The number is beyond comprehension. No one, not even the greedy Caribbean leaders who came up with such a ludicrous demand for ‘reparations‘ for the slave trade, can imagine what £18.8 trillion actually means.
The sum is roughly equivalent to Britain’s entire annual economic output – for seven years.
Rachel Reeves‘s fanciful £22billion ‘black hole’ is barely a rounding error by comparison – less than 0.15 per cent of what the UK is being asked to hand over to Jamaica, Barbados and neighbouring islands.
So why has the Foreign Office agreed to talks with the Reparations Commission of the Caribbean Community [Caricom] about meeting those demands?
David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, claims the UK’s position is that we will not pay reparations, but that’s a pie-crust promise – easily made, easily broken.
Forthright
Lammy was rather more forthright about supporting a payout in the past, thundering to Parliament in 2018: ‘As Caribbean people, we are not going to forget our history. We don’t just want to hear an apology – we want reparations!’
Now we learn that the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, was working with Caricom lawyers as far back as 12 years ago to help draft a case for reparations.
Caricom had turned to him and the ‘human rights’ law firm Leigh Day following its success in winning compensation for Kenyan survivors of the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s.
A year after Hermer got involved, Caricom’s members published a ten-point action plan detailing how they intended to spend their gargantuan windfall.
This included ‘psychological rehabilitation’ programmes for the descendants of slaves who had supposedly suffered ‘intergenerational transmission of trauma from colonisation’.
It would also fund ‘repatriation to Africa … the return of stolen people’.
Therapy for trauma suffered by other people in ages past, and ‘returning’ people to Africa who have never been there and have no desire to go – these ideas sound as deranged as Caricom’s demands are exorbitant.
Yet that may not stop the British Government funding them.
We have already witnessed in spectacular fashion our Prime Minister’s unwillingness – or inability – to defend our interest where it clashes with international law.
Sir Keir Starmer’s bizarre impatience to hand over the Chagos Islands to the government of Mauritius – along with a sweetener that could cost British taxpayers upwards of £50 billion – is a very costly insight into where his true loyalties lie.
According to Reform leader Nigel Farage, who has a close relationship with the US President, Donald Trump has already signalled his anger at the Chagos deal, with his secretary of state Marco Rubio taking Lammy to task over it during their first phone call last month.
Such is the importance of the Diego Garcia military base on the islands that I fully expect the US to veto the handover, taking the base by force if necessary.
Absurd
But whether or not the deal goes ahead, Starmer’s instinct to place the demands of other countries over what’s best for Britain has done deep damage to our ‘special relationship’ with America. How can the White House regard us as trustworthy allies now?
Starmer has the sensibilities of a lawyer, not a politician. He is programmed to cater to the wishes of the narrow class of human rights practitioners to which he has devoted his lucrative career, not to do what millions of UK taxpayers want or require.
The notion that taxpayers today owe trillions in reparations to the descendants of slaves in the West Indies – because of historic crimes which neither witnessed – is patently absurd.
It was, of course, Britain that ended the Atlantic slave trade at significant human and financial cost.
And what about my own case? I pay taxes here but I was born and spent my childhood in Ghana, West Africa – my family’s homeland for countless generations.
What possible moral justification is there for using my taxes to enrich people in Barbados or Jamaica? Will I get a tax exemption? (Answer: no.)
By the same token, what about the millions of people in Britain of West Indian descent? How is it fair to impose taxes on them, to pay reparations to other people of identical ancestry?
Many UK immigrants from the Caribbean have siblings back home. One would be paying reparations, the other spending them. That’s going to lead to some awkward conversations when they next chat on FaceTime.
Then there are all the white Britons who can reasonably argue that their own ancestors suffered centuries of oppression: those of Irish descent, or Scottish, Welsh and Cornish.
The great majority of white English people, moreover, are descended from agricultural or factory labourers who endured unspeakable mistreatment. Who pays them reparations?
Historical influences, though far distant, have shaped our economic system and erected barriers between religions and classes.
Their effects are so profound that they are completely incalculable – and certainly no one can reliably put a price on setting them to rights.
All this, though, is so emotive that it’s difficult to have a calm and reasoned discussion.
I have friends of Caribbean heritage who become so inflamed at the first mention of slavery that all logic goes out of the window.
It would be unforgivably tactless of me (though true) to point out that, without slavery, they wouldn’t have been born, because their ancestors would never have been so cruelly thrown together.
But I do sometimes try to insist that it’s wrong to assume that, if the transatlantic slave trade had never happened, Africa would be a far healthier and happier continent.
There’s no way of ever knowing. And, of course, there were tribal leaders in West Africa that took an active part in slavery.
What we do know is that, since independence and the end of the British Empire, many African countries have fared badly under dictators and corrupt politicians.
Try starting a business in these countries and you’ll soon come up against suffocating regulations, endless demands for bribes and crippling problems with infrastructure, from power cuts to transport breakdowns and military unrest.
Distraction
Africa has colossal potential but it also has huge problems. We all know it. That’s a major reason why so few African Americans and Caribbean people emigrate to begin new lives there. How many black Americans or Brits would trade their passports for a Ugandan one?
Barbados – whose prime minister has argued her island nation is entitled to £4 trillion – is roughly ten times richer per capita than Ghana.
It’s nonsense for Caricom to claim that trillions of pounds in reparations are needed to support West Indian people who want to move ‘back’ to Africa. There’s no appetite for that, in the Caribbean or in Africa.
If Starmer and his crew cave in and decide Britain will pay out untold sums in guilt money for slavery, how much of it will be siphoned off by corrupt officials?
Until that happens, their vociferous demands provide an invaluable distraction for politicians in Barbados, Jamaica and elsewhere.
As long as Britain’s Government is willing to be the scapegoat, then they cannot be blamed for mistakes of their own making.
Esther Krakue is a writer and broadcaster