Let’s bring the Caribbean struggle for reparations to Britain

Britain has heard the call for reparations and ignored it for decades. When the case for reparations is made, we are told to “move on” as then-British Prime Minister David Cameron put it to Jamaican politicians four years ago. “We were not given a development compact,” Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados argued, “we were given political independence.” According to her, the Caribbean has made great strides to reverse legal inequalities. First, because the case for reparations, inspired by the works of thinkers like CLR James, Eric Williams, and Walter Rodney, is itself rooted in radical West Indian tradition that led to the agitation of African and Caribbean independence, and is indeed a continuation of that struggle. Imagine if university students in Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, which Williams identified as the three cities that provid the link between early industrial capitalism and slavery, stood with the CARICOM reparations commission.