ROBERT HARDMAN: Reparations demand will stir up race hatred and could bankrupt Britain. But will weak Starmer cave in like he did over Chagos Islands?

This time next week, the Prime Minister and his Foreign Secretary will be packing for a gathering on the other side of the globe that both would rather avoid. 

It was often said during Tony Blair’s years in Downing Street that he found Commonwealth summits so tiresome he only attended to avoid offending the head, namely the monarch.

That is one reason why Sir Keir Starmer will fly to Samoa, in the middle of the Pacific, for this month’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the King’s first as the new head. 

Labour’s nonchalant attitude to all things post-colonial is amply illustrated by the way the Government has just surrendered the Chagos Islands to Mauritius without a fight.

The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, walking alongside each other

The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, walking alongside each other

The sooner we can ¿decolonise¿ foreign policy, so the progressives argue, the sooner the world will stop hating us, writes Robert Hardman

The sooner we can ‘decolonise’ foreign policy, so the progressives argue, the sooner the world will stop hating us, writes Robert Hardman

For Labour, however, Britain’s imperial legacy is either an embarrassment or a chore (Sir Keir has reportedly cancelled a post-CHOGM visit to Australia and New Zealand as he’d rather head home).

The sooner we can ‘decolonise’ foreign policy, so the progressives argue, the sooner the world will stop hating us.

That is why it is vital to keep a close eye on what Sir Keir and Foreign Secretary David Lammy sign away as they nurse their jet lag in Samoa. For they will find that a significant number of the 56 nations around the table will be demanding much more than the Chagos Islands.

A party obsessed with being ‘on the right side of history’ must somehow wriggle out of paying a bill which, if even partially paid, would bankrupt Britain and likely put Labour out of office for ever.

For the first time at a Commonwealth summit, the issue of reparations for Britain’s imperial wrong-doings will be on the agenda. Now backed by the global Left and the UN secretary-general, it is an issue that is not going away. It also threatens to make Rachel Reeves’s £22billion ‘black hole’ look like an accounting error.

In March, CARICOM, the association of 15 Caribbean governments, agreed unanimously to put the issue of ‘reparatory justice’ – compensation for the slave trade – on the table at the CHOGM. Now, Keith Rowley, the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, has declared: ‘When we meet in Samoa, the Caribbean leaders [will] very forcefully speak to the Commonwealth as one voice. And there is one particular country with a new King and a Labour government with an outstanding mandate.’

So how does Sir Keir rebuff the entire Caribbean? The ‘son of a toolmaker’ routine won’t wash with these hard-nosed political pros who are gathering momentum behind their contentious but deeply seductive narrative: our current problems are not of our own making but the fault of successive British generations and we want compensation.

The bill? According to a senior Cambridge academic, the cheap option is £205billion (roughly the entire annual cost of the NHS). At the upper end is a bill for £19trillion (the UK’s entire GDP or national output for eight years). That figure is not dreamed up by a loopy Marxist but the conclusion of an 86-page report by the Brattle Group, a US-based consultancy.

Its highly questionable calculations – including damages for ‘emotional harm’ over centuries – have been taken at face value by a senior judge at the International Court of Justice and the Caribbean leaders. Chief among these is the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, who leads CARICOM’s reparations campaign. She has described her country as ‘the size of the Gaza strip’ and ‘the home of modern racism’, thanks to British rule. She puts the UK’s debt to her country alone at £3.7trillion.

The report, incidentally, neither accounts for the UK’s long campaign to end the slave trade (at a cost of 16,000 Royal Navy lives), nor those African rulers who sold free-born neighbours to the traders.

How will Sir Keir Starmer rebuff the entire Caribbean?

How will Sir Keir Starmer rebuff the entire Caribbean?

Sir Keir Starmer with Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, who described her country as ¿the size of the Gaza strip¿ and ¿the home of modern racism¿, thanks to British rule

Sir Keir Starmer with Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, who described her country as ‘the size of the Gaza strip’ and ‘the home of modern racism’, thanks to British rule

Ms Mottley is the most formidable politician in the Caribbean. I saw her steal the show at the 2021 COP summit in Glasgow. Weeks later, she removed Elizabeth II as Queen of Barbados, without a referendum, and replaced her with an unelected president. Aside from a few lonely constitutional purists, no one dared criticise her.

Earlier this month, she was in London for a ‘pre-CHOGM’ talk with the King who she has praised repeatedly for saying, in 2022, that slavery is ‘a conversation whose time has come’.

Ms Mottley knows that the PM, not the King, is the one with the chequebook. So, who will come out on top in Samoa: the hand-wringing Sir Keir, already on the back foot after ceding the Chagos Islands, or the Caribbean’s socialist Margaret Thatcher? Until now, the UK’s response to the reparations movement has been to ignore it, fearing any attempt to engage would instantly be mired in quarrels about who pays and who gets what.

Those who have tried their own reparations have learned as much.

When the Gladstone family, erstwhile slave owners, went to Guyana last year with an apology and a cheque, they were met with protests that it was ‘not enough’.

The Church of England has pledged £100million but, two weeks ago, was castigated by Ms Mottley for insensitivity. Successive British governments have stoked an issue which has exploded in just a few years. The deplorable handling of the Windrush scandal has cut deep and has combined with Black Lives Matter rhetoric from the nearby US to create fertile ground for what some call ‘grievance farming’, if not ‘grievance archaeology’.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade involved unspeakable atrocities, as British children learn in school. But now the Brattle analysts have somehow calculated that damages for ‘gender-based violence’, for example, should be awarded at the rate of £420,000 ‘per adult per year’ for every enslaved female.

If Sir Keir cedes the principle, laid down in the report, that the Empire caused ‘mental pain and anguish’ – calculated at just under £1million per victim – most of the Commonwealth should start a class action. At which point, the UK might as well file for bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, the British public will argue that you can’t punish an entire nation for the 200-year-old crimes of richly compensated slave owners. History throws up abominations everywhere, though few surpass slavery. How do you tell the descendants of, say, an English child sent up a Victorian chimney by one toff that they must now compensate the descendants of the slave owned by another? It’s hard to think of a scheme more likely to stir racial divisions. Yet that is the direction of travel, unless Sir Keir gets a grip.

Colonialism can’t be ignored, as the King has said, and Labour can’t just blame the Tories.

This needs frank, sensible dialogue and cast-iron assurances that Britain is not an historic foe but an ally and friend who will support these small nations as they fight existential threats such as climate change.

For, contrary to received wisdom on the Left, the UK is not the imperialist villain so many British people have come to think it is.

New research by the leading think-tank Policy Exchange shows that a majority of Commonwealth citizens believe that Britain ‘does more good than harm’ in the world, even if that is a minority view among Britons themselves.

This astonishing finding, which the MoS has seen in a major new report on the Commonwealth, reveals what Policy Exchange calls ‘a lack of national self-confidence over Britain’s historic contributions to human advancement’.

Polls around the globe show just 47 per cent of Britons feel the UK ‘does more good than harm’, whereas that is the majority view in Nigeria (51 per cent), rising to 59 per cent in India. Perhaps Sir Keir’s advisers could whisper that in his ear before he raises another – very costly – white flag.