Dr Sarah Ingham is the author of The Military Covenant: its impact on civil-military relations in Britain.
In just over a fortnight the biannual Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting will be held in Antigua and Barbuda. Despite PM Gaston Browne’s warning that it is “critically important” that all 56 nations stand together, the summit could well be overshadowed by that most divisive of issues: reparations for slavery.
The Reparations Commission of the 15-member state Caribbean Community (CARICOM), a dozen of which are Commonwealth members, is determined that “reparatory justice for the Caribbean and Global Africa” is on the CHOGM agenda. Indeed, Commission chair, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles – author of Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Slavery in the Caribbean (2013) – described the summit as “very, very critical to this trajectory we are on.”
Campaigners have had a good year. In March, the UN declared the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as “the gravest crime against humanity.” The initiative came from Ghana. In June, Accra hosted the Next Steps conference to chart a roadmap to advance the UN resolution. It was shaped by CARICOM’s manifesto, the Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice,
CARICOM’s partnership with the African Union has injected fresh energy into the reparations campaign. It enables the two blocs to “speak with one voice on this matter” as Beckles stated at a recent briefing.
Shortly before cosying up to an al-Qaeda supporter, the Archbishop of Canterbury also visited Ghana, once a centre of the transatlantic slave trade. After tenuous three century-old institutional links were found to enslavement, the Church of England set up Project Spire.
This “Healing, Repair and Justice” endowment is worth £100 million. Reparations seekers could be hoping that this is just the opening offer, given that the Church Commissioners allegedly control £11billion+.
There has been some pushback against the reparations bandwagon. The United Kingdom was among 52 countries which abstained from the UN vote, stating “we must not create a hierarchy of historical atrocities.” In September, the King declined to meet a Jamaican delegation demanding reparations. But as Head of State of (currently) eight Caribbean nations, CHOGM could be far from easy for H.M.
Demands that Britain should pay reparations for the wrongs of slavery should be turned down flat. British institutions should not surrender to moral blackmail. Surely, the Church of England should know the verse from Ezekiel: “The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father.”
More than 200 years after slavery was abolished in this country and the wider Empire, today’s sons and daughters bear no responsibility for the evils of enslavement. We can acknowledge and regret its horrors, but we cannot be blamed and have nothing for which to atone.
In Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt, Professor Nigel Biggar explores why Britain is prey to exploitation over a contested past. A moral theologian, he examines the global history of the slave trade, pointing out that Britain’s role was neither unique nor leading. In relation to reparations demands, the scholarly Lord Biggar is unlikely to advise “Follow the Money.”
In fact, follow $107.8 trillion. In 2023 a report by the Brattle Group quantified the reparations it considered owed by countries which participated in transatlantic chattel slavery. Britain’s bill is $24.011 trillion.
With such eye-watering sums involved, it is unsurprising that a reparative justice industrial complex is emerging. It is eager to exploit anti-colonial sentiment, as well as the never-ending white liberal guilt over racism.
Reparative justice campaigners rarely acknowledge Britain’s role in ending the slave trade in much of the world. They are silent on the Royal Navy’s role. They refuse to consider the centuries of enslavement of Africans by Arab traders, commemorated in Zanzibar.
Those hoping to chisel billions out of Britain seem keen to blame “extractive colonialism” for any of the Caribbean region’s current woes. They excuse any inept governance since independence. They deprive nations of agency and lump them together, as if there were no difference between, say, Jamaica and CARICOM associate the Cayman Islands (GDP per capita $8,000 and $104,000 respectively, according to the World Bank)
On Wednesday a legal challenge began to halt Project Spire.
This week, PM Burnham claimed that it was “clear” that Russian disinformation was involved in the Brexit vote. Dodgy history is also toxic and socially divisive – and could also be peddled by hostile state actors to undermine Britain. Will the new National Centre for Information Defence be looking into this?
In The Subjection of Women (1869), John Stuart Mill observed “There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.” For most of history, women have been viewed men’s property; disenfranchised, economically disadvantaged and legally discriminated against.
Should today’s women accept the past is immutable, embrace the present and continue to build a better future for themselves? Or jump on the reparations bandwagon, which is going nowhere but backwards to the 18th century?