The UK delegation, led by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, faces an awkward Commonwealth summit next week, amid demands for reparations from member countries. King Charles will also be at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Samoa, following his trip to Australia.
British representatives face a strained meeting, with several governments demanding billions from the UK as reparations to poorer countries for causing climate change as well as slavery.
Philip Davis, the prime minister of the Bahamas, told the Observer that his country needed help from the UK to pay for damage caused by extreme weather events.
He said: “The Commonwealth is the ideal forum for making progress on reparations. Our very name echoes the principles and values of the necessary stewardship of the wealth we hold in common – our shared planet.”
He continued: “Bringing together some of the richest nations on the world with some of the most vulnerable gives us the urgent responsibility for finding a solution to the global shocks that threaten the loss of lives and livelihoods. For island states – which make up nearly half of the membership of the Commonwealth – it’s a threat which is truly existential. If we cannot find ways to make our countries more resilient to these shocks, we will not survive.
“The time has come to have real dialogue about how we address these historical wrongs.”
The UK faces demands to pay up to £200 billion for slavery.
Meanwhile, a study in the scientific journal Nature Sustainability last year suggested that the UK will owe £6.2 trillion in climate reparations by 2050 because of its carbon emissions since 1960.
The UK Government has already rushed to squash the eye-watering demands before the summit begins.
A Downing Street spokesperson has confirmed that there will not be an apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. They also ruled out financial reparations.
Instead, the spokesperson said that the focus will be on current issues, such as “shared challenges and opportunities faced by the Commonwealth, including driving growth across our economies”.
However, the summit’s agenda is up to the leaders of all of the member nations to decide, according to the Commonwealth Secretariat.
The demand for reparations could be particularly awkward for Britain’s foreign secretary David Lammy.
In 2018, as an opposition MP, Mr Lammy called for slavery reparations. He posted on Twitter: “As Caribbean people enslaved, colonised and invited to Britain as citizens we remember our history. We don’t just want an apology, we want reparations and compensation.”
At the last CHOGM in Rwanda two years ago, King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, stopped short of an apology but he expressed his sorrow for slavery.
He has commissioned research into the royal family’s involvement in the slave trade but is yet to share the outcome.
