Editorial | Burnham and reparations

Britain may not yet be fully seized of its moral and legal obligation to pay reparations for its role in the racialised chattel slavery of Africans. However, Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s recent shift on the issue is a welcome development, even if it is partly aimed at shoring up the UK’s vulnerable position in an increasingly hostile global environment.

Uncertain about its “special relationship” with the United States under the Trump presidency, with its economy still hurting from Brexit, facing fiscal challenges, declining productivity and slow growth at home, and being an increasingly marginal player on the global stage, Britain can ill afford also to have on its flanks a peeved and aggressive Commonwealth, the majority of whose members are African and Caribbean nations. These are the victims of slavery.

Moreover, the 56-member Commonwealth potentially opens opportunities for building trade and investment relationships outside the shadow of the United States and the whimsical imposition of tariffs, as has been the wont of President Donald Trump.

As Mr Burnham articulated in an op-ed column in The Guardian last week, “in an increasingly divided and dangerous world” the Commonwealth is vital to British interests.

Added the prime minister: “Together we can face down shared challenges. We can seize opportunities for trade and economic collaboration. We can strengthen our respective countries and share our values to build a safer world for us all.”

APOLOGY, NOT REPARATIONS?

That is the context in which Mr Burnham declared, on the eve of the Commonwealth Summit, which concludes in Antigua and Barbuda today, his willingness to consider a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and to offer “a structured dialogue with those affected by” it. The UK subsequently expanded on this, saying it would seek the help of countries that were victims of slavery in fashioning a mutually agreeable apology.

However, the prime minister, as has his foreign minister, rejected, in polite terms, the idea of reparations, arguing that the British people of today could not be “held liable for historical wrongs, however heinous, that happened in a different age under different laws and in which they played no personal part”.

Kemi Badenoch, the black leader of the Conservative Party, who is of Nigerian descent, perhaps understandably opposes even the idea of an apology. It would, she claimed, be used as a lever to wedge open the door to demands for cash.

Maybe the British can conjure up, in time, a passable argument against reparatory justice for what, earlier this year, a United Nations resolution characterised as “the gravest crime against humanity” and “the most inhumane and enduring injustice against humanity”.

But it is a bit rich to argue that today’s Britons ought to be immune from liability for the actions of their forebears and a lineal state. Indeed, it was only in 2015, when around 85 per cent of the UK’s current population was alive, that the Treasury completed payment on the £20-million bond the British government issued to compensate slave owners for their chattel-African slaves. As a share of Britain’s GDP, that would represent between £17 billion and £20 billion today, while some analysts say the financial leverage it gave those compensated would, in today’s terms, be closer to £100 billion.

Indeed, the slave trade made many people in Britain wealthy, and several slave-owning families, along with others who profited from slavery and the slave trade, have maintained intergenerational wealth. The enslaved people in the British colonies got nothing. Many systemic problems in post-slavery societies are directly traceable to racialised chattel slavery.

Mr Burnham instead proposed a so-called “debt reset” for the Commonwealth’s “poorest and most vulnerable countries”, which face their highest debt ratios in a quarter of a century. Interest payments squeeze their capacity to finance basic services.

“I want to launch a new drive on debt, working with our global partners to help those countries repay over a longer time period and with better rates,” Mr Burnham said.

The former British prime minister, Gordon Brown, has been asked to help with the project, which carries echoes of Mr Brown’s initiative in 1996, when he was the UK’s chancellor, that promoted global debt relief for heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC).

MORE COMPLEX ISSUES NOW

The HIPC Initiative did provide some debt write-off, with value to some of the world’s poorest countries. However, it did not reform the global financial architecture that discriminates against developing countries, which face more complex issues today, with respect to climate change and a ruptured global order, than they did three decades ago.

While Mr Burnham’s proposal is welcome, he is also urged to engage robustly and throw Britain’s weight behind Mia Mottley’s Bridgetown Initiative for global financial reform and the mobilisation of adequate resources to help developing countries adapt to climate change. Such projects are different from the obligations of reparatory justice.

A START, BUT NOT ENOUGH

Nonetheless, Andy Burnham has gone further than any of his predecessors in demonstrating a willingness to talk frankly with the victims of the slave trade and racialised chattel slavery. That counts for something. Now he must go further.

His potential reward is a Commonwealth that helps to insulate Britain from the worst effects of an unkind global environment in which old certainties no longer exist.