Brandon To is a political researcher and commentator who has researched for the Conservative Shadow Cabinet. Originally from Hong Kong, he writes primarily on immigration, crime and the economy.
This week, the King is in Antigua for the Commonwealth summit – the last leg of his Caribbean tour. Before he landed, Guyana’s President asked for an apology. Jamaica has lodged a $10bn reparations petition in London, addressed to the King himself. The question of Britain’s historical debt has come back like a boomerang: however far you throw it, it always returns.
I have a slightly unusual seat for this debate. I grew up in Hong Kong, one of the last major territories of the British Empire. I am not starry-eyed about colonial rule. For most of its 150 years under Britain, Hong Kong had little say in who governed it. But Britain also left behind common law, independent courts and a civil service that worked. I have since watched what happens to a city when those things are taken away.
So I did not come to Britain thinking its history was spotless. I came knowing it wasn’t, and decided its institutions and values were worth joining anyway.
No serious person denies the horror of the transatlantic slave trade, or Britain’s part in it. Millions of Africans were shipped across the Atlantic and exploited, and Britain grew rich as a result of it. But Britain also abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery across most of its empire in 1833, then spent decades using the Royal Navy to stop others. Both of these facts are are true. An honest country can hold both.
My problem with reparations is not that the history is made up. It is that nobody can tell me where they end. Who pays, to whom, how much, and when is the debt settled? Without answers, reparations stop being a settlement and become a standing order on the Treasury, paid by taxpayers born two centuries after abolition. And much has shaped Caribbean economies in the decades since independence, not all of it decided in London.
None of this means turning our backs on the Caribbean. Britain should keep investing in the region through trade, education and climate resilience, because a prosperous Caribbean is in our interest as well as theirs. There is a difference between helping a country build its future and paying it, indefinitely, for the past.
But the bigger cost of permanent apology is not the bill. It is what it does to us. Teach British children to be ashamed of their history, and they will grow up with nothing they feel proud enough to pass on. The numbers suggest that is already happening. According to the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, the share of people proud of Britain’s history fell from 86 per cent in 2013 to 64 per cent in 2023.
You can see it in the classroom too. In July 2025, Courtney Wright, a 12-year-old from Rugby, turned up to her school’s Culture Day in a Union flag dress, with a speech about British culture ready to go. Every culture was welcomed that day except British, which was apparently too extreme for a British school. She was taken out of lessons and kept in reception until her dad came to pick her up.
This was just the tip of an iceberg. In 2020 the BBC planned to drop the words to Rule, Britannia! at the Last Night of the Proms, until a public outcry forced a U-turn. In 2021, Pimlico Academy in London took down its Union flag after pupil protests.
The starkest case, however, is Tower Hamlets. When Palestinian flags went up on its lampposts in October 2023, the council left them there for months, worried that taking them down might “destabilise community cohesion“. They only came down in March 2024, after a legal threat. But then, in August 2025, the Union Jack and St George’s flags appeared on the same lampposts, and the council suddenly rediscovered its passion for routine maintenance, promising to remove them “as soon as possible“. Other councils followed, with Oxfordshire spending more than £15,000 before heading to the High Court.
We can sympathise with Gaza; we can doubt some of the people who put the Union Jack up, but we need to ask: Why is the Union Jack the flag a British council moves fastest to take down?
It’s something I find very unique about Britain. In most other countries, those who were born in them are usually the most patriotic to their homeland. In Britain though, we have lots of ‘Britons’ who are so embarrassed about being British, that I sometimes wonder whether I’m the one who was born and grew up here.
This is where it stops being a culture-war episode and becomes a real policy problem. The BSA survey has some good news: the share of people who think you must be born here to be truly British has fallen from 74 per cent to 55 per cent. Britishness is increasingly something you can join. But you cannot join a club that is too embarrassed to say what it stands for.
If we cannot proudly say that the rule of law, free speech, democracy and equality before the law are British, and worth signing up to, newcomers will reasonably conclude there is nothing in particular to integrate into.
Respect for these things should not be controversial. It is the bare minimum of being British. I chose to embrace them. Surely Britain can too.
The King’s tour is a chance to talk about slavery with seriousness and humility. It should not become another round of an apology that never ends, or shaming of our own British identity. Teach the history honestly, judge specific claims on their merits, and build partnerships that help people today.
Britain owes its past an honest account. It doesn’t owe its future an endless apology.