King Charles to face eye-watering £200billion demand in awkward summit confrontation
The King and Prime Minister will face an awkward call for massive reparation at a major international summit, after a growing campaign from 15 countries for the UK to pay them back
A major meeting of the leaders of Commonwealth countries later this month is likely to see an awkward confrontation between the British Government, which will in part be represented by King Charles. However, the monarch could face a difficult summit in Samoa, as 15 countries have banded together to call for £200 billion in reparations for historic injustices carried out by Britain.
15 countries in the Caribbean are making the eye-watering £200bn demand for repayment, following years of campaigning on the impact of the transatlantic slave trade – which saw more than two million human beings taken from their homes to be clapped in irons and shipped to British colonies to work as slaves.
But this massive sum pales to insignificance when compared to other estimates of the money owed to the descendants of slaves. Speaking to the UN, Barbados’ PM Mia Mottley said: “The numbers have been looked at and studied by many persons and the figures suggest a minimum of $5 trillion dollars…”
She continued: “4.9 to be precise, is what it would be if we were to be similarly compensated across the board today.” Barbados is one of the 15 governments making up the Caribbean Community, CARICOM, group calling on Britain to make reparations for the slave trade, which lasted for almost 250 years and made some British merchants, as well as the government, extremely wealthy.
The first of these slave colonies to be established was Barbados, which signed into law in 1661 that African people were property, reports Nadine White in the Independent. In the coming centuries before abolition, Britain and the crown would gain enormous sums of money by forcing slaves to work on plantations in the Caribbean, growing sugar and tobacco that would then be traded back in Britain.
Leading the charge almost 400 years after slaves were first taken across the Atlantic, the Barbados PM said she had pressed the matter with King Charles at a meeting earlier this month at Buckingham Palace, where Mottley reportedly discussed a much higher sum than £200bn.
