Keir Starmer will this week face calls for reparations over the UK’s role in slavery and colonialism.
The PM is set to meet Commonwealth heads of Government in Samoa – where there are growing demands for reparatory justice. It comes after King Charles, who will also be at the summit, was confronted by an Australian politician who told him: “This is not your land.”
Lidia Thorpe, an Aboriginal Australian independent senator, accused the royals of “committing genocide” as she was hauled out by royal protection officers. The monarch has been met with protesters during his visit to Australia ahead of the Commonwealth leaders’ summit – with activists demanding the UK negotiates with the Aboriginal people over reparations.
Mr Starmer also faces pressure within the Labour fold to address Britain’s colonial history and to discuss future payments to affected nations. Several MPs have said it is time the UK faces its “moral duty” to do so. At the weekend Bahamas prime minister Philip Davis said: “The time has come to have real dialogue about how we address these historical wrongs.”
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All three candidates to become the Commonwealth’s new Secretary General have said they support the move. It comes after a bombshell report headed by UN judge Patrick Robinson last year concluded that the UK owed more than £18trillion in reparations due to its historic role in slavery.
He told The Guardian: “They cannot continue to ignore the greatest atrocity, signifying man’s inhumanity to man. They cannot continue to ignore it.
“Reparations have been paid for other wrongs and obviously far more quickly, far more speedily than reparations for what I consider the greatest atrocity and crime in the history of mankind: transatlantic chattel slavery.”
Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy was among a group within the party saying the PM must be open to discuss the matter. She told The Guardian: “The UK has both a moral and legal duty to address the injustices of the past. If reparations is on the agenda for Commonwealth countries then the UK government must be willing to discuss it.
“Refusing to address our role speaks volumes about the regard in which we hold people who still live with the impact of enslavement and colonialism.”
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Last year Labour MP Clive Lewis told MPs that Britain must pay reparations to former Caribbean colonies subjected to “400 years of the most hideous abuse” or it will be guilty of “collusion” with slavery. He urged the Government to follow the example of a wealthy British family who apologised for their ancestor’s exploitation in Grenada by pledging to fund community projects.
He pointed out that former slave owners were awarded billions of pounds in today’s money in compensation – with the last payment made in 2015. “It was the slavers and the slaves themselves who received the vast sums – billions in today’s money… they only finished paying it off in 2015, Mr Lewis said.
“Just think about that. The people who for 400 years have been brutalised who came to rebuild this country paid their taxes to pay their former slave masters.” And Mr Lewis praised the wealthy Trevelyan family, whose ancestors were compensated when slavery was abolished in 1833 – but the 1,000 people they “owned” in Grenada were not.
Last year a Labour spokesman told The Mirror: “We don’t support reparations.”