‘Moral blindness’: UK far-right pol slammed for plan to deny visas over reparations

Barbados has accused the far-right Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage of “profound moral blindness” after he proposed that Britain should block visa applications from Caribbean and African nations seeking reparations for transatlantic slavery.

Farage told a press conference a Reform party government would “block visa requests ​from any country that demands slavery reparations”, which includes Barbados and other Commonwealth countries in Britain’s former empire.

Even though Reform UK has only eight national lawmakers, the ultra-conservative, anti-immigration party is topping opinion polls ahead of an election in Britain due by 2029.

Reform described reparations calls as “insulting” because they “ignore the fact that Britain ​made huge sacrifices to be the first major power to outlaw slavery and enforce ​this prohibition”.

But the deputy chair of the Barbados National Task Force on Reparations, Ambassador David Comissiong, countered that Farage’s “out‑of‑step thinking” would only serve to “fire up” reparations campaigners to push even harder for the cause, which includes the restoration of cultural institutions, assistance with the public health crisis, help with eliminating illiteracy and support for technology transfer.

“Far from causing anyone to back off from the reparations issue, it is going to, in fact, motivate us, the reparations campaigners, to actually double down in telling the story, educating national public opinion, confronting people like Mr Farage with the hard facts and truth of that tragic history,” Comissiong told Barbados TODAY in an interview on Friday.

“I am not sure that Mr Farage understands the implications of the policy that he is proposing. He is proposing a policy under which a government that he leads would prevent from travelling to Britain the citizens of virtually the entire Caribbean — all of the English‑speaking countries of the Caribbean — the citizens of all of the English‑speaking countries of Africa … that would be a policy pregnant with negative consequences, not only for the UK but for the entire Commonwealth of nations.”

Amb. Comissiong added: “So I am not sure any right‑thinking person in Britain would take Mr Farage seriously. But this type of thinking on the part of Mr Farage harks back to a strain of thought within the UK where these folk obstinately refuse to reckon with the truth of their past; refuse to come to terms with the fact that, as an empire, they committed serious, serious crimes in dominating non‑native people, enslaving, carrying out genocide of the native people, and constructing this terribly devilish and inhumane system of racialised chattel slavery, where they denied human status to a large segment of the human family.”

The reparations campaigner lamented that even hundreds of years after the abolition of slavery, there were still elements in that culture who continued to “obstinately refuse” to come to terms with that history and to have the humility to admit their country did wrong, and that damage was done to human beings whose consequences persist to this day.

“The fact that they are unable to admit any of this speaks to a profound moral blindness. And really and truly, the only antidote for that is public education … is to tell the story of that tragic history. So I think that this announcement by Mr Farage … this is the reaction it is going to generate.

“So Mr Farage is totally out of step with many of the leading entities and institutions of the UK.”

Amb. Comissiong cited a declaration made by King Charles III that reparations is a conversation whose time has come, and the Church of England, which has publicly admitted complicity in the crime against humanity, publicly apologised and undertaken a financial reparative justice scheme.

The envoy also drew the British political leader’s attention to the fact that “several of the establishment families of Britain, such as the Jacobeans, the Gladstones, have also publicly apologised for the role of their ancestors in this crime and have undertaken reparatory justice initiatives”.

In an exclusive phone interview from his London offices on Friday, Barbados high commissioner to the UK, Edmund Hinkson, told Barbados TODAY that while protocol constrained him from commenting on the politics of Britain, whether government or opposition, he was adamant that Barbados fully supports the United Nations resolution declaring that the transatlantic slave trade was the gravest crime ever committed against humanity in world history.

Hinkson expressed regret that even though the resolution was overwhelmingly passed by 152 of the 193 countries, Britain and all of the European Union nations that at some time had a hand in the slave trade abstained.

The high commissioner sought to make clear that contrary to popular belief in Britain, including among the media, Barbados and other CARICOM states are not focusing their reparatory demands on the payment of the estimated £18tn ($48tn) to £24tn ($65tn) of free labour that was provided to the slave traders — including commercial banks, insurance companies, the Church of England and, at one stage, three‑quarters of the British parliament.

Hinkson said: “The narrative in the United Kingdom by those who oppose our argument for reparatory justice is that we are asking for all these trillions and trillions of dollars in compensation for slavery and for the transatlantic slave trade. Of course, none of the countries that were involved in this tremendous international crime have that money right now. We are not asking for that kind of money by itself … that is not at the forefront. We understand that the practicality of that money will not be paid. 

“We are asking first and foremost for a full and formal apology. When you have done wrong, you should be the first to apologise. The argument that the descendants of the slave owners and slave traders should not apologise because it wasn’t them but their great‑great‑great‑great fathers who committed this crime — the reality is that those descendants of those slave owners, slave traders, are still reaping the tremendous benefits of their ancestors’ ignoble acts.

“We are asking, for example, for the restoration of our cultural institutions. You could go into any museum in Europe, in the United Kingdom, and see the histories of their countries and see assets that have been removed from civilisations of Africa and Asia. We are asking for assistance with our public health crisis.

“The reality is the effects of slavery are still in the DNA of our people today. We have the highest incidence in the Caribbean of chronic diseases in the form of hypertension and the two types of diabetes. We are asking for assistance in eliminating illiteracy. We are asking for assistance with psychological rehabilitation. We are asking for technology transfer; we are asking for debt cancellation.”