So it’s a “no” to reparations, yet again. No to repairing the damage done by the gravest and longest-sustained of human rights abuses, says Keir Starmer, once a crusading human rights lawyer. Buttressing his position is the foreign secretary, David Lammy, previously an advocate of reparations.

No from King Charles. Can’t turn back the clock, even if it is a rather nice clock bought with colonially ill-gotten gains.

Reparations are a hard sell for any British government that doesn’t wish to emulate Liz Truss’s length of tenure in office. However, given that Labour was established to represent the interests of working people, it really shouldn’t be. In fact, reparations present the party with a vast and unique opportunity for the type of redistributive, social and even psychological change it was founded to champion.

The greatest trick white supremacy ever pulled was to convince working-class white people that they had a stake in it. That they shared in the spoils of the racial supremacy-laden economic exploitation of “lesser species”, such as slavery and the colonisation of Africans. In reality, working-class white people were actually the dispensable pawns of white supremacy. Or as Lyndon B Johnson put it: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best coloured man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” In Britain,........

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