Commonwealth leaders concluded last week’s summit in Samoa by announcing that Britain should commit to reparations for its role in the transatlantic slave trade.
UK prime minister Keir Starmer had tried to refocus the summit around ‘future-facing’ challenges such as climate change. His chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was more blunt. She told the BBC last week that ‘We’re not going to be paying out the reparations that some countries are speaking about’. Yet in the end, it was to no avail. A day later, the 56 heads of government, including Starmer, signed a letter agreeing that ‘the time has come’ for a ‘meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation’ about Britain paying reparations.
This outcome was hardly a surprise. Over the past few years, the demand that the UK pay vast sums to the descendents of slaves has gained momentum. In August 2023, Patrick Robinson, a judge at the UN, argued that Britain owes £18 trillion in reparations. In March this year, the Church of England announced it would raise £1 billion to address its historic links to slavery. An All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Afrikan Reparations has been launched to push the issue in Westminster. And in David Lammy, we now have a foreign secretary who has repeatedly endorsed calls for reparations.
The reparations movement has gained so much traction because of the lack of any well-articulated rebuttal, especially from Britain’s political class. This has allowed pro-reparations campaigners to shape the narrative without challenge.
The argument for reparations rests on the contention that slavery and colonialism are solely responsible for both the wealth of former colonial powers and the poverty of former colonies. As Kehinde Andrews, an academic and staunch advocate for reparations, put it recently on BBC Two’s Politics Live: ‘The wealth we have today directly comes from slavery and the former British Empire.’
This narrative is widely propagated. It is also incredibly simplistic and overlooks the complex web of factors that has influenced global economic development over the past few hundred years. As then business and trade minister Kemi Badenoch rightly pointed out earlier this year, Britain’s prosperity cannot be attributed solely to colonial exploitation – and the economic challenges facing Britain’s former colonies cannot be blamed entirely on British rule, either.
Singapore, for example, was a British colony between 1819 and 1965. Despite this legacy, it has emerged as a global economic success story, largely due to political and economic reforms under former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew. At the same time, slave trading is hardly a guarantee of future wealth. Quite the opposite. The slave trade in the American South arguably stunted the region’s economic growth by creating an over-reliance on an outdated agrarian economy.
Reparations campaigners will also point to what they consider to be a monumental injustice – namely, the then British government’s decision in 1835 to take out a loan of £20million (worth over £2.5 billion today) to compensate slave-owners for their ‘loss of property’. Yet, in many ways, the nature of this payment is misunderstood. The British government was effectively paying for the slaves’ liberty, rather than ‘rewarding’ slave-owners. It was a pragmatic decision taken to overcome the resistance of slave-owners and to expedite the emancipation of their slaves.
Moreover, Britain was hardly a nation of slave-owners. In fact, only about 40,000 British individuals actually owned slaves during the abolitionist era and only 3,000 received reparations. The vast majority of British people at the time were economically marginalised themselves and did not directly benefit from the slave trade. Asking today’s working and middle classes to ‘compensate’ for the actions of a small elite from two centuries ago is wrong and historically misguided.
Here we come to the nub of the problem. Too often reparations campaigners distort the tragic and painful history of slavery to make their arguments. They overlook inconvenient historical facts, such as the role of the African rulers who actively participated in the slave trade and frequently resisted abolition. African leaders such as King Ghezo of Dahomey (modern-day Benin) directly benefitted from slavery, amassing wealth and power by selling captives from rival tribes to European traders. When the British sought to end the trade, King Ghezo reportedly resisted, declaring that, ‘The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people – it is the source and the glory of their wealth’.
I am far from opposed to reparations per se. I would support reparations for living victims of state injustices, from Holocaust survivors to Japanese Americans interned during the Second World War. If individual families wish to pay reparations for their forebears’ role in the slave trade, as the Trevelyan family has done, then that is their choice. However, it is a very different matter to make vague demands of the entire British public for reparations for events from centuries ago.
Chattel slavery and colonialism were devastating and morally abhorrent chapters in human history. But the best path forward is to treat individuals from all backgrounds as equals, free of the reductive labels of historical victimhood and unburdened by grievance.
Rather than obsessing over the past, Britain and its former colonies should look toward opportunities for partnership, development and trade. The reparations movement risks becoming a drain on moral and political discourse in Britain and beyond, shifting responsibility from modern elites who can enact change to a defeatist focus on historical grievances.
In Britain, the issue of reparations only fosters division and resentment. If our leaders want to prevent the call for reparations from gathering yet more momentum, they need to come up with a clear and reasoned response – one that acknowledges the complexities of history without conceding to misguided demands for financial atonement. Instead of allowing past injustices to dictate future policy, the focus should be on building a future that upholds true equality, freedom and shared prosperity.
Inaya Folarin Iman is a spiked columnist and founder of the Equiano Project.