By Admin. Updated 7:53 p.m., Sunday, July 19, 2026, Atlantic Standard Time (GMT-4).
During the recent CARICOM Heads of Government Meeting, Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley described a British MP’s suggestion that former Caribbean colonies should repay Britain for its investment in them as “asinine”.
Mottley later wrote on Facebook: “In 2026, I cannot believe we are being asked to respond to the suggestion that the descendants of the enslaved should pay for the machinery that oppressed them.
“The Caribbean does not owe Britain for slavery, for colonial extraction, or for laws that treated African people as chattel. We are not asking for charity. We are asking for justice, and history itself has already told the truth.
“Those who wish to speak on this matter should first take the time to read enough history to understand it. The Caribbean will not be used as a prop for anyone’s politics. We know who we are, we know what was done, and we will continue to speak for repair with clarity and dignity.”
The issue had been raised at the leaders’ meeting’s closing press conference by the UK Guardian Caribbean correspondent Natricia Duncan, who is a Vincentian. Duncan had asked the prime minister about comments from Suella Braverman, who had written on X that the British Empire “did so much good for the world.” Braverman used to be a member of the UK Conservative Party, but defected to the anti-immigration Reform UK party at the beginning of the year.
Braverman was responding to Bell Ribeiro-Addy, a Labour MP and chair of the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations, who had posted Natricia Duncan’s article about Jamaican officials travelling to the UK in September to lodge an unprecedented petition with King Charles to seek legal guidance on their slavery reparations claim from Britain on X. Ribeiro-Addy had added the comment: “It is getting harder and harder for British institutions to maintain their favoured tactic of simply ignoring calls for repair”.
In response, Braverman wrote: “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.”
The exchange follows a series of milestone developments in the slavery reparations movement, including the UN’s 25 March landmark resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans as the gravest crime against humanity and the unveiling of a new manifesto from the Caribbean Community Reparations Commission outlining the “moral, ethical and legal case for reparations” for the enslavement of African people.
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