ROBERT HARDMAN: Demands for reparations will fuel racial hatred and could bankrupt Britain. But will Woke Starmer give in as he did over the Chagos Islands?

Next week at the same time, the Prime Minister and his Foreign Minister will be packing their bags for a gathering on the other side of the world that they would both prefer to avoid. It was often said during Tony Blair’s years at Downing Street that he found Commonwealth summits so boring that he only attended them to avoid offending the leader, namely the monarch.

That’s one reason why Sir Keir Starmer will fly to Samoa, in the middle of the Pacific, for this month’s Commonwealth heads of government meeting, the king’s first as new leader. Labour’s lackadaisical attitude towards all things post-colonial is amply illustrated by the way the government has just handed over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius without a fight.

The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, walking side by side

According to progressives, the sooner we can “decolonize” foreign policy, the sooner the world will stop hating us, writes Robert Hardman

For Labor, however, Britain’s imperial legacy is either an embarrassment or a chore (Sir Keir reportedly canceled a post-CHOGM visit to Australia and New Zealand, preferring to return home).

According to progressives, the sooner we can “decolonize” foreign policy, the sooner the world will stop hating us.

That’s why it’s vital to keep a close eye on what Sir Keir and Foreign Secretary David Lammy sign as they nurse their jet lag in Samoa. Because they will find that a significant number of the 56 nations around the table will demand much more than the Chagos Islands.

A party obsessed with being “on the right side of history” must somehow avoid paying a bill that, even partially paid, would bankrupt Britain and probably bankrupt Labor on the doorstep of power forever.

For the first time at a Commonwealth summit, the issue of reparations for Britain’s imperial misdeeds will be on the agenda. Now supported by the global left and the UN Secretary General, this is a problem that will not go away. It also threatens to make Rachel Reeves’ £22bn ‘black hole’ look like an accounting error.

In March, CARICOM, the association of 15 Caribbean governments, unanimously agreed to put the issue of “restorative justice” – compensation for the slave trade – on the CHOGM table. Today, Keith Rowley, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, said: “When we meet in Samoa, Caribbean leaders will speak very forcefully to the Commonwealth with one voice. And there is one country in particular with a new king and a Labor government with an exceptional mandate.

So how can Sir Keir push back the entire Caribbean? The “son of a toolmaker” routine will not suit these intransigent political professionals who gain momentum behind their controversial but deeply seductive rhetoric: our current problems are not of our own making but the fault of British generations successive and we want compensation.

The bill? According to a Cambridge academic, the cheapest option costs £205 billion (roughly the entire annual cost of the NHS). At the top end is a bill of £19 trillion (the entirety of the UK’s GDP or national output for eight years). This figure was not dreamed up by some crazy Marxist, but is the conclusion of an 86-page report by the Brattle Group, a US-based consultancy.

His highly questionable calculations – including damages for “emotional harm” over centuries – were taken at face value by a top judge of the International Court of Justice and Caribbean leaders. Chief among them is Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who is leading the CARICOM reparations campaign. She described her country as “the size of the Gaza Strip” and “the home of modern racism”, thanks to British rule. It estimates the UK’s debt to its country alone at £3.7 trillion.

The report, incidentally, does not account for either Britain’s long campaign to end the slave trade (which cost 16,000 lives in the Royal Navy) or African leaders. who sold their freeborn neighbors to traders.

How will Sir Keir Starmer push back the entire Caribbean?

Sir Keir Starmer with Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who described her country as “the size of the Gaza Strip” and “the home of modern racism”, thanks to British rule

Ms. Mottley is the most formidable politician in the Caribbean. I saw her steal the show at the COP 2021 summit in Glasgow. A few weeks later, she removed Elizabeth II as Queen of Barbados, without a referendum, and replaced her with an unelected president. Apart from a few solitary constitutional purists, no one dared criticize it.

Earlier this month, she was in London for a “pre-CHOGM” interview with the king, whom she repeatedly praised for declaring, in 2022, that slavery was “a conversation whose time has come.” coming.”

Ms Mottley knows that it is the Prime Minister, not the King, who holds the checkbook. So, who will emerge victorious in Samoa: Sir Keir, already in difficulty after the cession of the Chagos Islands, or the Caribbean socialist Margaret Thatcher? The UK’s response to the reparations movement has so far been to ignore it, fearing that any attempt to engage would instantly become bogged down in squabbles over who pays and who gets what.

Those who have attempted their own repairs have learned as much.

When the formerly slave-owning Gladstone family visited Guyana last year with an apology and a check, they were met with protests that it was “not enough”.

The Church of England pledged £100 million but two weeks ago was blasted by Ms Mottley for insensitivity. Successive British governments have fueled a problem that has exploded in just a few years. The poor handling of the Windrush scandal has cut deep and has combined with the Black Lives Matter rhetoric of the neighboring United States to create fertile ground for what some call “grievance farming”, or even “grievance archeology”. “.

The transatlantic slave trade involved unspeakable atrocities, as British children learn at school. But now Brattle analysts have calculated that damages for “gender-based violence”, for example, should be awarded at the rate of £420,000 “per adult per year” for each enslaved woman.

If Sir Keir abandons the principle, set out in the report, that the Empire caused “mental pain and anguish” – calculated at just under £1 million per victim – most Commonwealth countries would have to initiate a class action. At this point, the UK might as well file for bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, the British public will argue that you cannot punish an entire nation for crimes committed over 200 years by richly compensated slave owners. History contains abominations everywhere, although few of them surpass slavery. How do we tell the descendants of, say, an English child sent down a Victorian chimney by an idiot, that they must now compensate the descendants of someone else’s slave? It is difficult to imagine a project more likely to inflame racial divisions. Yet this is the direction to go, unless Sir Keir takes control.

Colonialism cannot be ignored, as the King said, and Labor cannot just blame the Tories.

This requires frank, sensible dialogue and firm assurances that Britain is not a historic enemy but an ally and friend who will support these small nations in their fight against existential threats such as climate change.

Because, contrary to popular belief on the left, the United Kingdom is not the evil imperialist as many Britons have come to think.

New research from leading think tank Policy Exchange shows a majority of Commonwealth citizens think Britain “does more good than harm” in the world, although this view is in the minority among Britons themselves -themselves.

The astonishing finding, which the Department of Health has seen in a major new report on the Commonwealth, reveals what Policy Exchange calls “a lack of national confidence in Britain’s historic contributions to human progress”. .

Polls around the world show that only 47 per cent of Britons believe the UK is “doing more good than harm”, compared to the majority view in Nigeria (51 per cent), and this proportion reached 59 percent in India. Perhaps Sir Keir’s advisers could whisper that in his ear before he raises another – very expensive – white flag.