Keypoints:
- Mottley calls repayment demand ‘asinine’
- Caribbean seeks justice, not charity
- Reparations campaign gains global momentum
BARBADOS Prime Minister Mia Mottley has dismissed as ‘asinine’ British MP Suella Braverman’s suggestion that former colonies should repay Britain for its colonial-era investment, delivering a forceful defence of the Caribbean’s reparations campaign.
Speaking at the closing media conference of the 51st CARICOM Heads of Government Meeting in Gros Islet, Saint Lucia, on July 8, Mottley said the proposal ignored the oppression, enslavement and legal dehumanisation on which British colonial rule was built.
Braverman defends British Empire
Braverman entered the debate in a July 3 post on X after reports that Jamaica planned to submit a petition to King Charles III over Britain’s role in slavery.
The Reform UK MP and former home secretary said ‘the British Empire did so much good for the world’ and argued that there was no legal basis for requiring modern British citizens to pay for conduct committed during the 18th century.
She then suggested that ‘former colonies should pay the British back’ for what she described as Britain’s considerable investment, effort and contribution to the development of flourishing democracies.
The argument portrayed imperial rule as a project that ultimately benefited colonised societies through infrastructure, legal systems and political institutions.
Reparations campaigners reject that interpretation, arguing that colonial institutions were designed primarily to administer conquered territories, facilitate resource extraction and protect Britain’s political and commercial interests.
Mottley calls argument ‘asinine’
Asked about Braverman’s remarks during the CARICOM summit media conference, Mottley questioned whether the argument deserved a serious response.
‘I’m not sure that you want me to reply to things that really are asinine,’ she said.
Mottley then rejected ‘the notion that we should pay the United Kingdom for oppressing us, for enslaving us and for treating us as cattle’.
The Barbados leader said the defining feature of racialised chattel slavery was the systematic legal classification of African people as property.
‘Slavery existed before, but this was the first time that human beings were defined as cattle,’ she said.
Mottley pointed to the 1661 Slave Code of Barbados, which provided a legal framework for stripping enslaved Africans of basic rights and treating them as property.
She said the Barbados code and the slave laws that followed distinguished themselves through ‘the treatment of human beings as cattle’.
Her remarks challenged attempts to present colonial roads, courts and administrative institutions as benevolent gifts while separating them from the coercive economic system they were created to support.
‘We’re not asking for charity’
Mottley also rejected suggestions that Caribbean governments were seeking aid or generosity from former colonial powers.
‘We’re not asking for charity,’ she said. ‘We’re asking to be able to ensure that justice can be done.’
She contrasted Britain’s resistance to reparations for the descendants of enslaved people with Parliament’s decision to compensate slave owners following abolition.
‘In 1834, the British Parliament did not need to be persuaded of that fact with respect to the loss of property, because we were chattelled, and the compensation of the slave owners of £20m,’ Mottley said.
Britain authorised £20m (about £2.1bn today) in compensation for slave owners after slavery was abolished across much of the empire. The enslaved received no compensation for generations of forced labour, family separation, violence and dispossession.
Mottley urged critics of reparations to study the historical record before making public interventions.
‘I would like to advise that those who have not yet read sufficiently to understand the history do so before making comments that really do not reflect well on them,’ she said.
Her response comes as Jamaica seeks to advance its reparations case through a petition to King Charles, widening the campaign’s constitutional and diplomatic dimensions.
Reparations becomes global movement
Mottley said demands for reparatory justice were no longer confined to individual Caribbean states.
‘With respect to the movement, this is a global movement,’ she said.
The prime minister highlighted expanding cooperation between Africa and the Caribbean, including a high-level reparations conference held in Accra and a Ghana-led resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly in March.
‘We just came from Accra in Ghana, and as you know the United Nations passed the resolution that Ghana brought in March of this year,’ she said.
The resolution strengthened the joint Africa-Caribbean campaign for reparatory justice, giving governments a multilateral platform to pursue apologies, restitution, compensation and institutional reform.
Mottley also cited remarks by Pope Leo, French President Emmanuel Macron and King Charles III as evidence that reparations had become part of mainstream international diplomacy.
She recalled that Charles, while Prince of Wales, had stated at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Rwanda that reparations was ‘a conversation whose time had come’.
CARICOM leaders have also endorsed a revised 10-point reparations manifesto addressing slavery’s economic, cultural, psychological and gendered consequences.
The initiative builds on sustained CARICOM pressure for formal negotiations with Britain.
Britain maintains legal opposition
Britain continues to oppose financial reparations despite acknowledging the suffering caused by slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.
The UK has argued that modern international law cannot be applied retrospectively to conduct that occurred before current prohibitions on slavery and crimes against humanity were established.
African and Caribbean governments maintain that slavery’s consequences—including structural inequality, racial discrimination, debt burdens and underdevelopment—remain present-day issues requiring meaningful repair.
The diplomatic battle following Ghana’s UN initiative has intensified pressure on former colonial powers to move beyond expressions of regret towards concrete discussions about accountability.
Caribbean ‘should not be used as a prop’
Mottley suggested that Braverman’s intervention was partly intended to distract attention from political pressures within Britain.
‘I have no doubt that there are British parliamentarians who want to distract people from the domestic politics of the United Kingdom at this point in time,’ she said.
‘But the Caribbean should not be used as a prop in those circumstances.’
Her response returned the debate to the central argument advanced by reparations campaigners: institutions created during colonial rule cannot be presented as gifts without acknowledging the enslaved people, extracted resources and coercive systems that made them possible.
