Downing Street has said reparations for the British enslavement of black people in the Caribbean are not on the agenda at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting this week in the South Pacific. And Keir Starmer’s Labour government has asserted that it will not – now or ever – participate in the payment of any form of reparation.

On the first matter, nothing could be further from the truth. Reparations are in the mouths and on the minds of all participants, and the formal agenda does not determine the real agenda. It is just a conciliatory framework for the moment, and does not reflect what in fact is a supportive movement.

On the second, the Labour party’s participation is significant. In 2006, Tony Blair’s government laid down the party line of hostility to any apology for the crime of chattel enslavement, with the insistence that enslavement by Britain was legal because it said so. The Conservative government under David Cameron agreed, and told black folks to get over it in an address to the Jamaican parliament in 2015.

Global opinion, however, has rallied around the idea – rooted in international law and bolstered by the best ethical and moral thinking – that there is a case to answer and that negotiations should be inevitable. In 1939, Arthur Lewis, a Nobel laureate in economics, set it out clearly. Britain, he said, had 200 years of free labour from an estimated 20 million black men, women and children. This was Britain’s black debt, which must be acknowledged and repaired.

While imperial Britain soared to sustainable........

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