Commemoration day to recall slave trade and make UK face up to past

· Call for subject to be put on school curriculum
· Prescott compares slavery to the Holocaust

An annual commemoration day is to be held to recall Britain's role in the slave trade, and the fight against it, John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, has told the Guardian.

He expected the day to be held in common with the rest of Europe in June so that modern day slavery - human trafficking - could also be recalled and combated.

Mr Prescott said the commemoration day would provide a chance for national and local government, as well as schools, to think how they could help modern day Africa. He likened slavery to the Holocaust and expressed his deep personal regret.

The government has refused to make a full apology for Britain's role. Mr Prescott argued that Africa didn't want this, but that it was time Britain faced up to the past. "Like the Holocaust, we are learning to talk about the slave trade openly and more honestly. Tragic and terrible as it was, the slave trade defied anyone to discuss it because it was so horrendous."

He said he believed Britain was about to go through the process of self-examination that the US experienced with the publication of Alex Haley's Roots in the 70s. He said: "The book had an effect on Americans who are now going back to Ghana and turning the slave dungeons in Elmina in Ghana into a shrine.

"I think this anniversary is beginning to make us think again in the same way as the US. There is a sense of shock and horror at what went on in our history, and the sheer brutality of it. It has not yet fed into the schools. Indeed it has been kept out of the curriculum.

"We need to get the proper history told, including the good, the bad and dreadful. For instance we need to recall that parliament for the best part of a century facilitated slavery. It did not just have an overnight intellectual conversion. Public opinion made the change and forced the change on parliament. We have fed it into our minds that a Christian from Hull, William Wilberforce, came along and changed the law in 1807. It was remarkable, but the real change came from working people.

"It is one of the reasons why I would like us to pick a date every year. The legacy of this 200th anniversary should be a permanent date when we ask whether there is more we could do, so that every year, like Holocaust, we remind people of the horrors. Each year we should think about it and commemorate and rededicate ourselves to helping people on which such horrors were inflicted."

Mr Prescott was speaking the day before Britain signs the European convention against human trafficking, publishes an action plan to fight modern day slavery and he hosts the visit of Owen Arthur, the prime minister of Barbados, to Hull, the birthplace of Wilberforce.

Tony Blair is to deliver a pre-recorded address to a ceremony in one of the slave ports in Accra at a ceremony on Sunday. A national memorial service will be held at Westminster Abbey on Tuesday and the former secretary general of the UN Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian, will address both houses of parliament in May .

Critics have suggested the country needs to apologise for slavery, a phrase that has led to legal actions in the US for compensation. The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has apologised and the prime minister has expressed his deep sorrow.

Mr Prescott said the country had to express "more than regret" for its role in the slave trade, but argued the issue of an apology was not being raised in Africa. He has been to Ghana and Sierra Leone in the past few months to visit the jails from which slaves were transported. He said he had met children in Ghana who had told him: "Not every white man was guilty and not every black man was innocent."

"That has started a debate about whether you really want the native chiefs really to apologise for selling their own people. The traders only had to go to the ports and the slaves were delivered from inside Africa. The Ghanaians said 'We don't want apologies. We want people to think what we can do to help us. What our ancestors did was horrific, but everyone feels we need to learn and move on from that experience'."

He said he would never forget how shocked he felt visiting the slave prisons of Elmina in Ghana. "Even 200 years after the slave trade you can still feel the pain the dark stench, the horror, the cold and the hole in the wall, the point of no return."

Mr Prescott said the climate of awareness in Britain was changing, pointing out that black youngsters in St Pauls, Bristol, had demanded that the name of the new shopping centre should not be called Traders or Merchants. "To those black people it meant the language of slavery. A more open debate about this is necessary. We have properly spent a lot of time talking about Muslims, but there are a lot of black people in Britain who feel their history has not been recognised."

He said it was vital that the government went ahead with changing the national education curriculum so that there was a proper presentation of slavery in its true abhorrent sense. He argued that abolition was closely associated with white people, but there were many black heroes.

Guardian