Kojo Koram says Keir Starmer should engage with the argument about reparations, in part to help keep “the size of the cash transfer politically palatable” (Here’s what Keir Starmer gets wrong about reparations: we’ve made them before, but now we have to do it right, 30 October). Surely this goes to the heart of the problem. With figures mooted on behalf of claimants being of the order of £18tn, no British prime minister who has any thought of long-term survival can engage realistically with a process that would more than totally bankrupt their country. Indeed, no one appears, in our media at least, to have explained exactly what the claimant countries would do with such vast sums should they receive them.
Interestingly, Koram points out that the £20m paid to enslavers via the 1837 Slave Compensation Act is “worth about £17bn today”. Such a figure is surely a much more sensible basis to start a discussion about enhanced development aid for the Caricom countries. Indeed, as this is in the ballpark of other domestic compensation schemes, such as the £11.8bn being set aside for victims of the infected blood scandal, it might prove harder for the prime minister to resist a similar discussion around slavery.
Alan Tanner
Staunton on Wye, Herefordshire
• Calls for reparations are not new. In 1787, a little-known African writer called Quobna Ottobah Cugoano described his childhood experiences of enslavement. His was the first British publication in which an African writer had pressed for reparations to be made to African nations for the loss of their people and the impact of so much human trafficking.
Then, in 1824, a Leicester woman, Elizabeth Heyrick, took up the cudgels. In a pamphlet entitled Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, she wrote forcefully of the unconditional right of slaves to receive recompense for their long years of labour, saying “let compensation be made in the first place where it is most due”. Eventually, it was, of course, the enslavers who were compensated, not the enslaved people themselves. But now, more than 200 years later, there is still time to acknowledge the need for reparative justice and to offer a formal apology to those who were affected by slavery and their descendants.
Jocelyn Robson
London
• In his speech in Samoa last month, King Charles said: “None of us can change the past, but we can commit with all our hearts to learning its lessons and to finding creative ways to right inequalities that endure.” This showed an understanding of the sensitivities to the cruelty and barbarism of the slave trade, which will have affected the 33 African and Caribbean countries that are part of the 56-nation Commonwealth.
This empathetic leadership struck a chord with many. While the Commonwealth has said the time has come for “discussions on reparatory justice” for the slave trade, it is now incumbent on the governments of member states to take this forward.
Zaki Cooper
London
• Those who continue to castigate the Whig government for its “generous compensation to enslavers” in the act of 1833 (Letters, 29 October) should consider that without compensation, abolition might have been delayed for several years. Vested interests sometimes need to be placated. As Nye Bevan found in 1948, progress is often possible only by accepting a less than perfect solution. “Stuffing their mouths with gold,” as he put it, ensured that consultants were allowed to keep their lucrative private practice while being brought into the new NHS.
Terry Fulton
Stonehouse, Gloucestershire
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