WE REACT TO JULIA HARTLEY'S 'NO REPARATIONS' TIRADE

'Historical grievance grifting.' That's how Talk TV host Julia Hartley-Brewer describes former British colonies' calls for the United Kingdom to pay slavery reparations.

In this reaction video, we delved into Britain's refusal to pay and its shameful past involving ruthlessly extracting African and global wealth to power its industrial revolution and financial market.

Ahead of the Commonwealth Summit in Samoa starting on 26 October, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said she met with King Charles III to raise the demand for slavery reparations. In a speech at the London School of Economics in December 2023, Mottley said it was time for serious conversations on reparations, adding that 'numbers have been looked at and studied by many persons, and the figures suggest a minimum of $5 trillion, $4.9 [trillion] to be precise, is what it would be if [Barbados] were to be similarly compensated across the board today.' However, the Rev Dr Michael Banner, dean of Trinity College Cambridge, has claimed Britain owes $266 billion in reparations to all enslaved people in its former colonies. Meanwhile, a Brattle Group report released earlier this year stated all enslaving countries owed between $100 trillion to $131 trillion to 31 countries. That report featured an introduction by Patrick Robinson, an Afro-Jamaican judge at the International Court of Justice, the world's highest court.

In 1661, Barbados became Britain's first slave society and the first colony with a 'slave code' that enshrined in law that Africans would be treated as chattel property, not as human beings. British monarchs and UK governments were involved in the trafficking and sale of about 19 million Africans for profit for centuries. The captives were abducted and transported across the Atlantic to be sold into slavery on plantations across British colonies in the Caribbean and North America. Those ships turned around to ferry slave-grown produce—including sugar, tobacco and cotton—to the UK, which was sold, with the profits invested into Britain's economy, infrastructure (such as the National Health Service) and the coffers of aristocratic families.

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