Not a single penny: the liberal case against reparations

Does Britain owe other Commonwealth nations reparations for the historic crimes of slavery?

By Kristian Niemietz, IEA Editorial Director

Does Britain owe other Commonwealth nations reparations for the historic crimes of slavery?

That question is currently all over the media. Supposedly, this is because it was brought up at the recent Commonwealth heads of government meeting, but that is not really the reason at all: this is not an international diplomatic conflict, but a purely domestic Culture War. The fact is, if Commonwealth governments came up with demands which the Guardian disapproves of, we would never hear about it. We only hear about this one, because calls for slavery reparations were already fashionable among Britain’s own domestic cultural elites. A pro-reparations position is way to signal agreement with the fashionable anti-capitalist idea that the wealth of the Western world was built on slavery and colonial exploitation.  

This is why, when the IEA published Imperial Measurement earlier this year, one of the most common criticisms was that we were doing this in order to ward off progressive calls for reparations. For example, writing for The Observer, Will Hutton paraphrased my argument ironically (before rejecting it as “a risible recasting of history that should have been ignored as self-serving ideological tosh”) in the following terms: