'Pay up': Meet the activists demanding UK reparations for slavery

Andy Burnham and the King have almost apologised this week for Britain’s role in the Atlantic slave trade, but even if they did, that "wouldn’t be enough" activists have said, The National notes.

Pressure has been mounting in recent years from campaigners who not only want an apology, but are also calling for reparations.

The slave trade forcibly transported up to 12 million Africans to the Americas where most were forced to work in the production of commodities like sugar, coffee, cotton and tobacco.

This week, the Prime Minister said he is “open” to calls for Britain to formally apologise for its role in the slave trade, but ruled out considering financial reparations.

The King told Commonwealth leaders the transatlantic slave trade “fills my heart with horror and my soul with the most profound personal sorrow,” but did not offer an apology.

The Repair Campaign - a social movement for reparatory justice in the Caribbean, said: “Former colonial powers are reluctant to apologise formally for their role in the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans as many believe this will incur culpability and may pave the way for an obligation to pay financial reparations.

“Instead, they sometimes offer expressions of ‘regret’ or ‘deep sorrow,’ which doesn’t go far enough to redress the harms caused.”

The Repair Campaign said: “Genocide, chattel enslavement and colonialism inflicted deep and enduring damage on the people of the Caribbean, while providing significant financial benefits to the colonisers."

Lord Marvin Rees, adviser to The Repair Campaign, told The National: “The same clubs of people who exploited enslaved Africans exploited the impoverished British working class. They built their wealth on such exploitation. They didn’t share it with the white working class.

“In fact, they used that wealth to shore up their status and their power over them. And there are countless institutions and families whose contemporary wealth is traceable back to that time.”

Weyman Bennett from Stand Up To Racism told The National that both the King and Burnham “have to say that they condemn any crime and accept that there was an injustice which was done, I don't see what's so hard about that.”

Bennett said: “If you look at most of the [big British institutions like] Lloyds of London, Barclays Bank, Shell, many of the oil companies – if you look at the infrastructure that went into the industrial revolution, many of [those people] were the fabulously wealthy slaver class. 

“They were the oil class of their time. They were the Epsteins of their time. They fully profited from slavery – even today, if you look inside Parliament, at Drake Hall, you see that there are people who are descendants of those people that owned the plantations that are fabulously wealthy now.”

Campaigners said that part of the problem is not just how UK leaders talk about the slave trade, but its absence from school curriculum and national narratives.

Graham Smith, chief executive of Republic, told The National that the King’s position is “pretty feeble” and that he has “ducked an apology again with empty words [and this] stuff from the royals is just rather insulting to people in the Caribbean”. 

Smith said: “We have a significant problem in the UK in the sense of how we not just talk about the slave trade, but the Empire generally, and also the monarchy.

“We are not properly taught about the impact of what I would call the gangster class. We call it the aristocracy, but they're a gangster class who had us captured for centuries, and who exploited not just people around the world, but also people in the UK.”

Conditions for the slaves were terrible during the sea journey across the Atlantic where it is estimated that 3.5 million died during transport. But conditions didn’t get much better or safer once the slaves reached their destination. 

In Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean, 800,000 slaves were transported to the island between 1680 and 1776; but by the end of that period only 290,000 were left, with many being recorded as “dying within days of their arrival.”

Campaigners told The National that the slave plantations brought enormous wealth to the British Empire and were defended fiercely by the Royal Navy. 

Bennet from SUTR said: “Jamaica made more wealth than all the 13 colonies of the Americas put together. At one time Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were the most profitable centres in the world, and that enormous wealth was concentrated and centralised within the British Empire, and used to furnish the continued expansion of it.”

Gonsalves, from The Repair Campaign, is the former Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and a ‘founding father’ of the Caribbean reparations movement.

“In Britain, we have a progressive law that says if you steal, you have to give reparations, you're not allowed to profit from it. Why should those criminals who were super criminals at that time be allowed to be exempt from the same law?”

Gonsalves from The Repair Campaign said: “Britain and other European colonial powers built their wealth on the labour of enslaved Africans during this period.”

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