Ghana’s president wants Britain to pay reparations for its slave trade, which ended 200 years ago. It’s just a grift of the worst kind. Sadly, the befuddled, bewildered confederacy of dunces which we call the United Nations has today adopted John Dramani Mahama’s resolution. The amount Britain is supposed to pay under the bonkers “non-binding resolution” is £19 TRILLION – or about five times more than all the money in circulation on planet earth.

If you factor in the 31 other former slaveholding states – including Spain, the United States and France – the amount claimed skyrockets to $107.8tn (£87.1tn). Which is probably more money than there is in the known universe. It’s bizarre that what is supposed to be one of the most respected bodies on the planet is even giving this serious thought. There is so much wrong with it.

The UN declared the trafficking of enslaved Africans the “gravest crime against humanity”. And so it may be, though it is a very uncomfortable and not particularly enlightening question.

Mao Zedong’s enforced famine during the Great Leap Forward probably beats it for numbers, three centuries of Roman slavery would give it a run for its money too, and the Holocaust was no picnic.

See what I mean about uncomfortable?

Not much of an after -inner game is it? All of them are disgusting examples of incomprehensibly brutal inhumanity, and show the basic fatuousness of playing the “my tragedy is worse than your tragedy” game.

Then of course there is the bizarrely never-mentioned trans-Saharan slave trade – just as big, went on for longer, no Europeans involved.

And the fact that slavery in Ghana went on before Europeans arrived, and continued after they left. So, some people in the part of Africa we now call Ghana were obviously complicit in slavery.

So, er, why should they get money? I thought the whole point of the UN resolution that some Brits have great, great, great great grandfathers who were slavers. Same applies in Ghana surely (although, to be fair, not so in the Caribbean nations).

And that is the thing isn’t it? Two centuries after Britain abolished slavery – and then patrolled the seas to thwart otheres persisting with this vile trade – trying to unpick who did what is a fool’s errand.

My best mate’s family hail from St Vincent. Why on earth should he – whose great great great great grandad was a victim of slavery remember – have to cough up a penny? Surely he should be receiving reparations not paying them?

To be fair, even Ghanaian academics have responded to the ruling today saying that while it may be a moral victory no cash is ever going to change hands. It’s a “non-binding resolution” and while Starmer spinelessly crumbled over the non-binding resolution on the Chagos Islands surely even old jelly-spine can see this is the politics of the madhouse.

A Human Rights Professor at the University of Ghana School of Law Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atuah said after the ruling: “The big power voted against us or abstained, that is how UN General Assembly resolutions work.

“It came to naught because the big powers, the former colonial masters, voted against it.”

If all this grifting does is remind us of the horrors of slavery I guess that is an upside – though I think UN time and money could be better spent tackling actual slavery in places like China, India, and Saudi Arabia which is happening right now, not 200 years ago.

The unpalatable fact is some countries are using one of the darkest episodes in human history to ambulance chase on the off-chance of a payday.

But nobody in Britain today (okay, almost nobody) has anything to do with slavery and they never have. And don’t buy the “you’ve all profited from slavery” as if there’s been some trickle down effect from the cotton and tobacco and sugar plantations. There hasn’t. There never was. A small number of evil people made a huge amount of money a long time ago and kept it to themselves.

Me? I can’t personally be sorry for slavery. I didn’t do it. Not just because I was born 200 years after Britain abolished it but because at the time slavery was du jour my lot were starving to death in the west of Ireland under the jackboot of the English crown.

Hang on… I think I’ve got a claim for reparations!