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Straw: "no evidence" Britain ever involved in slave trade
Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, has said that an exhaustive search of records has failed to turn up any evidence that Britain was ever asked by the Americans to participate in the slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The practice of slavery, by which captured Africans were given a free pair of shackles and trans-Atlantic cruise followed by a job for life, was a key factor in the economic growth of the American Colonies. The process was known as "extraordinary rendition" in order to differentiate it from normal immigration.
Mr Straw's denial was in response to an accusation by human rights group Liberty.
Speaking at a press conference this afternoon, Mr Straw said, "An exhaustive search during tea break this morning yielded no evidence whatsoever that the Americans ever asked for permission to use any of our ports, nor indeed that British ports were ever used by American slave ships for the purpose of rendering Africans to American cotton plantations."
He refuted a suggestion by our reporter that twelve men seen by ground crew in an unmarked Boeing 737 that was being refuelled at Humberside Airport in the early hours of this morning were being extraordinarily rendered to work at WalMart in the USA. "It was, er, erm, a football team on its way to er, a match in a Middle Eastern country that I am not at liberty to name," he said. He explained that the men's leg shackles were used for lower leg strength training during the long flight, and their orange suits were not jumpsuits, as claimed by the ground crew, but tracksuits in their team colours."
Following Mr Straw's statement, newly-elected interim leader of the Conservative Party David "Cooler than Blair" Cameron launched an appeal to everyone who has ever been extraordinarily rendered, or descends from someone who has, to apply to become a Conservative MP. He said that application forms could be picked up at any McDonald's.
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