| Hugh Muir: The former colonies are losing out to Europe Sometimes it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry with David Cameron. First, he tells the Caribbean countries that he won’t countenance an apology or compensation for slavery. We must look forward not back, he says. Which is easy for him personally as his family benefited directly from the slavery past, and when it was over, was well compensated for it too. And the future as he sees it has nothing to do with due paying, but rather providing British money to build a new jail so that we can repatriate more Jamaican criminals from prisons here. Big guy, big heart, big Dave. Should the rich nations that became rich by plundering and stunting other nations continue to recognise that fact? Of course they should. And in some ways, we used to do that via trade agreements and special relationships with the former colonies. But we have other priorities now. I’m holding my nose as I write this, but Nigel Farage is right when he says that our ties with Europe complicate the relationship we have with the former colonies. We make trade deals via Europe. When the US strikes trade deals with Europe, it is keen to ensure that these aren’t undermined by historical arrangements we might have with the former colonies. We have a choice to make. The colonies lose out. We are prisoners of terminology. Even if we resolved to reconnect with the former colonies, and even if we threw off this notion that the debt is paid because it all happened a long time ago and we are fed up of paying it, we still could not psychologically come to terms with paying reparations. What would that say about our Britain? All the monuments, buildings, streets, institutions, wealthy bloodlines that emerged from the bloody trade. Not to mention the legal ramifications, which would be immense. That may not be a happy moral position, but it is life as it is. Much worse is the current approach that says the whole thing is settled, thus there is no need to maintain the trade and cultural ties that at least acknowledged a shared if bloody history. That heaps insult on still unmanageable injury. Reni Eddo-Lodge: It’s naive to think the past is irrelevant to today Britain made money from the dehumanisation of black bodies, and it is right that black bodies demand that money back. The “historic links” between the UK and Jamaica that Cameron proudly boasts of are rooted in violent racist colonialism. When Britain ended the slave trade, it wasn’t the enslaved who received compensation for their suffering – instead, it was slave owners. Cameron’s distant relatives received amounts equivalent to millions today. Some might insist that what his long dead relatives did 200 years ago is no longer relevant, but it’s naive to think that the past has nothing to do with the shape of today. Moreover, this is less to do with David Cameron as a private individual and more to do with David Cameron as the leader of a nation – a nation that has never fully apologised for its key role in the transatlantic slave trade. The closest we’ve ever come to a full apology was Tony Blair’s “deep sorrow” almost a decade ago. Cameron’s decision to dodge questions from the Jamaican press signals a prime minister running scared of facing the consequences on Britain’s whitewashed history, in which the British were always the heroes and never the bad guys. How can he be so eager to move forward with Jamaicans, if he’s not willing to be honest about the past? Esther Stanford-Xosei: It’s not just about money, we want justice Reparations cannot be reduced to money. The media is refusing to hear and amplify this essential message. Instead, there is an attempt to impose on us, the descendants of the enslaved, a definition of reparations where it is synonymous with compensation, which is not accepted by the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (Ismar). This point was emphasised in the 1993 Abuja Reparations Declaration. Now more than ever, our people’s reparations message is making greater sense, given recent developments in British politics. We mean the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the Labour party and his message of redistribution of wealth, which is consistent with our approach to securing reparatory justice. Together with Corbyn’s activists, we are working to ensure that an autonomous Afrikan Heritage Community for National Self-Determination (AHC-NSD) develops in Britain, which will ensure that Labour’s agenda for redistribution of wealth is done locally, nationally and internationally. Wealth criminally expropriated from the enslaved people and their descendants must be redistributed. This is the reparatory justice we demand. Ismar’s campaign for the establishment of a UK all-party commission for truth and reparatory justice is one important way forward. |