Britain Must Apologise and Pay Reparations for Transatlantic Slavery, Not Just Offer Debt Relief

The recent indication from UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer that he is open to a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans and chattel enslavement marks a significant, if overdue, shift. On the surface, this represents progress. Only a full, formal apology can begin to heal the wounds and address the cultural destruction wrought by colonialism, chattel slavery, and systemic oppression.

The Caribbean Community’s Reparations Commission (CRC of CARICOM) has long sought dialogue on apology and reparations, only to be met with expressions of “deep sorrow and regret” that stop short of accountability. In 2015, then-Prime Minister David Cameron explicitly rejected reparations calls, instead proposing a £25 million UK-funded prison in Jamaica to facilitate the deportation of Jamaican nationals—a proposal that sparked widespread outrage.

This latest concession appears driven by diplomatic necessity. With King Charles III addressing the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Antigua amid civil society protests demanding justice, the Prime Minister’s rhetoric seems calibrated to manage the moment rather than confront the history.

The distinction matters. As CARICOM’s Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice makes clear, an apology is not merely symbolic; it is a formal gesture of goodwill that acknowledges shared history, accepts responsibility for crimes against humanity, commits to non-repetition, and pledges to repair the harms inflicted on victims and their descendants. It constitutes an ethical and legal recognition that present-day inequalities and racial injustices are rooted in centuries of criminal conduct—including complicity in native genocide, the perpetuation of chattel slavery, and violent colonisation.

Yet an apology without material repair is hollow. The Prime Minister’s suggested “drive on debt”—improved repayment conditions for poor nations—falls woefully short. It misdiagnoses the debt. The true obligation is not what the Global South owes the West, but what the West extracted from the Global South.

Sir Arthur Lewis, the architect of the modern Caribbean reparations movement, framed this unequivocally in his 1939 work Labour in the West Indies: The Birth of a Workers’ Movement: “It is the British who by their action in past centuries are responsible for the presence in these islands of the majority of their inhabitants, whose ancestors as enslaved persons contributed millions to the wealth of Great Britain.” He identified over 200 years of unpaid labour as “a debt that must be repaid—and which the British have yet to repay.”

That “black debt” remains unacknowledged. Britain continues to deny responsibility despite overwhelming quantitative and qualitative evidence of its enrichment through chattel slavery. Lewis argued that the economic transformation of the colonies was impossible without the coloniser honouring this debt—a principle echoed in CARICOM’s Ten Point Plan, Ghana’s forthcoming 2026 UN Resolution, and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination’s General Recommendation No. 40.

Together, these frameworks affirm that the transatlantic trafficking and chattel enslavement of Africans “broke the world.” They created an unprecedented racialised regime of violence and governance that reduced Africans and their descendants to permanent, non-human property, excluded them from civic life, and established the blueprint for modern global power structures and enduring hierarchies of race and gender.

Descendants living with these legacies do not seek better loan terms. We seek a conversation on actual reparations: debt cancellation grounded in the lingering realities of colonialism, and monetary compensation for centuries of extracted wealth.

Confronting the “complicated history” the Prime Minister references requires paying for the wrongs of chattel slavery—a matter that is, in fact, not complicated at all. That conversation must also correct the historical record: abolition was driven not by British benevolence, but by the resistance of enslaved people like Chief Takyi in Jamaica and Black revolutionaries in Haiti and across the Americas.

Former colonisers may dispute that African jurisprudence always deemed trafficking and chattel enslavement criminal. But from the perspective of former colonies and African peoples, a crime does not expire; it is carried forward until justice is achieved.

The UK may intend to launch a new debt initiative for poor countries. But we reject the premise that a nation that profited from chattel slavery can discharge its obligation through restructured repayments. We demand debt cancellation and monetary compensation. It is time for Britain to apologise—and to pay its debt.

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