Former UK minister demands reparations from Britain’s ex-colonies

Former British Home Secretary Suella Braverman has called for Britain’s former colonies to pay reparations to London for the "investment, effort and contribution" she claims the empire made in building them.

In a post on X, Braverman, a right-wing politician who defected from the Conservative Party to Reform UK earlier this year, entered the reparations debate by declaring: “The British Empire did so much good for the world.”

“Of course slavery was abhorrent but to expect the British people of the 21st century to pay for actions that took place in the 18th century has no basis in law," Braverman said.

That claim is false. According to the British government, UK taxpayers were still paying off a £20m loan taken out in 1835 to compensate slave owners after abolition. The sum amounted to about 5 percent of the UK’s GDP at the time. In today’s money, that would be worth more than $3bn.

The UK government admitted in 2018 that it only finished repaying the loan in 2015, meaning British taxpayers spent generations servicing a debt created to compensate slave owners, not the enslaved.

Braverman went further, writing: "If the government is seriously thinking about this then former colonies should pay the British back for the considerable investment, effort and contribution that this country made which laid the foundations for many flourishing democracies today."

She was responding to Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who had reposted an article from The Guardian saying Jamaica should "take the case for reparations directly to King Charles" later this year by lodging a formal petition.

Ribeiro-Addy said it is "getting harder and harder for British institutions to maintain their favoured tactic of simply ignoring calls for repair."

There is no evidence that Britain “invested” in its colonies for the benefit of the colonised. Colonial economies were built to extract resources, labour and wealth for London, not to develop colonised societies on their own terms.

Research by economist Utsa Patnaik, published by Columbia University Press and based on almost two centuries of data, found that Britain looted about $45 trillion from India alone during colonial rule.

At its height, the British Empire covered roughly a quarter of the world’s land surface.

Braverman, who is of Indian heritage and whose parents migrated from former British colonies, immediately drew a backlash online.

"Of course slavery was abhorrent but" is a wild way to start a sentence,” one user wrote.

Another said: “The British empire didn't invest it stole its colonies wealth and resources to benefit the british empire not its colonies”