You could be mistaken for thinking that reparations are some wacky idea that have never been tried before. Listening to the debate about them in Britain, it’s almost as if the Caribbean nations of the Commonwealth are asking for something unprecedented, their mere suggestion prompting bile and bluster on breakfast news shows. Kemi Badenoch, prospective leader of the Conservative party, described the argument for reparations as a “scam”, and urged people not to “fall for it”. Writing in the Daily Mail, her rival Robert Jenrick suggested Britain’s former colonies ought to be thankful for the legacy of empire rather than demanding reparations. “Where does it end?” Nigel Farage recently cried on GB News. “We cannot concede anything. The past is the past … There are many other countries in the world that have done far worse.” Perhaps, Farage suggested, Britain should call for reparations against the French.
For all the incredulity that Badenoch and Farage show whenever they hear the R-word, reparations are increasingly a fairly standard part of international human rights law, the transitional justice version of those “Have you suffered an injury that wasn’t your fault?” ads on daytime TV. They have been used numerous times, such as when the German government recognised the genocide against the Herero and Nama ethnic groups and committed to pay their descendants in Namibia $1.3bn (£930m), or when the Canadian federal government signed the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, agreeing to provide $2bn of reparations to survivors. There are UN guidelines that outline when a violation of international human rights law can give rise to a right to reparation, and there have been a number of legal cases where reparations have been recognised and quantified by judges.
Once you see reparations as routine rather than ridiculous, Keir Starmer’s refusal even to engage in the conversation looks increasingly absurd. Three of his fellow MPs recently called out the “colonial mindset” he has shown towards the subject. Rather than make cogent and detailed arguments to defend his position, the former human rights lawyer insisted he couldn’t discuss any of this. His diplomacy style is that of a six-year-old putting his hands over his ears and shouting: “Nah, nah, nah, I’m not listening.” Unsurprisingly, it hasn’t been particularly effective. Ultimately, last week Starmer signed a joint statement alongside other leaders at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting that prominently featured reparations language. The “time has come” for a conversation about reparations, read the letter – even if Starmer isn’t ready for it.
The government has two options. Either it will be dragged kicking and screaming into a process that political, legal and historical forces have made inevitable, or it can try to get ahead of the issue and positively engage with these campaigns. By doing so, it could have some input into framing how reparations should be administered. Scholars like Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò have illustrated how reparations can include a broad range of structural policies, from global climate funding to the redistribution of voting power in the World Bank and the IMF. These ideas could be included in reparative justice proposals put forward by the British government, helping to rewrite some of the rules that embed inequality into our economic system while keeping the size of the cash transfer politically palatable.
Yet none of these possibilities will be on the table if Starmer keeps ducking the discussion altogether, out of fear of the rightwing press’s response. Recently, he has resorted to a false binary, arguing that Caribbean nations should focus on “challenges on things like climate in the here and now” rather than undertaking “very long, endless discussions” about reparations. This totally overlooks how the development deficit that makes Caribbean nations particularly vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis is linked to the legacy of slavery, as leaders including the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, have explained. While successive administrations have tried their best to ignore the issue in the hope that it goes away, others have set the terms. In 2023, UN judge Patrick Robinson co-wrote a report in which he said the UK should pay $24tn for its slavery involvement in 14 countries, describing the sum as an “underestimation” of the actual damage that was caused.
There’s a broader dissonance between where we are culturally as a nation and where we are politically on this issue. We consume films like Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, documentaries like the BBC’s Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners and books like Andrea Levy’s The Long Song which detail the horror of plantation slavery, correctly identifying this as one of the worst crimes in human history. Yet our elected officials can’t even issue a formal apology for fear of what this would mean. The government’s woefully ahistoric stance looks even more untenable when we remember that Britain has already paid out reparations for slavery. Only these reparations went to the slave owners rather than enslaved people or their descendants.
The 1837 Slave Compensation Act paid £20m, worth about £17bn today, to 40,000 claimants for the “property” they lost through abolition. Just a few years ago, the Treasury awkwardly congratulated contemporary Britons for still paying off this compensation to slave owners through their taxes until 2015, before quickly deleting the tweet. It was a crude reminder that money from slavery, including the funds paid out as reparation to slave owners after abolition, is still swimming through the country mansions and private bank accounts of the British upper classes even today. Many members of the British elite owe their wealth and power to their slave-owning ancestors.
One of the main beneficiaries was the family of future prime minister William Gladstone, whose father received £100,000 compensation for more than 2,500 enslaved people in Guyana and Jamaica, amounting to roughly £9.4m today. Rather than sweep this history under the carpet, the current descendants of the Gladstone family have taken a different approach from Starmer’s government. Last year, six members of the family travelled to Guyana to formally apologise and pledge £100,000 to the University of Guyana’s International Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies.
They aren’t alone in recognising their history. Last year the journalist Laura Trevelyan quit her job at the BBC to dedicate her life to campaigning for reparations. Her family also travelled to the Caribbean to publicly apologise for their role in slavery in Grenada and announce £100,000 in reparations. The American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates explained how politicians try to trivialise this issue. “Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?” he writes in his famous article The Case for Reparations. We already have the documentation that would help answer these questions. While most human rights violations are conducted under the cover of darkness, with all evidence destroyed and papers shredded, plantation slavery was incredibly well documented, and its profiteers kept immaculate accounting records detailing how they bought and sold their property.
Perhaps part of the resistance of the British establishment is that, as opposed to it being impossible to find out who profited from slavery, it is actually relatively easy to identify the families and companies that got rich from the human misery of the Caribbean plantation. Many of them are still highly influential today, and haven’t taken the approach of the Gladstone or Trevelyan families. Reparations are as much about the present as they are about the past. And they might soon seem like an inevitability.
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Kojo Koram teaches at the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, and writes on issues of law, race and empire