How would slavery reparations work?

Keir Starmer is facing a growing clamour for Britain to pay slavery reparations, which some estimates say could exceed £200 billion.

At the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Samoa, a group of countries known as the Caribbean Community – or Caricom – have agreed to put reparations on the agenda. Noting “calls for discussions on reparatory justice“, the 15 countries believe that “the time has come for a meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation towards forging a common future based on equity”, according to a draft communique for the summit.

The “philosophical arguments” for and against paying reparations tend to overshadow the “tricky” practicalities, said The Economist in 2020. Who would be eligible for reparations? How much should the payment be? And should it be paid to governments or to individuals?

In Britain, experts have made “numerous estimations” for reparations amounts, said The Independent. Reverend Dr Michael Banner, the Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, “hit headlines” this year claiming that Britain owed £205 billion. Last year, a report by Patrick Robinson, a leading judge at the International Court of Justice, said Britain should pay for its involvement in slavery in 14 countries and estimated the payout at about £18.8 trillion.

As to how reparations would be paid, direct payments “may do less to reduce inequality than their supporters hope”, said The Economist. Big one-off payments cannot alone redress wider structural inequalities. That’s why some economists argue that reparations should fund training and education programmes, and investment in businesses run by members of the affected communities.

But there’s another sticking point: who decides the answers to any of those questions? And in that, we have a warning. In 2021 Germany pledged €1.1 billion (nearly £1 billion) to Namibia in “development aid” projects, to atone for its colonial genocide between 1904 and 1908. “The agreement was supposed to be a win-win,” said Al Jazeera, but instead the affected Herero and Nama ethnic groups “vehemently opposed the agreement, saying it was dictated by Germany” and dismissed the offer as “insulting”. The row, still ongoing, could “derail Germany’s attempts to rid itself of decades of colonial guilt” and also “underscores the challenges of righting historical injustices in ways that are acceptable to, and inclusive of the very people who were wronged”.

Compensation for slavery has actually been made before – but to slave owners, said Thomas Craemer, professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut, on The Conversation. After Britain abolished slavery in 1833, the Bank of England paid a compensation package to former slave owners with a loan totalling about £20 million – equivalent to roughly half the government’s annual expenditure. The British taxpayer didn’t finish paying off those loans until 2015; many generations were therefore saddled with “a reparations debt for which they were not personally responsible”, said Craemer. And at the time, few complained that it was unfair.

What next?

Starmer has ruled out the prospect of reparations being discussed at the summit. But the issue is “in the mouths and on the minds of all participants”, said Hilary Beckles, chairman of the Caricom Reparations Commission, in The Guardian. “The formal agenda does not determine the real agenda.”

Support is building among African and Caribbean nations for “the creation of an international tribunal” on the transatlantic slave trade, said Reuters. This would be “modelled on other ad-hoc courts such as the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals after World War Two”.

Advocates within Caricom and the African Union (AU) are now developing a white paper on what reparations might look like. “We have a global community behind this message,” said Jasmine Mickens, a US-based specialist in reparations. “That’s something this movement has never seen before.”