By Sir Ronald Sanders
Suella Braverman, a former Conservative Party minister turned vocal member of the far-right Reform party, has argued that Britain's former colonies owe reparations to Britain — a claim that Antigua and Barbuda's Ambassador to the United States and the OAS calls historically illiterate, morally offensive, and politically revealing. According to Antigua News Room, the commentary was authored by Sir Ronald Sanders, who also serves as Chancellor of the University of Guyana.
Braverman, the child of Indian parents from Mauritius and Kenya, has built a political career on rhetoric hostile to immigrants and developing nations. Her latest argument holds that former colonies should repay Britain for the "investment, effort and contribution" that allegedly laid the foundations for "many flourishing democracies today" — and that expecting twenty-first century Britons to pay for eighteenth-century actions has no legal basis.
Ambassador Sanders does not accept that framing. He acknowledges that the legacy of British colonialism in the Caribbean is mixed. Writing in a personal capacity, he notes genuine gains: English became the language of international commerce, benefitting the English-speaking Caribbean in global trade. Legal and judicial institutions, written constitutions, and missionary-led education also carried value. The establishment of the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica in 1948 helped a region of roughly five million people produce Nobel laureates and contribute leaders to international organisations well beyond its size.
Yet Sanders argues those gains are overshadowed by a far darker record. For three centuries, Britain organised Caribbean economies around a single crop — sugar, and later bananas — for the benefit of British conglomerates, while workers remained trapped in poverty. Britain, he writes, did not bring development to the Caribbean; it brought wealth extraction. Infrastructure deficits, fragmented transportation links, structural unemployment, and chronic debt across the region today are not accidents of geography but products of deliberate colonial design. The dismantling of the West Indies Federation and the granting of independence to small, isolated territories locked in place a fragmented Caribbean with little bargaining power — an outcome Sanders includes in the "effort and contribution" Braverman now asks the region to repay.
The sharpest part of Sanders' critique concerns slavery. When abolition came to the English-speaking Caribbean in 1838, British slave owners received lavish compensation for the emancipation of some 655,780 enslaved people of African descent. The British government borrowed £20 million — approximately 40 per cent of national income at the time — to finance those payments. That debt was only fully repaid in 2015, meaning generations of British taxpayers, including those alive today, honoured the obligation to slave owners. The enslaved themselves received nothing. Those compensation payments, Sanders notes, are woven into the foundations of major financial institutions including Barclays, Lloyds, and the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Indentured servitude compounded the injustice. In Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and elsewhere, Indian labourers were bound to estates and deprived of basic liberties in what historian Hugh Tinker described as "another kind of slavery." When slavery ended, formerly enslaved Africans received no land grants, no cash payments, and no support — while former owners drew down their state compensation.
"For a British politician to answer that the victims' descendants ought instead to compensate the beneficiaries is to mock history and stand it on its head," Sanders writes.
He also places Braverman's remarks within her broader political trajectory. She previously championed a plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Now aligned with Reform UK — a party that has pledged to stop issuing visas to nationals of countries that seek reparations for the transatlantic slave trade — Braverman's intervention, Sanders argues, is part of a deliberate effort to recast Britain as victim and benefactor in the story of empire, and to frame Caribbean demands for justice as impertinence.
Sanders is clear that reparations are not about punishing modern Britons. They are, he writes, about acknowledging that history created structural disadvantages that persist and designing measures to repair them. Until that truth is confronted honestly, he concludes, talk of British "investment, effort and contribution" is not history — it is evasion.
(The writer is Antigua and Barbuda's Ambassador to the US and the OAS and Chancellor of the University of Guyana. The views expressed are his own.)
