Reform UK’s racist fury over calls for reparations for slavery

Slavery and colonialism laid the foundations of a capitalist system that has bred poverty, exploitation, racism and climate breakdown. 

The British far right is outraged that the United Nations (UN) backed calls for reparations for slavery.

Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf said the party would stop issuing visas to people from any country that calls for reparations. They want the collective punishment of black and brown people for demanding justice.

The UN resolution, moved by Ghana’s president John Dramani Mahama, said that “claims for reparations represent a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs against Africans and people of African descent”.

The United States, Israel and Argentina voted against and many European countries, including Britain abstained. Britain has never formally apologised for its role in slavery and colonialism despite growing calls to do so, including from a majority of British people. 

The right howl that reparations would break the British treasury by demanding billions of pounds of compensation. But this misunderstands what people in the Global South are calling for. 

Kwesi Pratt Junior is the general secretary of the Socialist Movement of Ghana and the author of the book Reparations—History, Struggle, Politics and Law. 

He told Socialist Worker, “It’s an insult to the people affected by colonialism to be offered money for the crimes that were committed against them. These crimes were horrendous. No amount of money can pay. 

“What we need to do is to reset the world, to build a new world in which the resources of the world belong to the peoples of the world, and the resources are used in order to solve the concrete problems that people face.

“Build a world in which resources are not diverted from production of food, to the building of weapons of mass destruction.”

He explained, “What slavery led to, the accumulation of surpluses, became the basis for the building of capitalist society today. 

“And it has also led to a certain narration about who we are, where we came from, and so on, which reinforces capitalist ideology.”

The rulers of states such as Britain have encouraged poorer countries in the Global South to copy the model of development that the richer countries have followed. 

But Kwesi argued that it is not possible for countries like Ghana to follow in the footsteps of the North. He said, “We cannot copy the example of the advanced capitalist states.”

“We need to build a new system where we generate surpluses, which are then used in the collective interest of all the people. The name of that option is socialism.”

Reparations would mean the cancellation of debt, which ensures that any aid money that does go to countries like Ghana leaves again in the form of debt repayments. It would mean re-orienting economies away from exporting raw materials and rebuilding it to serve the interests of people in the Global South. 

And it would mean addressing other legacies of slavery and colonialism too. 

Kwesi said, “The racism we suffer today, which justified some people capturing others as beasts of burden, needs to be smashed in the reordering of things. 

“We need to have a new educational system that rejects all these notions of superiority”. 

“And there are 1.4 billion Africans who have no say in anything. We only have a voice in the UN general assembly. We have no veto power in the security council, the UN takes very important major decisions about the world and its future and so on.

“The World Bank and the IMF lending body are structured to maintain the domination of the Western capitalist states.

“How come we don’t have any voice? We don’t have any voice because around 1945, when these institutions were being established, we were colonies. So we were not represented.

“We can only insist that our voice matters if these institutions are pulled down or restructured.”

The British state justified abstaining on the resolution because there is “no duty to provide reparation for historical acts that were not, at the time those acts were committed, violations of international law”. 

But this overlooks the scars left by the legacy of slavery, including laying the foundations of a capitalist system that has bred poverty, exploitation, racism and climate breakdown. 

Kwesi asked, if slavery is all in the past and we can put it behind us, why are the descendants of slave holders continuing to benefit?

He explained that after slavery was abolished across the British Empire in 1833, the slaveholders were compensated for the loss of their “property” with the equivalent of £300 billion in today’s money.  

“That payment of compensation carried on until 2015. The current generation is taking compensation.”

British institutions also continue to benefit. Kwesi said, “Barclays Bank was established by the two Barclay brothers, who were slave traders. If you go to the financial sector in Britain, the profits of transatlantic slave trade are still being enjoyed today by today’s generation.” 

Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf also repeated the mantra that Britain was “the first major power to outlaw slavery”, as if Britain didn’t also play a role in starting the vile trade in human bodies that it later outlawed. 

Kwesi said, “Nigel Farage and Reform UK are so completely confused. They don’t understand the world in which they live.

“And if they ever get close to power, they will join with Donald Trump and so on to destroy the world, including the communities in which they live. 

“Can you imagine what would happen if all Africans were to be withdrawn from the health service—the doctors, the nurses, and so on? The NHS would simply collapse.”

He added, “We are not asking countries which are complicit in the transatlantic trade to have pity on us and to be generous to us. We are engaged in a struggle.

“The UN resolution doesn’t solve anything by itself. The resolution is an acknowledgement that a large part of the world recognises the injustice of the transatlantic slave trade. That’s a tottering first step. 

“The next step is how we mobilise people on all continents, including in the capitalist states, how we mobilise the working class to wage a struggle for the building of a fair and just world.”