One of the biggest reasons why King Charles is traveling to Australia and Samoa over the next two weeks is because he will attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM). This will be his first CHOGM as king, and he is nowhere near as beloved as his mother. QEII held the British commonwealth together through sheer force of will, and some countries do not value their commonwealth ties the same way now that she’s gone. The issue of slavery reparations percolated for years during QEII’s reign, but nothing ever happened. According to the Daily Mail, the issue of reparations will be front and center for Charles’s first CHOGM.
King Charles and Sir Keir Starmer are set to face demands for the UK to pay an astonishing £200 billion in compensation for its role in the slave trade when they attend a Commonwealth summit later this month. A group of 15 Caribbean governments has unanimously agreed to put slavery reparations on the table at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Samoa on October 21.
It comes after the Prime Minister of Barbados told the United Nations that reparations for slavery and colonialism should be part of a new ‘global reset’. Mia Mottley, who is leading the demands from the West Indies nations, met the King in London earlier this month for talks in advance of the 56-nation Commonwealth gathering. Ms Mottley has praised Charles for declaring two years ago that slavery is ‘a conversation whose time has come’, although Buckingham Palace declined to reveal the contents of their latest ‘private discussions’.
The calls come in the wake of the Prime Minister’s controversial decision to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius earlier this month, a move which has led to fears for the future of British control of other strategic territories including the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy – who is descended from enslaved people – has described how his ancestors heard ‘the twisted lies of imperialism as they were stolen from their homes in shackles and turned into slaves’. He also controversially supported protesters who toppled the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol and dumped it into the harbour four years ago. Dozens of other memorials to traders and colonialists were removed in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests.
Estimates of the likely reparations bill for British involvement in slavery in 14 countries range from £206 billion to a staggering £19 trillion. The higher figure was cited last year by UN judge Patrick Robinson, who called it an ‘underestimation’ of the damage caused by the slave trade. Mr Robinson said he was amazed that countries involved in slavery think they can ‘bury their heads in the sand’ on the issue, adding: ‘Once a state has committed a wrongful act, it’s obliged to pay reparations’.
King Charles has spent the past two years splitting his time between a dozen different royal castles, palaces and mansions while his second wife raids the Royal Collection jewels. In my head, Charles surveys all of what he inherited and wonders “how could one even begin to part with any of it?” Anyway, reparations should happen. The fact that the reparation conversation has taken this long to make it to the CHOGM agenda speaks to the affection QEII engendered from commonwealth nations. But over the past five years or so, all of that has fallen to the wayside. Now the Windsors are seen as colonialists dumbf–ks who are too stupid to do even the most basic of soft diplomacy.
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