its abolition from the 1770s to the 1830s when slavery was outlawed in all British colonies.
It is an important statement of solidarity with the tens of millions of its victims over the four centuries involved with all the colonial world. Critics demand that Mr Blair should have gone further by apologising for this crime, raising the possibility of reparations. But the huge legal, economic and political problems that would pose were deemed a step too far. Instead he appeals for a renewed effort to link racial equality and economic development throughout the world.
That is fine as far as it goes, but it prompts the question of what resources are needed to redress the damage done. There was an admirable mobilisation of British popular involvement in last year's Make Poverty History campaign. But unless it is followed up in a focused and determined tackling of the structures of under-development laid down in the slave trade - especially in Africa - it has a hollow sound. Mr Blair correctly points to the role of debt relief, education and healthcare aid, and also to the rich diversity of the worldwide African diaspora which is one of main legacies of that period.
In another comment he observes that it is "hard to believe that what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time". The point can be made about contemporary evils such as bonded labour, child soldiers and human trafficking, all of which are similar to slavery but persist despite humanitarian and human rights progress. Political judgments of this kind are contingent on changing circumstances as well as moral principle.
Mr Blair's observations on slavery recall the statement he made on the 150th anniversary of the Irish famine in 1997, that "those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy".