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King Charles and the slavery reparations row
Monarch and PM both stop short of apologising for Britain’s role in slave trade, and sidestep growing calls in Commonwealth for financial redress
“No one seems to want to apologise for the transatlantic slave trade, do they?” said Tom Peck in The Times. The prime minister and King Charles were both in the Caribbean for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua yesterday, a summit dominated every year by growing calls for slavery reparations.
King Charles, the head of the Commonwealth, spoke of the “monstrous injustice” of the trade that forced an estimated 12-15 million enslaved people from Africa, about 4.7 million to the Caribbean, and caused unquantifiable human suffering. It “fills my heart with horror and my soul with the most profound personal sorrow”.
But he “artfully declined” to apologise for Britain’s role. Even Andy Burnham, “one of the great apologisers of his generation”, stopped short. Of course, the problem with apologising is that sorry will “inevitably open the door to what it has always really been about” – reparations.
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It’s right and patriotic to have the “difficult conversations” that Commonwealth members have been asking for, said Burnham in The Guardian. That’s why Britain is offering a “structured dialogue” with nations affected by the slave trade.
But I do not believe financial reparations are the “right answer”. British people today shouldn’t be “liable for historical wrongs, however heinous, that happened in a different age under different laws and in which they played no personal part”.
What about those who profited from the trade? Ghana, “one of the biggest slave-trading countries”, is leading the campaign directed at Britain, which was “not the most guilty” of those countries involved, said historian Robert Tombs in The Telegraph. It’s demanding to be “compensated for its own crimes against humanity”.
Muslim countries were “arguably the cruellest” in exploiting enslaved people; Brazil, France and the US were among the biggest buyers. “If reparations are due, all these should pay them.”
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‘Meaningless attempt at appeasing’
But meaningful reparations “cannot be reduced” to the improved debt repayment conditions Burnham proposes, said Verene A. Shepherd, vice-chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission, on Al Jazeera. What we, “the descendants now living with the legacies of chattel enslavement and colonial terror”, want is debt cancellation and monetary compensation. We “reject the notion” that a country that profited from slavery should not now be held responsible. “It is time for Britain to apologise and pay its debt.”
Ultimately, sorrow without accountability is a “meaningless attempt at appeasing the ‘natives’”, said Caribbean analyst Kenneth Mohammed in The Guardian.
The Commonwealth “presents itself as an association of equal, independent nations”. If members can’t “secure meaningful engagement from Britain on one of their most consequential historical grievances”, how equal is it? The Caribbean “need not accept neocolonialism and historical amnesia” as the price of partnership.
Harriet Marsden is a senior staff writer and podcast panellist for The Week, covering world news and writing the weekly Global Digest newsletter. Before joining the site in 2023, she was a freelance journalist for seven years, working for The Guardian, The Times and The Independent among others, and regularly appearing on radio shows. In 2021, she was awarded the “journalist-at-large” fellowship by the Local Trust charity, and spent a year travelling independently to some of England’s most deprived areas to write about community activism. She has a master’s in international journalism from City University, and has also worked in Bolivia, Colombia and Spain.
