Britain’s former Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s suggestion that former colonies should compensate the United Kingdom for its “investment, effort, and contribution” that she claims the former slave empire made is not merely historically illiterate, it is an astonishing inversion of one of humanity’s darkest moral catastrophes.

It is an argument so devoid of historical proportion that it transforms the victim into debtor and the perpetrator into creditor.

No serious discussion about reparation can begin by erasing the foundation upon which the British Empire accumulated much of its wealth; that is, the forced labour of millions of enslaved Africans. Britain’s plantations throughout the Caribbean and elsewhere did not flourish because of benevolence, infrastructure, or enlightened governance. They flourished because human beings were bought, sold, whipped, raped, mutilated, and worked to death to generate extraordinary profits for the Crown, merchants, financiers, and plantation owners. The magnificent buildings, financial institutions, and commercial fortunes that still adorn Britain were, in no small measure, underwritten by stolen African labour.

Ms Braverman contends that today’s British people should not bear responsibility for actions committed centuries ago. That argument displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of reparation. The issue is not one of inherited guilt, but of inherited benefit. Nations, unlike individuals, are continuous entities. Britain continues to enjoy institutions, wealth, and global influence accumulated during its imperial zenith, just as former colonies continue to grapple with structural inequalities deliberately engineered during colonial rule.

Her argument becomes even more indefensible when viewed through the lens of Britain’s own conduct at Emancipation. When slavery was abolished in 1834, the British Government did not compensate the enslaved for generations of unpaid labour, shattered families, stolen lives, and immeasurable suffering. Instead, it paid slave owners £20 million — an astronomical sum at the time, equivalent to billions of pounds today — for the loss of what the law grotesquely regarded as their “property”.

Worse still, the formerly enslaved were compelled into periods of so-called apprenticeship, working for their former masters in a cruel extension of exploitation masquerading as freedom.

The moral obscenity did not end there. British taxpayers continued servicing the loan used to compensate slave owners until 2015. Imagine the irony: Descendants of the enslaved, many now British citizens themselves, helped pay off a debt incurred not to repair injustice, but to reward those who profited from it.

Against this historical backdrop, Ms Braverman’s demand that former colonies repay Britain is breathtaking in its effrontery.

Repay Britain for what, precisely? For centuries of extraction? For economies deliberately structured to enrich the colonial master while impoverishing the colonised?

To ascribe charity deserving reimbursement is to mistake ruthless exploitation for philanthropy.

Slavery, and the transatlantic slave trade are among the greatest crimes against humanity. Such crimes, tied to colonial exploitation, are not nullified by the passage of time, nor erased because the victims are no longer alive. Their consequences endure in persistent wealth disparities, underdevelopment, and social inequities.

Calls by descendants of the enslaved for reparation are therefore not exercises in vengeance or collective blame. They are demands for historical honesty, restorative justice, and meaningful acknowledgement of enduring harm. They represent an assertion that societies built upon immense injustice have a moral obligation to help repair damage done to others.

History should never celebrate commerce while forgetting horrendous consequences. And it cannot demand repayment from those whose ancestors paid the ultimate price.