UK to face ‘astonishing’ slavery reparation claims – media

Caribbean governments are planning to raise the issue of compensation for the slave trade at the upcoming Commonwealth summit, the Daily Mail reports

A group of Caribbean countries will demand reparations amounting to “an astonishing £200 billion” ($261 billion) from King Charles III and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer for the transatlantic slave trade at the upcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the Daily Mail claimed on Saturday. 

The nations reportedly agreed unanimously to broach the subject of slaveholding practices at the biennial gathering that will be hosted by Samoa on October 21.

The tabloid wrote that Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, which is leading the charge on the issue of reparations among the West Indies states, met King Charles in London earlier this month for negotiations ahead of the 56-nation summit. Mottley reportedly praised the monarch for declaring two years ago that slavery is “a conversation whose time has come,” although Buckingham Palace hasn’t unveiled further details of what were called “private discussions.”

Last month, addressing the UN General Assembly in New York, Mottley called for an additional decade to “complete the unfinished work and address the matter of reparations for slavery and colonialism.” In 2023, she urged the UK to pay $4.9 trillion in reparations for the transatlantic slave trade.

The UK has for years faced intermittent demands to pay reparations for its role in the slave trade. The calls have grown louder and more frequent in recent years in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.

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Revd Dr. Michael Banner, the dean of Trinity College Cambridge, calculated that the UK owes the Caribbean £205 billion in reparations. In 2023, research conducted by economic consulting firm Brattle Group suggested that Britain owes nearly £19 trillion ($24 trillion) in reparations for its three-centuries-long slaveholding practices.

In August, UN judge Patrick Robinson said that the UK cannot ignore calls for slavery reparations, highlighting that the amount calculated by Brattle Group was an “underestimation” of the damage caused by the slaveholding practices. 

In April 2023, then-UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak publicly declined to apologize or offer reparations for the slave trade, saying that “trying to unpick our history is not the right way forward and is not something we will focus our energies on.”

Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade began in 1562, and by the 1730s the nation had become the world’s largest slave-trading state. The slave trade and enslaved labor in the British colonies were abolished in 1807 and 1833, respectively.