Here is something that should not need saying. You cannot spend centuries trafficking human beings, building an empire on enslaved bodies, extracting every ounce of labour and dignity from millions of Africans, compensating the enslavers when you finally decide to end the practice, and then expect a round of applause for abolition while refusing to apologise or pay a penny in reparations.

And yet here we are. Commonwealth leaders have vowed to keep seeking reparations after Reform UK announced a plan to “punish” countries demanding justice by halting their nationals’ visas. Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesperson, declared that the UK was being “ridiculed on the world stage” and that “enough is enough.”

Enough of what, exactly? Is it enough of former colonies asking for acknowledgment of centuries of brutality? Perhaps enough of Black leaders refusing to pretend the past does not shape the present. Or enough of the victims of history demanding that history be accounted for?

Arley Gill, the head of the Grenada Reparations Commission, put it perfectly: “It is not funny that they think after years of invading and colonising a people that they think a British visa for those same people is a privilege.”

The UN resolution that exposed everyone

Last month, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution spearheaded by Ghana that described the transatlantic trafficking and enslavement of Africans as “the gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations. One hundred and twenty-three member states voted in favour.

The United States, Israel and Argentina voted no. And the UK? The Labour government abstained as well.

The UK, the nation that ran the transatlantic slave trade, that transported an estimated 12 million Africans across the ocean in chains, that saw more than two million people die on the forced journey, could not bring itself to vote yes on a resolution calling that history what it is.

Kemi Badenoch, never one to miss an opportunity for performative outrage, tweeted: “Russia, China and Iran vote with others to demand trillions in reparations from UK taxpayers…and the Labour government abstain! Britain led the fight to end slavery. Why didn’t Starmer’s representative vote against this? Ignorance…or cowardice?”

The framing is familiar. According to this version of history, Britain led the fight to end slavery and should be proud of that legacy. Paying for a crime that supposedly helped eradicate? Absolutely not.

Diane Abbott, as ever, cut through the noise: “Commonwealth leaders are right. You cannot commit a monstrous crime and profit from it, then expect to get credit for ending it. Slavery demands reparations.”

One of these people understands moral accountability. The other is Kemi Badenoch.

The Reform UK fantasy

Nigel Farage, because of course he has inserted himself into this conversation, claimed that the UK spent “four decades on the high seas … driving slavery off the world’s oceans.” This is the same rhetorical move that has been deployed for centuries: look how noble we are for ending the thing we started.

Ralph Gonsalves, the former prime minister of St Vincent and Grenadines, accused Farage of “doing an imitative Trump” and “seeking another cultural wedge issue” that “will certainly isolate Britain further.” He added:

“None of us in the Caribbean who are advocating reparations would be cowed by that sort of talk. For us, the present is the past because of the legacy of underdevelopment, which can be empirically sourced to native genocide and the enslavement of African bodies.”

That last sentence is the one Reform UK does not want you to read. The present is the past. The underdevelopment of the Caribbean, the poor health outcomes, the struggling education systems, and the economic fragility are not an accident. It is not bad luck. It is the direct, documented, measurable consequence of centuries of British colonial extraction. And Reform UK wants to punish nations for pointing this out.

The hypocrisy of the visa threat

Here is where the Reform policy becomes not just morally bankrupt but actively stupid. As Nels Abbey pointed out on social media: “Putting aside the increasingly desperate racism laundering, the NHS, the prison service, the transport system, caring for our elderly, hospitality, retail, etc, are all disproportionately overreliant on people from nations with populations once enslaved by Britain. Good luck Zia.”

He is right. Since Brexit, the UK has turned again to former African, Caribbean and Asian colonies to fill skills shortages in teaching, health, social care and the Prison Service. The British economy relies on workers from the very countries Reform UK wants to punish.

Neville Watson, who was Reform UK’s only Black branch chair until he left last year, has called for reparations. He said Reform’s stance would “punish nations for raising legitimate historical claims” and compound UK skills shortages. He described a recent UK-Nigeria trade deal as a reminder that “prosperity is seated in partnership.” That deal is a £746 million loan saddling Nigeria with debt while funnelling contracts to British Steel and protecting UK jobs, leading critics to call it a classic neo-colonial “mugu deal” that benefits Britain far more than Nigeria.

The visa policy, he warned, would “tear down the very fabric of trade and diplomacy.” So Reform UK wants to cut off the very countries that provide essential workers, trade partnerships, and diplomatic relationships. All because those countries dare to ask for acknowledgment of historical crimes.

The compensation nobody talks about

Here is a detail that should make every Briton uncomfortable. When Britain abolished slavery in 1833, the government allotted £20 million, about 40 percent of all government expenditures that year, to compensate the slaveowners. Not the enslaved. The owners. Today, that sum is estimated at £17 billion. Until the 2009 bank bailout, reparations to Britain’s 46,000 slaveowners represented the largest monetary bailout in British history.

The enslaved received nothing. In fact, for four years after their liberation, they were bound under the Act to work 45 hours a week of unpaid labour for those who had hitherto enslaved them. Britain called it “apprenticeship.” As historian Kris Manjapra hauntingly explains:

Britain declared it would teach blacks how to use their freedom responsibly, and would train them out of their natural state of savagery. But this training involved continued unpaid labour for the same masters on the same plantations on which they had worked the day before.”

Who in that scenario is the real savage? The oppressor or the oppressed?

Researchers have confirmed that the ancestors of George Orwell, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sir George Gilbert Scott, and David Cameron all received significant monetary reparations after slavery’s abolition. The names that appear in the ledgers of the Slave Compensation Commission are the same English surnames that were imposed on enslaved Africans — names that were sometimes branded on their skin to mark them as property.

That is not ancient history. We are talking about the 1830s. Those events unfolded within the lifetime of Queen Victoria, whose great-great-great-grandson sits on the throne today. And yet Britain has never formally apologised. Not once. Not a single word of official apology has ever been uttered to the descendants of the enslaved.

The “Ghana sold slaves” deflection

Whenever the topic of reparations arises, someone always pops up with the same tired deflection: “Africans sold slaves too. Ghana sold slaves.”

Setting aside the fact that Ghana as a modern nation-state did not exist during the transatlantic slave trade, this argument fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the crime. Yes, African kingdoms participated in the capture and sale of prisoners of war. That is historically documented. But the transatlantic slave trade was not an African enterprise. It was a European enterprise that relied on African intermediaries, just as colonial administrations around the world relied on local collaborators.

The scale, the duration, the systemic nature, the brutality, and the enduring consequences are what make the transatlantic slave trade unique. Twelve million people transported across an ocean. Two million dead on the journey. Centuries of chattel slavery where human beings were treated as breeding stock and property. A racial hierarchy constructed specifically to justify this inhumanity. And then, after abolition, a continuing system of colonial extraction that left formerly enslaved nations deliberately underdeveloped.

Blaming African participants for the European trade is like blaming a cashier for the policies of the bank that employs them. It ignores who held power, who set the terms, and who profited most.

As Hilary Beckles, the chair of Caricom reparations commission, said:

The view seems to be that the legacy of toxic racism, the legacy of white supremacy politics is still so intense that Black people are deemed undeserving” of reparations. “Crimes against humanity have been committed against so many people on this planet and most have now received some form of apology, reparations. The idea the victims of an enormous crime calling for justice are to be doubly punished is tragic.”

The Labour government’s tightrope

Keir Starmer has previously said the UK would not pay reparations. But No 10 has indicated the country could support some forms of reparatory justice, such as restructuring financial institutions and debt relief. This is the classic British approach: acknowledge enough to seem reasonable, commit to nothing that would require actual resources or accountability.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the Labour MP and chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afrikan Reparations, called Reform’s policy a “ridiculous provocation.” She added: “Reparatory justice was never simply about money. The demand is for acknowledgment, truth-telling and structural repair. Reform have either failed to grasp that, or chosen to ignore it. What they are effectively doing is threatening the descendants of the enslaved for insisting the transatlantic slave trade be recognised as a crime against humanity. Some still believe they sit at the head of a table the rest of the world was never invited to. The world is changing.”

Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South, put it even more starkly:

“The total death toll of slavery may exceed 20 million. We confront that history honestly not as an act of self-flagellation but because the alternative — the insistence that power never has to account for itself — is exactly the logic that makes atrocities possible in every generation.”

That is the heart of it. Accountability is not about guilt. It is about breaking the cycle. Power that never accounts for itself becomes power that repeats its worst instincts.

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