Reform UK would stop visas for people from countries seeking slavery reparations

(The Guardian)- Reform UK would stop issuing visas to people from any country that continues to demand compensation from the UK for its role in the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, the party has said.

Zia Yusuf, the party’s home affairs spokesperson, told the Daily Telegraph that the call for reparations was “insulting”.

He claimed 3.8m visas had been issued over the last two decades to people from countries calling for reparations.

For four centuries, seven European countries, including the UK, enslaved and trafficked more than 15 million Africans across the Atlantic. Historians have linked wealth from enslavement to mass industrialisation in the west.

Last month, the UN voted to describe the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”

The landmark resolution was backed by the African Union and the Caribbean Community (Caricom). It had been proposed by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, who said: “Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of millions who suffered the indignity of slavery.”

The UK and members of the EU abstained from the vote, while the US voted against the resolution, which was not legally binding.

Yusuf told the Telegraph: “A growing number of countries are demanding reparations from Britain. These countries ignore the fact that Britain made huge sacrifices to be the first major power to outlaw slavery and enforce this prohibition.”

He said the “bank is closed and the door is locked” for anyone who wanted to “use history as a weapon to drain our treasury”.

“The United Kingdom is not an ATM for ethnic grievances of the past, and we will no longer tolerate being ridiculed on the world stage,” he continued. “While countries like Jamaica, Nigeria and Ghana ramp up their demands for reparations, the Westminster establishment has rewarded them. Enough is enough.”

Reform UK has previously pledged to scrap international aid for countries demanding reparations.

In 2023, a report on reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, written and compiled by Patrick Robinson, a former judge of the International Court of Justice, concluded the UK alone should pay $24tn (£18.8tn) as reparations for transatlantic slavery in 14 countries.

Last year the Caricom Reparations Commission (CRC), which was set up to progress the Caribbean’s pursuit of justice for centuries of enslavement and colonisation by European countries, addressed misleading press reports that suggested the commission’s aim was to “break the British Treasury” by demanding trillions of pounds.

The CRC’s chair, Prof Sir Hilary Beckles, speaking at a lecture in London during its first official visit to the UK, said the commission’s ultimate aim was for the UK and its former colonies to identify mutual strategies for a mutually beneficial restorative justice programme.

“Every week, we open the newspapers and we hear the most terrible things about these reparations people from the Caribbean. Some have said that we have come here to break the British Treasury by demanding millions and billions and billions of pounds. And they have consistently tried to discredit what is an ongoing moral and ethical argument for justice, the right to justice,” he said during the lecture.