slavery

The prime minister has ruled out financial reparations despite longstanding Caribbean demands ahead of Commonwealth leaders’ summit.

Britain’s prime minister has opened the door to a formal apology for its role in the transatlantic slave trade, while ruling out financial reparations.

Andy Burnham set out his position in a Guardian article on Friday, ahead of a Commonwealth leaders’ summit  in Antigua and Barbuda on Sunday.

The Commonwealth comprises 56 countries, mostly former British colonies, whose Caribbean members have long pressed Britain to acknowledge slavery’s legacy and offer redress.

Burnham offered structured talks with countries and campaign groups affected by slavery, including discussions on whether Britain should issue an official state apology.

“Listening to calls for a formal apology on behalf of the British state will form an important part of this process and I am open to them,” Burnham wrote.

He expressed “sorrow and regret” for the suffering of millions of enslaved people, but rejected calls for financial compensation.

“I do not think that British people today can be held liable for historical wrongs, however heinous, that happened in a different age under different laws and in which they played no personal part,” he said.

The stance maintains the position of previous British governments, despite his willingness to discuss an apology.

Instead, he proposed an international effort to ease the debt burden on poorer nations by extending repayment periods and cutting interest rates.

Burnham also said that former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will assist with the initiative, adding that more than 40 percent of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable countries spend more on debt interest than on healthcare.

Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley welcomed the opening for talks but reiterated her government’s position on reparations.

In a statement reported by the Guardian on Saturday, she said cooperation could also cover healthcare, education, development and fairer borrowing terms.

Antigua’s Prime Minister Gaston Browne, who is hosting the summit, welcomed the debt initiative and promises of cooperation on renewable energy.

CARICOM, the regional bloc of Caribbean countries, has drawn up a 10-point plan for reparations.

Its demands go beyond payments to include an apology, support for health and education, as well as measures to address the economic and social damage left by slavery.

The dispute surfaced at the last Commonwealth summit in Samoa in 2024, when leaders called for discussions about reparations, despite opposition from then Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

King Charles III will also attend the summit. However, Buckingham Palace has said he will not issue a formal apology for slavery during his trip, despite calls from countries in the region.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said he is “open” to the possibility of the UK issuing a formal apology for its role in the transatlantic slave trade, but has ruled out considering financial reparations.

Burham said he wanted a “dialogue with those affected by the slave trade” and was open to “calls for an apology”.

He dismissed the idea of paying financial reparations, saying they were “not the right answer”.

The comments come ahead of a Commonwealth leaders summit in the Caribbean next week, which Burnham will attend. Caribbean nations have renewed calls for the UK to apologise for its role in the slave trade, and for reparations, as King Charles III tours the region.

Burham described the transatlantic slave trade, when Africans were trafficked to the Americas, as a “brutal and barbaric violation” and said Britain must “face up to the past”.

The British government has never formally apologised for slavery or offered to pay reparations. Burnham has stuck with the policy of his predecessors, and has stopped short of offering any consideration of reparation payments.

“I do not think that British people today can be held liable for historical wrongs, however heinous, that happened in a different age under different laws and in which they played no personal part,” Burnham wrote in his piece for the Guardian, external.

He said Commonwealth countries had for years been asking for an “honest conversation”. Burnham said he wanted to offer a “structured dialogue” adding: “Listening to calls for a formal apology on behalf of the British state will form an important part of this process. I am open to them.”

A government source told the BBC this was “morally the right thing to do”.

Downing Street believes it is in the UK’s interest to strengthen the Commonwealth, in a world where China and Russia are seeking to exert influence.

Only this week, President Vladimir Putin hosted a Russia-Africa summit in Moscow.

The United Kingdom’s King Charles lll is travelling to the Bahamas on Tuesday, where he will begin a nine-day tour of the Caribbean.

The tour will take him to the Bahamas, Guyana, and Antigua and Barbuda, where he will attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) from November 1-4.

This comes as demands for reparations over Britain’s notorious role in the slave trade grow louder, and as the monarchy faces questions about its future in the region.

So what is the significance of this tour? And what does the Caribbean want?

Here’s what we know.

What’s on the itinerary?

King Charles will visit three countries in nine days.

His tour begins on Tuesday with the archipelagic country of the Bahamas, where he will be staying for three days.

Then he will make his way to Guyana, a former British colony that had more than 100,000 slaves when the trade was abolished in 1807.

After two days in Guyana, where he is expected to meet the president and elected leaders of Amerindian villages, he will head to Antigua and Barbuda for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

The meeting, from November 1-4, is expected to include discussions about the environment and trade and development, although the question of British reparations for slavery is also likely to feature.

What do the countries King Charles is visiting want?

Government officials in the Bahamas and in Antigua and Barbuda – both of which are part of the British Commonwealth with King Charles as their ultimate head of state – have signalled that they want to become republics. Guyana gained independence from the UK in 1966, and has a president as its head of state.

Guyanese President Mohamed Irfaan Ali said in an interview with ITV News that while Charles “rightfully” recognised slavery as the “darkest days in human history” during a visit to Barbados in 2021 when he was still the prince of Wales, an apology should be his next step.

“You exploited the region. You destroyed lives. You created underdevelopment,” Ali said, in a reference to the lingering legacy of the British Empire and the slave trade.

In 2023, a Lord Ashcroft Poll revealed that 51 percent of surveyed respondents in the Bahamas wanted to become a republic, while 27 percent preferred to retain the British monarchy as head of state.

Niambi Hall Campbell-Dean, chair of the Bahamas National Reparations Committee, was critical of the king ahead of his arrival. “Why do we still have a king? What does this person really represent to us? Why is he coming and how will that benefit us?” she asked.

What do other countries in the Caribbean say about slavery?

Jamaica, which is not on the itinerary for this trip by King Charles, made its stance clear in September, when it filed a $10bn slavery reparations petition in London, addressing it to the king.

That was the first time a British Commonwealth state has taken legal action pursuing “the cause of reparatory justice”, as the Jamaican delegation called it.

The petition is due to be heard by a UK privy council in March next year. The UK has, so far, refused to formally apologise or pay reparations for slavery.

Also in September, Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) Secretary-General Carla Barnett said reparations are “fundamentally about justice”.

“It is about recognition, accountability and transformation, and about building a just and equitable future for the descendants of those who, as the chattel of colonial owners, endured untold suffering, loss of life and freedom,” she said.

The transatlantic slave trade was recently declared the “gravest crime against humanity” in a United Nations resolution in March this year.

The last time a British royal visited Jamaica was when Prince William and Kate Middleton, then the duke and duchess of Cambridge, toured the island in 2022 during their Caribbean Platinum Jubilee tour.

The more memorable moment of the trip was when the couple was pictured shaking hands with Jamaican children with a fence separating them, which many criticised for being “tone-deaf”.

What’s likely to happen at the Commonwealth meeting?

The meeting in Antigua and Barbuda is expected to cover climate resilience as well as trade and development.

Leaders and representatives of 56 Commonwealth countries will be attending. Many want an apology for slavery from the king, but Buckingham Palace recently announced that will not be happening.

“The visit programme will…not shy away from ‘the darkest days of our past’, as his majesty has described them, but – in keeping with the wishes of our host nations – ‌it ⁠will principally be oriented to the vibrant present and promising future of each country,” a palace spokesperson said in a statement.

The palace added that it is “important” to acknowledge the “creative” ways that Charles has tried to right “enduring inequalities”.

The chair of the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Afrikan Reparations, Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, said the royal family and the UK government had failed to recognise the demands of those wanting reparations.

“I think it would be wrong to think that we can continue with platitudes. You’ve got ‘atrocity’, ‘deep regret’, ‘sorrow’, and now they’re going to say ‘darkest days’,” she said. “I think the king needs to realise that people wouldn’t keep raising it if what he was doing was anywhere near enough.

“You can tell that the Commonwealth means something to the monarchy, and I’m sure he would not want to be the monarch under which it crumbles.”

WASHINGTON — N’nanba (Robin Rue Simmons) has spent years trying to answer a question that has vexed the United States since the abolition of slavery: What would it actually look like to repair the damage?

In Evanston, Ill., she helped turn that question into a $25,000 housing grant for Black residents whose families were harmed by discriminatory housing policies. Now, Rue Simmons is spreading the nation’s first municipal reparations program to more than 100 communities across the country.

But as America celebrates its 250th anniversary, there is a formidable hurdle: President Trump’s administration.

The administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and its broader efforts to curtail federal support for race-based initiatives and Black history, have prompted some institutions to reconsider or quietly scale back reparations work.

Those reversals come while at least part of the world community is reexamining the past. In March the U.N. General Assembly issued a resolution declaring the trafficking of millions of enslaved Africans “the gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparations. More than 120 countries supported the resolution — only three voted against it — Argentina, Israel and the U.S. Fifty-two, including England and 27 members of the European Union, abstained.

“Under this administration, of course, there are many barriers to achieving that, but we still stand on federal redress as our collective north star,” Rue Simmons, the chairman of Evanston’s Reparations Committee and a former city councilwoman, told the Associated Press.

For more than 3½ centuries, the transatlantic slave trade forced an estimated 12.5 million Africans aboard ships bound for the Americas; some 1.8 million didn’t survive the journey.

Roughly 388,000 enslaved people were taken to what is now the U.S. and their enslavers maintained a system of chattel slavery, treating the enslaved and their children as property, until abolition in 1865.

Enslavement deprived generations of Black Americans their freedom and any meaningful share of the fruits of their labor. Jim Crow segregation, discrimination and systemic racism further depressed the Black population’s ability to build wealth that is still largely concentrated among white families.

From the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule, to modern-day reparations proposals, initiatives to address the legacy of slavery are entering a new era of political uncertainty.

“I don’t think that there’s been any president who’s been supportive of comprehensive Black reparations — for a long time it was just taboo to even speak the word,” said William Darity, who wrote a book on reparations with A. Kirsten Mullen.

“Now, Trump will speak the word, but with hostility,” he added.

“They want to steal your money for reparations,” Trump told his supporters during a speech in September. “Our country doesn’t have that kind of money. … The people that hate our country are asking for it, but it’s going nowhere.”

Marcus Anthony Hunter, a sociologist in African American studies at UCLA, said reparations are about atoning for the past crime of chattel slavery, even if some programs come in the form of housing grants or college scholarships instead of direct cash payments.

“It’s not even a lot of money that they are given. But it comes back to the recognition, the acknowledgment, responsibility and remedy,” he said.

The Trump administration disagrees and has entered the legal fight in Evanston to stop it from happening.

The Republican administration’s attacks on modern-day repayment efforts include a lawsuit in Evanston, which was initially filed by Judicial Watch.

Michael Bekesha, who represents the plaintiffs, says the Evanston program distributes funds based on race without specific harm identification. He argues the city’s program is unlike historical reparations programs.

“The Constitution prohibits governments from picking winners and losers based entirely on race,” Beshka told the AP.

The Justice Department this month received a federal judge’s permission to intervene in the case, alleging that the city’s actions violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and the Fair Housing Act.

Last year, the Justice Department sent a letter of warning to leaders in Asheville and Buncombe County, N.C., contemplating creating their own programs.

Kiersten Pels, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said in a statement to the AP that “race-based government benefit programs are both unconstitutional and often violate federal civil rights laws.”

“Those implementing these programs do so in violation of federal law and the federal government has an obligation to stop them,” she said.

The White House referred questions to the Justice Department.

Georgetown University was one of the leaders, offering admission consideration for the descendants of enslaved people tied to the campus’ past, an effort that has continued despite Trump’s crackdown on campus DEI efforts.

But across higher education, new efforts have come to a standstill, said Richard Cellini, who previously led a Harvard University project to identify descendants of people enslaved by Harvard’s past leaders.

“People don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to hear about it, they’re not hiring for it,” Cellini said.

Some Virginia universities have quietly been taking steps to provide scholarships to descendants, as required under a 2021 state law. But otherwise there has been no sign of new scholarship programs being started since Trump returned to office, said Kirt von Daacke, a University of Virginia historian who leads a consortium of colleges studying slavery.

The Georgetown initiative focuses on descendants of slaves sold by Georgetown’s Jesuit priests to slaveholders in Louisiana.

The Virginia Theological Seminary makes annual cash payments to the descendants whose family members labored on its campus during slavery and Jim Crow eras. The private institution’s program is funded by an endowment started in 2019 that has grown from $1.7 million to $2.8 million. Payments to individuals vary based on the closest lineage to the family members and continue into perpetuity.

“We believe we’re the only educational institution in the United States which makes annual cash reparations payments” with no strings attached, said Nicky Burridge, the seminary’s spokeswoman.

“The moral repair, the healing aspect is as great as the monetary one,” said Ebonee Davis-Hayes, its director of reparations.

Hussein, Fields and Binkley write for the Associated Press.