It would be a shame if Britain were forced to leave the Commonwealth, given the great work it has done over the decades – especially under the guardianship of the late Queen. But our departure is swiftly going to emerge as an option if grasping Caribbean governments continue with their threat to ambush Keir Starmer at the Commonwealth summit in Samoa and press for reparations for slavery. This is an issue which is not going to go away among Commonwealth countries, given that all three of the candidates to replace Baroness Scotland as the organisation’s Secretary General appear to be in favour of pressing for billions of pounds in ‘reparatory justice’.
So far, Starmer has been blunt in his rejection of the demands, saying that he would rather talk about the problems facing the world now than try to put right things which happened 200 years ago. It may well be that he is holding his foreign secretary at bay over the issue, given that David Lammy has previously spoken in favour.
If the government of the Bahamas feels short of cash, it could always raise its taxes
But the Prime Minister needs to go further and make the case for the utter intellectual feebleness of the campaign for slavery reparations. He will need to do so because of the creeping efforts on the Left to try to make reparations an inevitability.
Starmer certainly can’t look to the BBC for a balanced debate on this, after this morning’s Today programme, which featured the foreign minister of the Bahamas invited to make his case. He was given the prime interview slot on the subject and egged along by the presenter, with no other guests quizzed on it other than several brief questions to Lisa Nandy at the tail end of another interview earlier in the programme. You might have expected the BBC at least to put reparation demands into context, and point out that the £18 trillion suggested by UN judge Patrick Robinson last year is nearly seven times UK GDP in 2023. But sadly that was too much to hope.
As has been argued many times before, Britain did not invent slavery – indeed it was endemic within many of the peoples from whom Caribbean slaves were taken. What Britain did do, on the other hand, was to abolish the global slave trade, at considerable cost and risk to the Royal Navy.
But the case against reparations doesn’t end there. Obviously slavery was wrong and any victims of modern slavery (such as Uighurs reported to be employed in slave-like conditions in factories in North West China, or unpaid, imprisoned domestic servants who come to light from time to time in Britain and other countries) are due compensation from those who have enslaved them. So, too, you might make a case that the immediate family of slaves are due compensation for having their family members enslaved. But after 200 years you inevitably arrive at a fundamental problem: who is compensating whom? Go back eight generations and we all have 256 direct forbears. Among them, in a growing number of cases, will be both slaves and slave masters – so they will presumably have to compensate themselves. Why stop at transatlantic slaves? Many of us – probably most of us in Britain – will have medieval serfs in our family tree, so do we all get compensation for that?
Moreover, for what exactly would you be compensating the descendants of slaves? If you have victims of the transatlantic slave trade among your ancestors you are very likely the citizen of a high or middle-income country – rather than a low-income one as you would likely now be had your ancestors remained in West Africa. You personally, in other words, are better off thanks to the slave trade, even if your distant ancestors suffered deeply.
But the Commonwealth countries are not proposing reparations between individuals; what they want is direct financial transfer between the UK and Caribbean governments. But this is an even more problematic concept, not least because Caribbean governments are the successor organisations of the colonial authorities which oversaw the plantations.
Should it not be they who are paying compensation to the countries of West Africa from which the slaves are taken? If the foreign minister of the Bahamas ever did get his way and Britain was persuaded to cough up billions, inevitably raised through taxes on UK citizens, my first thought would be right, that’s it: I’m off to live in a tax haven. But that, of course, is exactly what the Bahamas is – which raises another problem. Many UK citizens are themselves descendants of slavery. Why should their pockets be picked in order to help subsidise a tax haven, especially one inhabited by large numbers of white British tax exiles?
If the government of the Bahamas feels short of cash, it could always raise its taxes, such as by imposing even a penny of income tax or VAT. But no, how much more attractive to jump on the reparations bandwagon and try to appeal for handouts in compensation for ancient wrongs. And how ironic that many of the countries demanding slavery reparations are themselves quite happy to do business with China, in spite of that country’s record on modern slavery.
The whole concept of slavery reparations is a scam – and the UK government should not shy away from saying so.