Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley called “asinine” a suggestion by a British lawmaker that Britain’s former colonies should repay it for its historic investment in them.
“I am not sure that you want me to reply to things that are asinine and certainly the notion that we should pay the United Kingdom for oppressing us, for enslaving us and for treating us as chattel”, Mottley said Thursday.
She was speaking after Suella Braverman, a former British Home Secretary who is now a member of the anti-immigration Reform UK party, wrote in a post on X on July 3 that the British Empire “did so much good for the world.”
Braverman was writing in response to another parliamentarian who noted that Jamaica planned to lodge a formal petition for reparations later this year.
“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,” Braverman wrote.
Mottley’s comments came during the closing news conference of leaders of the Caribbean Community, or CARICOM, who met this week in St. Lucia to discuss issues including reparations for slavery.
Last month, Mottley led a subcommittee of Caribbean leaders that launched a new slavery reparations manifesto during a reparations conference in Ghana.
Under Mottley, Barbados cut ties with Queen Elizabeth II in November 2021 and ceased to be a constitutional monarchy.
In recent years, Britain has insisted it will not pay to make amends, while Caribbean leaders have called for a formal apology and various measures including debt cancellations.
U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk has said that an estimated 25 million to 30 million Africans were uprooted for the purpose of slavery, with many sent to work on plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas.
