Britain, slavery, and the reparations debate

‘Global calls for reparations are only growing louder.' So declared¹ Hilary Beckles, the Chair of CARICOM’s Reparations Commission, and he is right. Both the Royal Family and the prime minister now seem unable to travel to certain parts of the Commonwealth without being dogged and browbeaten with demands for slavery reparations. Nor can they safely escape back to Britain to evade the demands—a growing caucus² of Labour MPs are mounting pressure on their leader to address the issue.

The demands themselves are self-evidently ridiculous; a report from the University of the West Indies claimed³ Britain owed £18 trillion in reparations, which amounts to more than eight times Britain’s current GDP. There is no feasible way Britain could ever meet those demands, which is perhaps the point.

Response has so far focused on the impracticalities of such a scheme. Chancellor Rachel Reeves dismissed⁴ reparations on the basis that Britain lacks the money for any such payments. Others have highlighted how African chiefs and Arab slavers benefitted from the trade and how the principle of historical reparations could lead to a never-ending spiral of demands over historic injustices. Some point to the fact that slavery still takes place today, arguing that that ought to take priority over historic instances.

The problem with all these responses is that they take at face value the moral righteousness of the call for reparations and then construct some excuse or other as to why it is not an actionable demand.

But conceding the moral argument and relying on impracticalities to refute reparations will only empower its advocates, who will always find workarounds to practical objections. Sure, the full payment cannot be afforded now, or African chiefs and Arab states should be made to pay too, or all historical injustices should be addressed eventually, but we have to start somewhere, so why not lead the way and start now with just a few billion? For a political class obsessed with the status of being ‘world leaders’ in areas such as climate change, the opportunity to be world leaders in reparatory justice may prove all too alluring.

To make the demands for reparations cease, it is important to attack the core argument head-on and confidently refute it. Skirting around the issue or attempting to divert attention from the core moral complaint only pushes the problem down the line.

The argument for reparations is disarmingly simple. A near-universally agreed upon moral injustice took place in the form of slavery, and that injustice caused a considerable amount of harm. Therefore, to right this moral wrong, reparations should be paid to those who suffered the harm in order for justice to be restored. Put like that, it all seems rather straightforward. But even a modicum of scrutiny reveals the case for historical reparations to be shaky, to say the least.

The most glaring problem is that those who actually suffered through slavery are now long dead. There is no form of reparatory justice that can reach beyond the grave, meaning the recipients of reparations would be the descendants of the aggrieved parties, two centuries removed from the moral crime of slavery.

Just as the slaves themselves are long dead, so are the slavers and shareholders who were directly morally culpable for the practice. There is nobody alive today who could be held personally morally culpable for the injustice that took place.

The case for reparations therefore hinges on an interpretation of justice that goes beyond moral culpability. Sure, nobody in Britain today is morally responsible for slavery, but through the accumulated capital extracted from slavery two centuries ago, they still benefit from the institution, the argument goes. The pro-reparations position therefore takes historical guilt out of the equation, positing that the moral onus for reparations is borne from the current-day benefits Britain enjoys, which are only possible thanks to the historic injustice of slavery.

The guiding moral principle here is the idea that those who enjoy the material benefits of a past injustice have a moral obligation of restitution for that injustice, even if they themselves did not perpetrate it. It is on this basis that Hilary Beckles made his claim that all Britons are collectively liable to pay reparations, since the exploitation of slaves in the Caribbean helped fund economic development in Britain, creating a direct line of causation between the profits made from slavery and the success of major industries in Britain, which later made the country rich.

Immediately, this line of reasoning encounters a key problem. Beckles’ otherwise wide-ranging interpretation of who benefitted from the downstream consequences of slavery is artificially limited to Britain alone. The downstream benefits of slavery, which were initially created in Britain, are by no means today limited to just British people. In fact, the innovations and advancements that came from Britain have had a transformational effect in improving human welfare the world over. From the steam engine to vaccinations to the telephone and so much more, the benefits to the welfare of those in the Caribbean that came directly out of Britain are incalculably high.

In other words, if Britain got rich from slavery, that money did not stay here. It helped others around the world prosper, too—including in the Caribbean. In today’s globalized world, very few hands are completely clean of slavery money.

Perhaps conscious that arbitrarily singling out modern-day Britons for having benefitted from the downstream benefits of slavery imposes no unique moral burden upon them, the demands for slavery reparations then muddy the moral waters by attaching a litany of further justifications for the payments.

CARICOM’s 10-Point Reparations Plan⁵ adds far more dubious claims to their reasoning for reparations, including that all kinds of current problems in Caribbean nations, from health and education outcomes to the general state of the economy, are tied to the injustice of slavery and its legacy of racism and underdevelopment. These claims amount to a series of empirically questionable grievances, though, rather than any kind of serious moral claim for justice.

The core moral justification for slavery reparations, that Britons benefit from the downstream products of slavery and are therefore uniquely responsible for financially remedying this historic wrong, is completely arbitrary in singling Britons as the sole beneficiaries. In truth, all those living in industrial societies today are indirectly benefitting from the fruits that slavery made possible—those in the Caribbean just as much as those in Britain. Our government should stop kicking the can down the road and call out reparations demands for what they are: nonsense.

This article was written by Luca Watson. Luca is a British writer.