Don't dismiss the 'call' for reparations

I have to say, if I were personally demanding £18 trillion, I'd be on a tropical island somewhere, sipping coconut water and watching my bits in Wallace and Gromit on repeat. According to some people, that's exactly what I've done. But that's not what I said. It’s not what the book in which I'm supposed to have written it actually says either.

- Lenny Henry, The Independent

I had a look at some of the headlines and I thought, well... here we go again. I have gone out and personally demanded £18 trillion in reparations.

The thing is that it’s easier to frame reparations as just a number — a scary, impossible number. It’s easier to pitch white people against Black people, to turn a conversation about justice into one about resentment. It's easier to quote Lenny Henry than to actually engage with the massive body of academic and moral work that's been done on this issue.

There is a serious point to be made. The Brattle Report, published in 2023, is an economic study commissioned to calculate the scale of the financial debt owed from slavery. It found that Britain's historical slavery debt could amount to around £18.8 trillion. And when that report came out, the headlines looked very different from when I spoke about the same thing: “UK's £18tn slavery debt is an underestimation, UN judge says,” BBC Online. “UK cannot ignore calls for slavery reparations, says leading UN judge,” The Guardian. Those were serious, sober, well-informed discussions.