REPARATIONS | Jamaica’s Failures Do Not Absolve Britain

MONTEGO BAY,  Jamaica, September 17, 2026 - by O Dave Allen | In remarks circulated by GB News, broadcaster and royal commentator and apologist Rafe Heydel-Mankoo dismissed Jamaica’s reparations claim as an “avaricious cash grab” and accused the country of “exploiting naive Western guilt.”

That language is revealing. It attacks the motives of those seeking redress before seriously confronting the substance of the claim.

The accompanying argument about corruption and mismanagement deserves to be stated fairly. Jamaica has suffered serious failures of political leadership and public administration. Money has been wasted. Institutions have failed. Governments have too often disappointed the people they were elected to serve. A critic may therefore ask: why should Britain provide reparations if Jamaican institutions might squander them?

Accountability is a legitimate concern. But the conclusion does not follow.

The failures of Jamaican governments cannot erase Britain’s responsibility for centuries of enslavement, colonial exploitation and extraction. These are separate questions. Both can be true at the same time.

Jamaicans do not have to defend corruption in order to defend reparatory justice.

We should demand honest government at home. We should insist on competent administration, transparency and consequences for those who misuse public resources. But we should reject absolutely the suggestion that the suffering of generations of Jamaicans becomes less deserving of redress because governments that came afterwards sometimes failed them.

That would impose a grotesque double penalty upon the Jamaican people: first, exploitation under slavery and colonialism; then disqualification from redress because some of their own post-independence leaders governed badly.

Britain cannot reasonably begin its account of Jamaica in 1962.

Any serious historical reckoning must examine what slavery extracted, what colonialism accumulated, the ownership structure it created, the institutions it fashioned, the opportunities it denied and the social order it left behind.

That does not mean blaming Britain for every pothole, every failed policy or every act of corruption in modern Jamaica. Independent Jamaica must answer for its own decisions.

But the opposite claim is just as intellectually dishonest: that because Jamaica has made mistakes since independence, the material consequences of slavery and colonialism somehow disappeared.

They did not.

And Britain’s own emancipation settlement exposes the contradiction at the heart of the modern argument against reparations.

When slavery was abolished in the British Empire, Parliament authorised £20 million in compensation to slave owners for the loss of what the law had recognised as their “property.”

The enslaved received no equivalent compensation for their stolen labour, their brutalisation, their dispossession or generations of denied freedom.

Britain found money for those who claimed ownership of human beings.

It found no comparable compensation for the human beings who had been owned.

Against that history, describing Jamaica’s present claim as an “avaricious cash grab” is not an argument. It is an insult standing where an argument ought to be.

And reparatory justice is not reducible to a cheque handed to the Jamaican Government.

CARICOM’s reparations programme encompasses development measures including education, public health, cultural rehabilitation, technology transfer, debt-related measures and programmes intended to repair some of the continuing consequences of slavery and colonial exploitation.

If the concern is corruption, then build safeguards.Require independent audits. Publish expenditure.Create transparent institutions.Give affected communities representation. Direct resources towards measurable programmes in education, health, land, housing, heritage and economic development.

Accountability should determine how reparations are administered. It cannot determine whether the historical wrong existed.

Nor can Britain claim moral superiority merely because modern Britain is wealthier, more institutionally developed or better manicured than societies it once colonised. A polished present does not disinfect an exploitative past.

Jamaica has responsibilities. Britain has responsibilities. One does not cancel the other.

We should confront corruption in Kingston with the same seriousness with which we confront historical injustice in London. We should demand accountability from our own governments without permitting that demand to become an alibi for former colonial powers.

The moral case for reparatory justice must continue to be supported by rigorous historical evidence. Legal claims must withstand legal scrutiny. Economic arguments must withstand economic scrutiny.

But “Jamaica is badly governed” is not an answer to the reparations question.

It is a different indictment.

We will not be shamed out of seeking an honest reckoning with history.

We can condemn failures at home and demand justice abroad.

Indeed, if accountability means anything at all, we must do both.

EDITOR'S NOTE:

There is a convenient forgetting at the heart of Britain's story about itself. It celebrates 1807 and 1834 as moral triumphs, and says much less about who built the machine that abolition later dismantled.

The English trade in African lives was not a rogue enterprise of greedy merchants operating beyond the Crown's gaze. It was sponsored, chartered and profited from at the very top.

When John Hawkins sailed for the West African coast in the 1560s, Elizabeth I invested in his voyages and lent him a royal ship, the Jesus of Lübeck, for the purpose. A century later, Charles II granted a royal charter to what became the Royal African Company.

It was headed by his brother James, Duke of York, the future James II, and historians count it as having shipped more enslaved Africans across the Atlantic than any other single institution in the trade's history.

Captives, many bound for Barbados and Jamaica, were reportedly branded with "DY," the Duke's own initials, so that ownership was literally burned into human flesh. Then in 1713, at the Treaty of Utrecht, Britain secured the asiento, the right to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America, as a prize of statecraft.

None of this was incidental to the Crown. It was policy, patronage and profit. Any honest conversation about reparatory justice in the Caribbean has to begin there, not at the moment of emancipation, when the same state that enabled the crime paid compensation to the perpetrators rather than to the people it had wronged. 

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