Caribbean leaders say UK debt aid does not replace slavery reparations
Select a version of the text written from a presumed ideological perspective. This is not the original text, but a hypothetical version — how someone with that viewpoint might have phrased it. Tapping the current version again will return to the original or select cleaned version.
Caribbean reparations advocates rejected UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham's offer of debt relief and infrastructure funding as a substitute for formal slavery reparations, stressing that debt cancellation and monetary compensation are still essential.
Caribbean reparations advocates said the United Kingdom's proposal of debt relief and a £40 million infrastructure package for the region is not, and cannot be, a substitute for slavery reparations. The comments came after Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced that the UK would open a dialogue on slavery and apologise, while still ruling out direct reparations — a position critics say preserves the old power imbalance in new language.
Ralph Gonsalves, a former prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines and a senior figure in the reparatory justice movement, warned that dressing up debt restructuring or development assistance as reparations would be fundamentally inadequate. He pointed out that the Caribbean Community’s reparations commission has a 10-point plan calling for "debt cancellation" and monetary compensation, arguing that the region’s current debts are inseparable from centuries of colonial extraction and exploitation.
"When I listened to Andy Burnham, and I listened to the king, they’re talking about what is helpful is not reparations, but for them to work on specific things like debt relief, education, health and climate-change infrastructure," Gonsalves told the Guardian.
Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, chair of the House of Commons all-party parliamentary group for African Reparations, said the heart of the issue is agency, insisting that reparative justice must be led by those who were harmed rather than imposed from above by the very institutions that benefited from slavery.
"When reparative justice arrangements are being made, it has to be made with those who were affected, because if it is done to us, it is not reparations," she said.
Prof. Kingsley Abbott, a human-rights lawyer and director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, echoed the demand that victims’ voices shape any reparations process, emphasizing that justice means making affected communities whole again rather than offering limited state-managed concessions.
A Foreign Office spokesperson said the prime minister aims to strengthen Commonwealth relationships by confronting the past and focusing on a future of equality, security and hope, and reaffirmed the UK's commitment to work with partners on debt, climate and development issues.