“The problem we all had in England, especially black boys, in terms of education outcomes, wasn’t just teacher racism and the hangover of slavery,” says Sewell. “We had a real issue with absent fathers and family breakdown. This is where I would say that Lenny Henry has a point and doesn’t have a point. The breakdown of the family does have antecedents in slavery because it did break the family tradition. However, how you repair that is not on the level of dependency. That violence can only be repaired by the actors themselves.
“It’s almost patronising to think a whole load of cash would stop this problem.”
High unemployment rate
Henry and Ryder argue that slavery is a long-term cause of the employment gap in the UK. Black British people are twice as likely to be unemployed as their white counterparts. In 2024, the unemployment rate for black 16 to 24-year-olds was 27 per cent, versus 10 per cent for white. Black households are the most likely to be in lower income bands, while home ownership is below the population average.
Advocates for reparations argue that this is because the proceeds of slavery have been entrenched for mostly white beneficiaries for nearly 200 years, while black British people have suffered the downsides. But a blanket approach to the UK might not do justice to the minutiae.
“The unemployment rate among black British people is higher than the average,” says Owolade. “But again, this doesn’t break down the various groups with the black British population. One could argue that reparations should be paid to specifically black Caribbean rather than black British people as a whole.
“But if we look at another black Caribbean group, black Caribbean people in America [who are also descendants of enslaved African people], they do very well in terms of education and employment in America.”
It is for this reason that some calls for reparations have focused on more specific redress. One high-profile example was Laura Trevelyan, the BBC broadcaster who, on discovering her family had benefited enormously from the Slave Compensation Act, made a donation and established a fund to try to make amends.
“Caribbean calls for reparation have not generally focused on paying reparation to individuals but typically include asking landowning families to return their ancestors’ former slavery plantations,” says Prof Corinne Fowler, a lecturer on postcolonial literature at the University of Leicester. “Another example is funds to address the diabetes epidemic – an intergenerational medical legacy due to diets eaten by enslaved ancestors.
“Most Britons of Caribbean descent not only bear the surnames of their ancestors’ enslavers but can’t construct their family tree because of the way plantation records were kept. And when the Windrush generation – the descendants of enslaved people – were invited to work in Britain in the 1940s, they were denied access to bank accounts and had to devise their own loans and credit associations which still operate today, known as the Pardner Hand.”
If specific or individual reparations may be possible, the idea of blanket cash handouts, as mooted in The Big Payback, seems more ambitious. “There is an element of sheer grift and economic opportunism,” says Sehgal Cuthbert. “It will appeal to a strata of non-white people, mainly middle-class, who have something to gain. There are lots of grants to be had. That explains some of the support for reparations. But it doesn’t explain the widespread, uncritical, lazy agreement that story has among a wider section of people.
“My suspicion would be it speaks to a need for moral certainty at a cultural moment where there are few fixed points to be had. It is an ersatz religion, really. The actual nitty-gritty political, economic and cultural analysis of what’s going on in Haiti or Jamaica or Ghana or Nigeria is being usurped by this narrative of ‘You have to slot them into their moral categories and pay up accordingly.’”
Lack of agency
Although some in the Labour Party, such as Clive Lewis and David Lammy, have previously expressed sympathy for the reparations cause, there are no signs the Government is about to take action, especially at a time of fiscal constraint. Sir Keir Starmer has said the Government is “very clear” that it would not pay.
For Sewell, Henry’s adoption of the reparations cause is, ironically, a symptom of guilt. “It’s not just about white guilt, there’s also a lot of black guilt,” he says. “The black middle-class feel very guilty about what they think of as their own privilege. To do well is regarded as almost a curse. In his case, doing well is selling out to your own community. He has a particular history in that he was involved in The Black and White Minstrel Show.” (Henry was the first black performer on the comedy series, which has been widely criticised as racist, and recently said he needed therapy to deal with his memories of it.)
