By Brian Tamuka Kagoro
Introduction: The Reparations Question Arrives in Downing Street
The reparations question has moved, in the space of roughly a decade, from the margins of activist politics to the centre of the diplomatic agenda the British government must manage. In 2013 CARICOM established its Reparations Commission; in 2014 it adopted a Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice. In February 2025 the African Union’s Assembly formally qualified slavery, deportation and colonisation as crimes against humanity and genocide against the peoples of Africa, with all 55 member states concurring. The AU designated 2025 the Year of Reparations and 2026–2035 the Decade of Reparations, mandating Ghana’s President Mahama as continental champion. The March 2026 UN resolution, while non-binding, calls on member states to enter “inclusive, good-faith dialogue” on reparatory justice encompassing apology, restitution, compensation, rehabilitation and guarantees of non-repetition.
This creates a sharply defined political problem for the Burnham government and an equally defined line of attack for the Badenoch opposition. Badenoch has consistently treated reparations as an illegitimate claim on present-day Britons — part of what she frames as an apologetic, self-flagellating reading of national history — and has argued that Britain’s relationship with Africa and the Caribbean should be forward-looking, based on trade and investment rather than retrospective liability. Burnham, by contrast, built much of his political identity on historic-injustice campaigns — Hillsborough, the contaminated blood scandal — and his party’s own materials describe him as committed to “righting the wrongs of the historic injustices many have faced”. Three popular arguments recur in the British debate and deserve rigorous treatment: first, that African chiefs sold people into slavery, which supposedly dissolves European liability; second, that today’s British taxpayer bears no responsibility for events two centuries past; third, that Britain can discharge whatever residue of obligation exists by maintaining or modestly increasing investment in Africa and the Caribbean. This essay subjects each to historical, legal and political-economic scrutiny.
- The Historical and Economic Record: What Is Actually Being Claimed About
Any serious discussion must begin with magnitudes. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database records approximately 12.5 million Africans embarked on slave ships between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, of whom roughly 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage; mortality at sea alone is estimated at 1.8 million. British and British colonial vessels carried approximately 3.1 million of the embarked — more than any other nation after Portugal — making Britain, by the eighteenth century, the Atlantic’s leading slave-trading power. At emancipation in the 1830s, roughly 800,000 people were held in chattel slavery in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, Mauritius and the Cape.
The economic architecture is equally well documented. Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944) argued that slave-trade and plantation profits substantially financed British industrialization — a thesis long contested in its strong form but substantially rehabilitated in moderated versions by Joseph Inikori (Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England , 2002) and by Klas Rönnbäck’s econometric work estimating slavery-linked activity’s contribution to British national income. The plantation complex was not peripheral: sugar was Britain’s largest single import for much of the eighteenth century; the triangular trade underpinned the growth of Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow; marine insurance (Lloyd’s), banking (the ancestors of Barclays and Lloyds), and the Bank of England itself were entangled with slave-system finance. The Bank of England has formally acknowledged these links and the £20 million compensation scheme.
The 1833 Slavery Abolition Act and the Slave Compensation Act 1837 constitute the single most important — and most legally awkward — episode in the British record. The state paid £20 million, approximately 40 per cent of total annual government expenditure, to some 46,000 claimants, exclusively slave-owners; the enslaved received nothing but an uncompensated “apprenticeship” period of further forced labour. Because the sum was raised by loan, it entered the consolidated national debt; the Treasury has confirmed in response to a Freedom of Information request that the borrowing was only fully repaid in 2015. As the Bank of England itself now concedes, this means that British taxpayers — including, as a 2020 parliamentary petition pointedly noted, descendants of the enslaved — were servicing the debt created to compensate slave-owners until within the last decade. The UCL Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project (Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and colleagues) has traced how this compensation capital flowed into railways, insurance, merchant banking, the City, country houses and cultural philanthropy — the material substrate of modern British institutional wealth.
On the harm side, Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) and Hilary Beckles’s Britain’s Black Debt (2013) document the counterfactual losses: demographic extraction from West and Central Africa at the very moment of Europe’s demographic and industrial take-off; the forcible monocultural restructuring of Caribbean economies; and a colonial fiscal model in which colonies funded their own administration and infrastructure through debt. The CARICOM Reparations Manifesto makes the contemporary connection explicitly: Caribbean states “inherited the burden of the legacies of indigenous genocide, African enslavement and colonialism” and “were forced to fund basic development through international borrowings,” leaving them with “some of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios globally”. The Brattle Group’s 2023 quantification, presented by ICJ Judge Patrick Robinson, estimated total reparations owed by former slave-trading states at US107.8 trillion, of which the UK’s share across 14 countries was put at approximately US24 trillion — a figure that is not a legal judgment but a benchmark of the scale economists attribute to uncompensated labour, lost liberty and forgone development.
III. The Legal Architecture: Domestic, Critical-Legal and International
International law. The standard official objection — deployed by the UK, US and EU in the March 2026 General Assembly debate — is non-retroactivity: the transatlantic slave trade was not prohibited by positive international law when practised, and nullum crimen sine lege bars retrospective criminalisation; European states argued against “retroactive application of international rules”. This argument has real force under the intertemporal law doctrine associated with the Island of Palmas arbitration (Huber, 1928): acts are judged by the law of their time. But it is weaker than it appears, for four reasons.
First, reparations claims need not rest on criminal liability at all; the general law of state responsibility in the ILC Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (2001) attaches to breaches of obligations, and the commentary tradition recognises that conduct violating peremptory norms (jus cogens ) engages aggravated responsibility — and the prohibition of slavery is now universally classified as jus cogens . Second, the “continuing wrongful act” doctrine (ILC Art. 14) allows claims grounded in present-day effects where the wrongful situation is maintained: this is the logic the ICJ deployed in its 2019 Chagos advisory opinion, treating Britain’s continued administration of the archipelago as an unlawful act of continuing character notwithstanding its colonial origins. Third, the 2001 Durban Declaration already characterised the slave trade as a crime against humanity, and the 2026 resolution — as Ghana’s foreign minister put it, a “considered legal and moral designation” whose “significance lies precisely in what it demands… not sympathy, not ceremony, but accountability” — consolidates an emerging customary and soft-law consensus that carries normative weight even without an enforcement mechanism. Fourth, precedent demonstrates that states can construct reparative frameworks for historical wrongs when political will exists — the 1952 Luxembourg Agreement between West Germany and Israel, the 1988 US Civil Liberties Act for interned Japanese-Americans, the New Zealand Treaty of Waitangi settlements — and that, as Accra notes, “the absence of any comparable framework for the transatlantic slave trade… is not a matter of legal impossibility. It is a matter of political will”.
English law and critical legal perspectives. Domestically, limitation periods, state immunity (reinforced by Germany v Italy , ICJ 2012) and the act-of-state doctrine foreclose conventional tort claims — a point made brutally clear in Mutua v Foreign and Commonwealth Office (the Mau Mau litigation), which settled for £19.9 million in 2013 only after years of procedural combat, and which succeeded precisely because it revealed the government’s own “migrated archive” of concealed colonial abuses. Critical legal scholars (Robert Westley; Boris Bittker’s classic The Case for Black Reparations , 1973; more recently Alasia Nuti’s Injustice and the Reproduction of History , 2019) argue that doctrinal obstacles are not neutral technicalities but part of how law reproduces historical injustice: the same legal order that treated enslaved Africans as chattels (affirmed in spirit, if hedged in letter, after Somerset v Stewart 1772 and The Slave, Grace 1827) now deploys limitation and immunity rules against their descendants. Yet English law also supplies resources for the claimants: unjust enrichment and restitution doctrine; the fiduciary analogy used in Commonwealth indigenous-title jurisprudence; and the growing body of restitution practice — the Human Tissue Act 2004’s repatriation provisions, the Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) Act 2009, and the Horniman Museum’s 2022 transfer of Benin Bronzes under Charity Commission authority — which erodes the British Museum Act 1963’s deaccession bar as a matter of political if not legal inevitability.
- The “African Chiefs Sold Their Own People” Argument
This is the most rhetorically common deflection and deserves a fair hearing before rebuttal. It is historically true that the transatlantic trade was supplied substantially through African political and commercial intermediaries. The kingdoms of Dahomey, Asante and Oyo; the afose and war-captive systems of the Bight of Benin hinterland; merchant networks along the Senegambia and the Loango coast — all participated, and some elites grew wealthy on the trade. King Ghezo of Dahomey defended the trade’s economic centrality; John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (1992) demonstrated that Europeans lacked the military capacity to seize captives at scale in the African interior and depended on African sellers.
But the argument fails as an exculpation of Britain, for several independent reasons.
First, complicity of collaborators does not extinguish the liability of principals — in any legal tradition. English criminal law has never allowed a defendant to escape by pointing to a co-conspirator: joint enterprise doctrine (clarified in R v Jogee [2016] UKSC 8) treats all parties to a joint criminal venture as liable. Tort law holds joint tortfeasors liable concurrently. Nuremberg Principle IV and the entire architecture of superior-orders and accomplice jurisprudence reject “others were guilty too” as a defence. If African elites bear historical responsibility — and African scholars and the AU itself have increasingly acknowledged this, with the Benin and Ghanaian governments engaging in their own truth processes — that is additional liability, not a reduction of Britain’s.
Second, the trade’s character was transformed by European demand. Pre-existing African servitude systems, as Paul Lovejoy’s Transformations in Slavery documents, were heterogeneous — often incorporative, kinship-based, non-hereditary and non-racialised. The Atlantic system was something new in world history: hereditary, racialised, industrial chattel slavery in which the enslaved person’s legal status as property passed to descendants in perpetuity. The 2026 UN resolution’s emphasis on “racialised chattel enslavement” and its “systemic nature” and “enduring consequences” captures precisely this qualitative distinction.
Third, African actors resisted as well as collaborated. Afonso I of Kongo wrote to the Portuguese crown in 1526 protesting that his people were being “seized” and that the trade was depopulating his kingdom; countless polities from the Kongo civil wars to the Maroon wars of Jamaica fought enslavement. The selection of “complicit chiefs” as representative of “Africa” is itself a rhetorical construction — as if Quisling’s collaboration could be cited against Norway’s claims on Germany.
Fourth, and most practically, the argument proves too much. If third-party participation dissolved the principal beneficiary’s liability, no reparation for any historical injustice — Holocaust expropriation, wartime forced labour, colonial massacre — could ever be sustained, since all involved local collaborators. The German state has never suggested that Vichy officials’ or Einsatzgruppen auxiliaries’ participation reduces its own obligations.
- “The Modern Taxpayer Bears No Responsibility”
This is Badenoch’s strongest political argument and the one requiring the most careful answer. In its philosophical form (associated with libertarian entitlement theory and, more moderately, with Jeremy Waldron’s work on the fading of historical claims), it holds that obligations attach to persons, that present taxpayers are not identical to eighteenth-century slave traders, and that intergenerational collective guilt is both illiberal and practically incoherent in an immigrant nation whose citizens include people whose ancestors arrived in 1960 — or were themselves enslaved.
The counter-arguments, drawn from both scholarship and the fiscal record:
The state is a continuing juristic person. Britain is not a crowd of individuals but a corporation sole in continuity: the same Treasury, Crown and Parliament that legislated the trade (the Royal African Company’s 1672 charter; the Asiento of 1713, which made slaving a centrepiece of national strategy at Utrecht) exists today and enjoys the assets accumulated through it. Janna Thompson (Taking Responsibility for the Past , 2002) and David Miller (National Responsibility and Global Justice , 2007) — neither a radical — argue that nations as intergenerational communities inherit obligations just as they inherit territory, treaties and the national debt. Indeed, the state’s own practice proves the principle: Britain honours debts contracted in 1694 and treaties signed in 1713. It cannot coherently claim institutional continuity for credit purposes and institutional mortality for debit purposes.
The 2015 fact. The “distant past” framing collapses against the abolition loan: until 2015, every British taxpayer — including Afro-Caribbean Britons — was servicing debt incurred to compensate slave-owners. The intergenerational-transfer mechanism the objection declares impossible was in fact operating, in the wrong direction, within living memory.
Continuing benefit and continuing harm. Unjust-enrichment reasoning (Boxill; Sher; Nuti) attaches liability not to personal guilt but to receipt of benefits traceable to injustice: institutions now embedded in British life — banks, insurers, universities, the built environment of port cities — capitalised on slavery-derived wealth, a fact several have conceded through their own historical reviews (the Church of England’s £100 million commitment following the discovery that its endowment invested in the South Sea Company; the University of Glasgow’s £20 million programme with the University of the West Indies; the Bank of England’s public acknowledgment). Meanwhile the harm is not past-tense: racialised wealth gaps, Caribbean debt distress, and the structural position of commodity-dependent African economies are measurable present-day effects.
None of this requires the moral absurdity of billing a Bradford care worker for the Royal African Company. Reparations in practice are paid by states out of general revenue over long horizons — as the 1835–2015 experience itself demonstrates — and are financed like any sovereign obligation. The question is not whether individuals are guilty but whether the polity owes.
- Can Investment Substitute for Liability?
The Badenoch position — deepened trade, maintained or slightly increased aid and investment, no acknowledgment of debt — deserves analysis as what lawyers would call an attempted accord and satisfaction without the accord. Three points follow.
Legally, aid and reparations are different categories. The UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on Reparation (GA Res. 60/147, 2005) define reparation as that which is owed to victims as a matter of right, entailing acknowledgment of wrongdoing; development assistance is discretionary. The 2026 resolution’s architecture — apology, restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, guarantees of non-repetition — makes acknowledgment constitutive, not optional. A payment without admission is precisely the formula claimants have rejected elsewhere: Germany’s €1.1 billion “reconciliation” offer to Namibia was denounced by Herero and Nama representatives as an insulting aid-package relabelling, and the descendant communities refused it. An investment programme that expressly denies the existence of the debt cannot satisfy the creditor — it can only demonstrate that the debtor acknowledges the obligation enough to pay, but not enough to say so.
Economically, the flows run the wrong way. Research synthesised in the Honest Accounts reports estimates that for every dollar entering Africa as aid and investment, several leave through debt service, profit repatriation, illicit financial flows and terms-of-trade effects; the African continent is a net creditor to the rest of the world in financial-flow terms. CARICOM’s manifesto grounds its debt-cancellation demand precisely in this asymmetry. Britain’s aid budget, meanwhile, has been cut — from the statutory 0.7 per cent of GNI to 0.5 per cent in 2021 and announced to fall to 0.3 per cent to fund defence spending. A “slight increase in investment” against a baseline that has been nearly halved, while UK-pension-fund and corporate returns flow out of African assets, is not arithmetic that a finance ministry in Accra or Bridgetown will mistake for settlement.
Politically, the investment-only strategy purchases delay, not discharge. The reparations coalition is institutionalising — AU coordination mechanisms, a proposed AU-CARICOM global reparations fund, the November 2025 Addis Ababa Declaration’s monitoring provisions, and a UN resolution that will be re-tabled and built upon. Each iteration raises the reputational cost of abstention: the UK has already been isolated alongside the US, Israel and Argentina on one side of a 123-vote question. For a Labour government seeking Commonwealth relevance, Global South partnerships on migration and climate, and Security Council support, perpetual refusal is a wasting asset. The historical pattern of British historic-injustice policy — Hillsborough, Bloody Sunday, Mau Mau, the Post Office scandal, Windrush — is remarkably consistent: decades of denial, followed by apology and compensation at higher eventual cost, once evidence and politics align. Burnham, whose premiership is ideologically organised around exactly this pattern, faces the question of whether to lead the cycle or be dragged through it.
The plausible settlement architecture, in fact, already exists in the CARICOM Ten-Point Plan itself: formal apology; repatriation and cultural restitution; an indigenous peoples’ development programme; debt cancellation; technology transfer and education funds; and chronic-disease and psychological-rehabilitation programmes. Every element is a form of structured, acknowledged investment — which is to say, the choice facing Britain is not between “reparations” and “investment” but between investment offered as charity on British terms and investment negotiated as settlement on jointly agreed terms. The former preserves the hierarchy that is itself part of the harm; the latter converts liability into partnership, which is what the AU and CARICOM explicitly say they seek: “the demand for restitution is not adversarial but a striving for mutual redress and reconciliation”.
VII. Conclusion
The three deflections examined here share a common structure: each takes a genuine fragment of the record — African participation, temporal distance, the reality of British aid flows — and inflates it into a dissolution of liability. The historical record, the Bank of England’s own acknowledgments, the Treasury’s confirmation that compensation-debt servicing ran to 2015, the emerging international legal consensus codified in March 2026, and the comparative precedent of every other modern reparations settlement all point the other way. The Brattle quantification of a US$24 trillion UK share will never be paid as such; but its function is not to issue an invoice — it is to destroy the premise that the sums under discussion are charity rather than a discounted settlement of a real and quantifiable debt. For the Burnham government, the strategic question is whether Britain negotiates that settlement while the terms are still shaped by reconciliation, or continues to abstain while the legal and diplomatic architecture hardens around it. History suggests that delay has never made British historic injustices cheaper — only longer.
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