It may seem a bit odd to be asking this, with the Westminster Abbey memorial service looming, the Commons united in self-congratulation, the John Prescott 200th anniversary celebrations about to set sail (two replica slave ships travelling around Britain; a set of stamps); after even Diane Abbott, great great granddaughter of slaves, declared that her ancestors would be “happy and proud” today, on the 200th anniversary of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade — but, er . . . are you absolutely sure it isn’t a bit soon to be celebrating?

I don’t ask that because of the current problem of sex-trafficked women. We can all easily agree, as MPs did on Tuesday when they debated William Wilberforce’s great achievement, that sex trafficking is a sick form of slavery. Even the Government has belatedly caught up with the mood on this, and will today sign, two years late and after 34 other countries, the Council of Europe’s convention against trafficking human beings, which offers protection to trafficked sex slaves by treating them as victims not criminals.

Nor do I ask the question because of the slavery around the world of child and bonded labour whose efforts slash the prices of cheap clothing on our high street (they may not make the clothes, but have you checked who picks the cotton?).

No, I ask it because of the place of black people here in Britain today. And the question I can’t help coming back to, as I read the debates and the plaudits and the histories of William Wilberforce, is: did we really, absolutely, free them? Should we, modern multicultural Britain, be patting ourselves on the back quite yet?

For the ultimate point of the abolition of slavery was to mark all men (and women) as equal. As William Hague, a biographer of William Wilberforce, speaking for the Conservatives, said in the debate on Tuesday: “It is worth noting that the fight against the slave trade was also an early campaign against racism. It was an important attribute of the abolitionists that they set out not only to end the slave trade, but to demonstrate that former slaves could live freely and prosperously with equality between every race.” Equality between every race? Well, take the Commons itself first: there are 15 non-white MPs (13 of them in the Labour Party) which equates to 2.3 per cent of MPs, compared with the 8 per cent nonwhite population in the UK as a whole. Parliament is representative of the nation in that respect; it well advertises the fact that black people (as well as other ethnic minorities) are not equal to white people in Britain today.

According to figures from the Office for National Statistics, ethnic minorities are more likely to live in low-income households (half of black Caribbeans do, for instance, compared with a fifth of whites). Black people are far more likely to live in social housing than any other ethnic group; less likely to have a bank account, stocks and shares and savings. Yet the employment rate of black men is only five points below the national average, while the employment rate of black women is six points above average.

Why are they not as wealthy as us? Perhaps because black boys do worse at school than white boys? Yet black girls do as well as white boys — although worse than white girls. A report last week from the Equal Opportunities Commission found that black Caribbean women are twice as likely to be unemployed as white British women, despite there being only a 10 per cent achievement gap between them at GCSE. Those black women who are employed are clustered in a narrower range of jobs.

If you live in a city, go to your supermarket and check out the equality at the checkout.

Only a couple of MPs raised these issues in the debate on Tuesday; most were too intent on lauding the historical contributions of their own constituencies. One was Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrats’ Shadow Chancellor. He asked “whether we sufficiently acknowledge the role of the black community in Britain and the extent to which, in a country that once had slavery, we now fully accept our own black citizens as complete equals and accept them with dignity. It is a very mixed story.” Mr Cable goes regularly to Feltham Young Offender Institution: “The minute one goes into the place, it is very striking that 65 per cent of all the prisoners are from ethnic minorities, and the vast majority are black. Clearly, something has gone fundamentally wrong with the way in which black youth is being dealt with in British society that perpetuates this disadvantage.”

We can see that day after day in the casual murder of young men on city streets, generally dismissed by white people as gang wars and by politicians from time to time with an emergency seminar, a range of new penalties and a five-point plan.

Dawn Butler, one of only two black women MPs (there have only ever been three), made the point that a three-decades-old study is still relevant today. It found the achievement of black boys to be depressed by low expectations on their part and the part of teachers, low motivation because they feel that the cards are stacked against them, and a low estimation of their own abilities. Although the history of slavery is rightly now to be included in the national curriculum, there must, as Ms Butler said, be a positive tale of black achievement in there as well, and a proper recognition of the contribution of black people, slaves or not, to the building of modern Britain.

The Queen will attend the service at Westminster Abbey to mark the bicentenary of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807. Have you ever seen her with any black advisers? Have you seen many of them around the Prime Minister? Parliament has come up with myriad ways to commemorate the anniversary of this Act of Parliament, including a whole section dedicated to it on its website, copies of ancient parchment and what have you, but it doesn’t even officially collect figures for the ethnicity of its MPs today.

I cannot help but think that some form of positive discrimination from British leaders — business as well as political — a concerted national effort to raise role models and the hopes and self-respect of black boys, and to iron out the inequalities against black women would be a more fitting (and far tougher) way to commemorate this anniversary than a year-long festival of self-congratulation.

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