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CURB has read with deep disappointment the remarks of Uma Kumaran, the UK Minister for the Overseas Territories. Speaking to The Royal Gazette after signing the Hamilton II Declaration in Bermuda this week, she said the United Kingdom “doesn’t pay reparations.” The Minister said Britain is aware of the painful history. Awareness is not justice. Acknowledgement without repair is simply a more polished form of refusal.
The Minister’s answer is not new. It is the settled line of successive British governments. In 2015, David Cameron told Jamaica’s Parliament that slavery was “abhorrent in all its forms,” and in the same visit ruled out reparations. In 2023, Rishi Sunak refused both an apology and reparations. In 2024, ahead of the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, Sir Keir Starmer’s spokesman declared, “We do not pay reparations.” The Prime Minister himself dismissed the matter as “very, very long endless discussions about reparations in the past.” Prime ministers change. The answer does not.
The Royal Family’s own words expose the contradiction. In Barbados in 2021, the then Prince of Wales called slavery an appalling atrocity that forever stains Britain’s history. In Kingston in 2022, during the Caribbean tour that also took him to The Bahamas, Prince William expressed his profound sorrow and said: “Slavery was abhorrent, and it should never have happened.” We welcome those words. But if something is abhorrent, should never have happened, and forever stains a nation’s history, then that nation owes more than sorrow.
The Crown has now moved further than the British Government. Last month, King Charles III referred Jamaica’s reparations petition to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The petition asks three questions: whether the enslavement of Africans was lawful, whether it breached international law, and whether the United Kingdom has a legal obligation to provide a remedy. A minister’s “no” now sits alongside a live legal question before Britain’s own highest Commonwealth court.
We must be clear about what slavery was. Millions of Africans were seized, shipped in chains and worked to death in the Americas. Families were sold apart. Men, women and children were branded, flogged and treated in law as property. Britain was not a bystander. It was a leading slave-trading nation, and its ports, banks, insurers and industries grew rich on the trade and on slave-grown sugar and cotton. Bermuda was part of that system. Our ancestors were enslaved here, under British law.
Then came emancipation, and with it the most revealing act of all. Under the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, Britain paid £20 million, about 40 per cent of its national budget, to compensate slave owners for the loss of their “property.” Slave owners in Bermuda were among those paid. The enslaved received nothing. Instead, they had to keep working almost for nothing for years to come. Essentially, they paid for their own freedom.
The loan raised to fund that compensation was not finally paid off until 2015. For 180 years, British taxpayers serviced a debt incurred to pay enslavers. Among those taxpayers were descendants of the enslaved: the Windrush generation and their children, who came from the Caribbean to help rebuild Britain. Within living memory, the grandchildren of the enslaved were helping to pay the compensation given to those who had owned their ancestors. And clearly, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, “the time is always right to do the right thing” and, we might add, no matter how long it takes!
This is the heart of the matter. Britain has already accepted that the end of slavery created a loss deserving compensation. It applied that principle generously to the slave owner. Justice demands that the same principle now be applied to the descendants of the enslaved. If Britain could find the means to compensate those who held human beings as property, it can find the means to repair the harm done to the descendants of the enslaved.
Britain’s established church has already shown its Government the way. The Church of England was deeply implicated in slavery. Its endowment fund, Queen Anne’s Bounty, invested heavily in the slave-trading South Sea Company. The Church apologised in 2006. In 2023, after investigating its own history, the Church Commissioners committed £100 million to a fund for healing, repair and justice. Their independent oversight group judged even that sum insufficient, and the Commissioners have accepted a £1 billion target. They have held to that commitment in the face of fierce political opposition.
Here at home, the Anglican Church of Bermuda has also begun to face its history. In 2007 its Synod unanimously resolved that the Church “benefited from the evil trade in African peoples over an extended period.” The Synod also expressed remorse for the discrimination it practised after emancipation. On 13 September this year, beneath the Rubber Tree in Warwick, Bishop Nicholas Dill presided over a Service of Remembrance, Lament and Dedication. It honoured the free and enslaved Black Bermudians buried at a site opposite St Mary the Virgin Church, where they had been laid to rest because they were barred from the churchyard. Their graves were later disturbed, their remains moved to a common grave, and the land given over to other uses.
Through the research of historian Andrew Bermingham and parish administrator Janet Bento, 78 people buried there have been identified by name. They range from infants a day old to elders in their eighties, and their names were read aloud at the service. Bishop Dill spoke plainly. The legacy of slavery, he said, did not end in 1834. It continued through segregation and still shows itself today in “inequality, multi-generational trauma, prejudice, imbalance and bias.” The Government of Bermuda has since restored the Rubber Tree memorial.
These are acts of truth-telling and repair by Bermudian institutions confronting their own past. A church with no tax base can accept that benefiting from slavery creates an obligation. A parish can recover the names of its dead. A local government can restore their resting place. The British state legislated for slavery, protected it, profited from it and paid its owners, yet it alone still says no. Will the British Government do the right thing, or will it choose to remain on the side of the slave owners it once compensated?
Reparatory justice is not a demand for a cheque. The CARICOM Reparations Commission’s Ten-Point Plan calls for a full formal apology, debt relief, investment in public health and education, cultural restitution and technology transfer to address slavery’s lasting damage. Whatever form repair takes, it must be acceptable to the descendants of the enslaved, decided with them through genuine dialogue, not imposed or dismissed from London.
Ms Kumaran noted that the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting is approaching and that discussions are ongoing. CURB calls on the United Kingdom to use that meeting to move beyond sorrow. It should open a serious, good-faith conversation with the Caribbean and the Overseas Territories, including Bermuda, on a framework for reparatory justice. We also call on the Government of Bermuda to state its position clearly and to stand with our CARICOM neighbours.
Britain says it sees Bermuda as a partner. Partners do not tell each other that the past is closed when its debts were only settled in 2015, and when even the Church of England has accepted that those debts are not yet paid.
