It was only five years ago that the UK was in the middle of a profound racial reckoning. More than 260 towns and cities held protests in June and July 2020. Historians described as the most widespread anti-racist demonstrations since the abolition of slavery.
At the heart of that movement was a call for Britain not only to confront its role in transatlantic enslavement but also to pay reparations. To this day, the UK has never issued a formal apology for slavery. (In 2006, Tony Blair expressed “deep sorrow” and said “we are sorry” at a 2007 press conference, but Caribbean nations did not recognise this as an official apology from the state.)
Several British institutions did act in 2020. The Bank of England issued an apology, while Lloyd’s of London, Greene King and the Church of England went further, pledging to pay reparations. The Guardian also apologised and committed to a programme of restorative justice, as well as launched the Cotton Capital series. Yet what looked like the beginning of a reckoning soon stalled. The trickle of apologies and pledges never grew into a wave; instead, an intense backlash ensured it petered out.
It might be tempting to think the momentum around reparations has long faded. But as a recent report by the leading anti-racist thinktank the Runnymede Trust shows, historians and activists such as Kojo Koram, who contributed to the report, keep pressing the issue.
“People in the government should be more attuned to because it is clearly not going away,” Koram told me. “Not in the Caribbean, and not here in the UK. The movement is only gaining momentum.”
In debt to the enslavers
The figures attached to reparations are staggering. One authoritative study published in 2023, the Brattle Group’s Report on Reparations for Transatlantic Chattel Slavery, concluded that the UK alone would owe $24tn (£18.8tn) in reparations across 14 countries.
Instead of treating those numbers as a measure of the vast wealth Britain extracted, not to mention the brutal cost in human lives, many seize on them as proof that reparations are impossible, unprecedented and even absurd.
But as Koram pointed out to me, Britain has already paid reparations for slavery. It just paid them to the enslavers. “When slavery was abolished, the people who owned “property” – of course that property was living, breathing human beings: men, women and children with their own hopes and dreams just like all of us – considered abolition to be an injustice to them. They argued they were due compensation for the loss of their “property”, Koram said.
The British government agreed. It borrowed £20m to pay enslavers, 40% of the Treasury’s annual income, according to Tax Justice UK, equivalent to £450bn today.
Taxpayers in the UK footed those payments until 2015, a fact the Treasury once, bizarrely, tweeted about with pride.
Architecture of inequality
When Keir Starmer was pressed on reparations, he focused on “current future-facing challenges” such as climate resilience and debt restructuring. He has kept well away from the topic since.
It was frustrating to watch Britain’s political class dismiss the issue so quickly, especially when even a cursory glance at the demands by campaigners shows that the very challenges Starmer highlights are at the heart of the reparations movement.
“When we talk about reparative justice, we are not just talking about financial compensation for historical wrongs. We are also talking about restructuring the architecture of global power dynamics, which continue to shape contemporary issues,” Koram told me.
He uses climate policy as an example. “The question becomes: ‘How can we facilitate arrangements between the global north and the global south that balance out contribution towards the climate crisis, and can lead to a more sustainable future.’ So it’s not just about the past, it’s about the future.”
He added that the demand for reparative justice takes many forms, including restructuring economic inequalities, such as tackling the global debt crisis or the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) that restrict Caribbean economies. It could also mean changing legal structures, for example that Jamaica’s final court of appeal is still the UK’s Privy Council, an institution most people in Britain are barely aware of, Koram said.
“So it’s trying to rewire a lot of that architecture of inequality, which is just as valuable of a reparative justice initiative as monetary figures.”
The past is never dead
Some suggest there is no clear plan for reparations, but there are several models. For example, Caricom, the regional organisation representing Caribbean countries, has a 10-point framework. It calls for measures such as establishing museums and research centres, addressing the Caribbean’s chronic disease crisis, supporting efforts to eradicate illiteracy, ensuring young people gain access to science and technology, and cancelling historic debts.
This framework shows, powerfully, the links between the past and the future. Which is why, whenever I write about transatlantic slavery and the call for reparations, I think of William Faulkner’s famous line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” What happens in our past, recent and historic, has a way of staying with us.
This is the point Koram made when I asked what he would say to Britons who believe what happened 200 years ago is ancient history, and we need to move on. “People often assume that when we’re talking about reparations, we’re talking about dealing with people in red coats and muskets and what wrongs happened in the early 18th century or even late 17th century. But the people in the Caribbean are not talking about their issues of what happened 300 or 400 years ago, they’re talking about how those issues connect to many of the continuing flows of wealth and flows of capital, even today,” he said.
Koram argued that Caribbean countries such as Jamaica or Barbados are still suffering the economic consequences of British enslavement and colonisation. “That attempt to try and create this separation between the past and the present doesn’t really stand up on interrogation.”
It goes far beyond economic systems. Slavery shaped ideas of what it means to be human. Entire populations were legally defined as non-human to justify their trafficking and enslavement. That dehumanisation required an ideology, one whose echoes continue to fuel injustice today.
“The way people are treated by different institutions of power – the police, the prison system, the immigration system, the education system – are ideas about who belongs, who we see as intelligent, who we see as aggressive and violent” Kojo said. Those ideas, he explained, were first forged during transatlantic slavery.
Perhaps that is why it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate calls for racial equality from demands for reparative justice.
