Why won't Keir Starmer engage with Commonwealth on reparations?

Late last year the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, said her nation was due £3.9tn in compensation from slave-owning states, with the University of the West Indies estimating that the UK alone would owe around $24tn to 14 countries for its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Representatives of Gambia, Ghana and Lesotho have called for reparations to be made, as have indigenous leaders from Australia, New Zealand, The Bahamas and Canada.

Jamaica's sports minister, Olivia Grange, said in 2021: "Our African ancestors were forcibly removed from their home and suffered unparalleled atrocities to carry out forced labour to the benefit of the British Empire. Redress is well overdue."

There have been some, small scale, payments such as to 5,000 Kenyans who were tortured and brutalised during the Mau Mau uprising, with one survivor, Muthoni Matenge telling German outlet DW: "Let (Queen) Elizabeth bring what belongs to me."

For the most part though, the response of the British state has been stonewalling at best and outright denial at worst.

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Mr Starmer's point-blank refusal to engage with the topic is perhaps unsurprising given the culture war conniptions which greeted the decision to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, but it's an issue which is unlikely to go away.

The British famously once had an empire on which the sun never set, the pithy rejoinder being "that's because God wouldn't trust the British in the dark".

Scotland was, of course, disproportionately involved in what became known as the 'Triangular Trade'.

Glasgow was referred to as the second city of the Empire, its wealthy  barons shipping goods to Africa which would be sold or bartered for slaves, who would then be shipped to the Americas to labour in the tobacco and cotton fields.

Tobacco, sugar, rum, cotton and other goods would then make their way back to Britain, often on ships which sailed up the Clyde, a legacy which can be seen in names like Jamaica Street and the Kingston Bridge, or streets named for slave traders like John Glassford or Andrew Buchanan.

(Image: getty) More than three million slaves were transported on ships flying the Union Jack, more than two million to the British Caribbean and close to a quarter of a million to the United States.

Not that it was limited to the Carribbean.

For close to 200 years Britain ruled over India, which at the time of its conquest beginning in 1757 accounted for 23% of the world's GDP - more than all of Europe combined.

By the time independence was declared in 1947 that had fallen to under 3%.

There are those who would argue that Britain built railways and other infrastructure, ultimately improving the lives of its subjects, but the British East India company was guaranteed, by the Crown, a 5% return on its investment with the money taken from Indian taxes.

When the East India Company was nationalised in 1858 the cost of its purchase by the Crown was added to the colony's public debt and an annual dividend of 10.5%, guaranteed to shareholders for forty years, was likewise taken from Indian taxes.

Some three million Indians were shipped to the West Indies or Carribbean to work in indentured servitude, by 1931 the average life expectancy was 27 and the literacy rate just 16%.

Trade of the East India Company circa 1800 (Image: World History Encyclopedia)

Over the course of British rule up to 35 million Indians died in famines, including up to four million in the 1943 Bengal famine alone, a catastrophe in which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill - who described Indians as "beastly people with a beastly religion" - refused to divert food supplies.

When Britain gave up its Indian colony due to the ruinous financial impact of the Second World War it partitioned the country into India and Pakistan, sparking bitter internecine conflict which displaced 15 million.

The man who oversaw the partition, Lord Mountbatten, at least had the good grace to admit in a BBC interview: "I f****d it up."

In his defence, he was hardly the only one, given Britain's unfortunate history with splitting up the lands it had conquered.

The carve-up of Africa with other colonial powers often cut across tribal and ethnic lines, leading to various conflicts, massacres and famines after the continent had been plundered for much of its wealth - various cuttings of the largest diamond ever found, in Imperial South Africa, sit in the British Crown Jewels.

Then there was the promising of the lands of Palestine, then under Ottoman rule, to both the Arabs (in 1915-16) and the Zionist movement (with the Balfour Declaration of 1917) which famously went really well and never caused any issues down the line.

All told that does seem quite a hefty reparation bill, and that's without even getting into Ireland - An Gorta Mór, the Great Famine, killed more than a million under British rule - or Australia where the Aboriginal people were routinely massacred, forced into labour camps and separated from their children.

It's fair to say Mr Starmer probably hasn't factored the cost of that into his much-touted fiscal rules, but why is his government so blunt about the issue? After all, the Indian anti-colonial intellectual and politician Shashi Tharoor said he'd accept a symbolic payment of £1 a year for 200 years as a mea culpa for the horrors of empire - why can't the Prime Minister even broach the subject?

(Image: Flickr)

One possible explanation is the British national view on its colonial legacy.

A 2014 poll by YouGov found that 59% viewed the Empire as "something to be proud of", with a later one in 2020 finding that 32% were proud, 37% neither proud nor ashamed and just 19% felt it was something to be ashamed of, with a third believing that the former colonies were better off following the intervention of the British.

This is not a uniquely British phenomenon - similar numbers emerged in Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands - but reckoning with the legacy of colonialism is clearly a thorny issue.

The vestiges of the empire on which the sun never set cling on today, though there is perhaps a sense of the twilight drawing in.

Britain's overseas territories today are home to around 250,000 people and the most recognisable are a rump on the bottom of Spain and some windswept islands off the coast of Argentina.

The Commonwealth, too, is starting to look like it could soon be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Zimbabwe left in 2003, while polling suggests six of the remaining states - Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, the Bahamas, Canada, Jamaica and the Solomon Islands - would vote in favour of abolishing the monarchy if given the chance in a referendum.

See also the collective shoulder shrug which greets the Commonwealth Games these days, with a 'stripped back' event to be held in Glasgow in 2026 after two Australian cities decided it wasn't worth the cost.

Mr Starmer has made a big play of 'reclaiming' the Union Flag, which you'll find plastered all over his campaign material and projected behind him in speeches - well, unless they happen to be in Scotland.

With that in mind, his obdurate stance on reparations appears to be born not so much of fiscal concern but rather out of fear of stepping on a culture war landmine.

The sun may finally be setting on the British Empire but the Prime Minister, it appears, is not willing to risk alienating those prepared to rage against the dying of the light.