Reform UK(political party) would stop visas for people from countries seeking slavery reparations

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Reform UK would stop visas for people from countries seeking slavery reparations​

04/07/26
Reform UK would stop issuing visas to people from any country that continues to demand compensation from the UK for its role in the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, the party has said.

Zia Yusuf, the party’s home affairs spokesperson, told the Daily Telegraph that the call for reparations was “insulting”.


He claimed 3.8m visas had been issued over the last two decades to people from countries calling for reparations.

For four centuries, seven European countries, including the UK, enslaved and trafficked more than 15 million Africans across the Atlantic. Historians have linked wealth from enslavement to mass industrialisation in the west.

Last month, the UN voted to describe the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”.

The landmark resolution was backed by the African Union and the Caribbean Community (Caricom). It had been proposed by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, who said: “Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of millions who suffered the indignity of slavery.”

The UK and members of the EU abstained from the vote, while the US voted against the resolution, which was not legally binding.

Yusuf told the Telegraph: “A growing number of countries are demanding reparations from Britain. These countries ignore the fact that Britain made huge sacrifices to be the first major power to outlaw slavery and enforce this prohibition.”

He said the “bank is closed and the door is locked” for anyone who wanted to “use history as a weapon to drain our treasury”.

“The United Kingdom is not an ATM for ethnic grievances of the past, and we will no longer tolerate being ridiculed on the world stage,” he continued. “While countries like Jamaica, Nigeria and Ghana ramp up their demands for reparations, the Westminster establishment has rewarded them. Enough is enough.”

Reform UK has previously pledged to scrap international aid for countries demanding reparations.

In 2023, a report on reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, written and compiled by Patrick Robinson, a former judge of the International Court of Justice, concluded the UK alone should pay $24tn (£18.8tn) as reparations for transatlantic slavery in 14 countries.

Last year the Caricom Reparations Commission (CRC), which was set up to progress the Caribbean’s pursuit of justice for centuries of enslavement and colonisation by European countries, addressed misleading press reports that suggested the commission’s aim was to “break the British Treasury” by demanding trillions of pounds.

The CRC’s chair, Prof Sir Hilary Beckles, speaking at a lecture in London during its first official visit to the UK, said the commission’s ultimate aim was for the UK and its former colonies to identify mutual strategies for a mutually beneficial restorative justice programme.

“Every week, we open the newspapers and we hear the most terrible things about these reparations people from the Caribbean. Some have said that we have come here to break the British Treasury by demanding millions and billions and billions of pounds. And they have consistently tried to discredit what is an ongoing moral and ethical argument for justice, the right to justice,” he said during the lecture.

 

[FlimFlam]

Slick usage of language and framing.

They centered the transatlantic slave trade because that isn't the only reparations movement against England. India has had a reparations from Englad movement for generations. That nation would collapse if they stopped Indians from coming

Interestingly enough, India has the highest likelihood of getting reparations especially if the state pressed the issue

 

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Commonwealth leaders vow to keep seeking reparations after Reform UK plan to halt visas

Politicians warn party’s pledge to ‘punish’ countries seeking justice for slavery will harm and isolate Britain

www.theguardian.com

04/07/26

Commonwealth politicians say they will not back down from seeking reparations as UK public figures, including a former Reform insider, warn the rightwing party’s pledge to “punish” countries seeking justice for slavery would harm and isolate Britain.

This week, Reform UK said they would halt visas for nationals of countries formally demanding reparations from Britain if they took power.


Arley Gill, the head of Grenada Reparations Commission, said: “It is not funny that they think after years of invading and colonising a people that they think a British visa for those same people is a privilege.”

Last month a resolution spearheaded by Ghana, which described the historical transatlantic trafficking and enslavement of Africans as “the gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations, was passed by the UN general assembly

Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesperson, said on Monday the UK was being “ridiculed on the world stage”.

“While countries like Jamaica, Nigeria and Ghana ramp up their demands for reparations, the Westminster establishment has rewarded them. Enough is enough,” he said.

Sri Lanka, where Yusuf’s parents migrated from, is among countries seeking colonial redress from the UK.

On Tuesday, Ralph Gonsalves, the opposition leader and former prime minister of St Vincent and Grenadines, accused Farage of “doing an imitative Trump” and “seeking another cultural wedge issue” that “will certainly isolate Britain further.”

“None of us in the Caribbean who are advocating reparations would be cowed by that sort of talk,” he said.

“For us, the present is the past because of the legacy of underdevelopment, which can be empirically sourced to native genocide and the enslavement of African bodies.”

The UK has never formally apologised for slavery.

Calling for “inter-nation dialogue”, Hilary Beckles, the chair of Caricom reparations commission, said “the idea the victims of an enormous crime calling for justice are to be doubly punished is tragic.”

He added: “Crimes against humanity have been committed against so many people on this planet and most have now received some form of apology (or) reparations.

“The view seems to be that the legacy of toxic racism, the legacy of white supremacy politics is still so intense that Black people are deemed undeserving … (but) I think the British parliament is filled with people who do not share that view.

“I have no doubt in time the British people and the British government will come to realise (dialogue) is what is required.”

On Tuesday, the Reform leader, Nigel Farage, said the UK had spent “four decades on the high seas … driving slavery off the world’s oceans”.

Gill said Reform’s position showed a “terrible lack of knowledge” of the issues, highlighting that enslavers were compensated by British taxpayers.

Last month, the UK and Nigeria agreed a £746m deal in which the UK would provide loan financing to refurbish two major ports in Lagos. The deal includes a £70m contract for loss-making British Steel in Lincolnshire, which has a Reform UK mayor.
Neville Watson, was Reform UK’s only Black branch chair until he left last year, having called for reparations.

Watson, the Christian People’s Alliance candidate for 2028’s London mayoral elections, said Reform’s stance would “punish nations for raising legitimate historical claims” and compound UK skills shortages.

He described the UK-Nigeria trade deal as a reminder our “prosperity is seated in partnership”, adding that the Reform visa policy would “tear down the very fabric of trade and diplomacy”.

Antoinette Fernandez, the global majority Greens reparations officer, said: “Britain outlawed slavery because consistent slave uprisings made it no longer profitable.

“Reparative justice is about correcting not just the wrongs of the past but the ongoing exploitation of African countries – a large majority of which still provide natural resources and goods to Europe for which they are consistently shortchanged.”

Bell Ribeiro-Addy, a Labour MP and chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afrikan Reparations said Reform’s policy was a “ridiculous provocation”, adding “reparatory justice was never simply about money. The demand is for acknowledgment, truth-telling and structural repair.”

She added: “Reform have either failed to grasp that, or chosen to ignore it. What they are effectively doing is threatening the descendants of the enslaved for insisting the transatlantic slave trade be recognised as a crime against humanity. Some still believe they sit at the head of a table the rest of the world was never invited to. The world is changing.”

Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South, said: “The total death toll (of slavery) may exceed 20 million. We confront that history honestly not as an act of self-flagellation but because the alternative – the insistence that power never has to account for itself – is exactly the logic that makes atrocities possible in every generation.”

Since Brexit, the UK has turned again to former African, Caribbean and Asian colonies to fill skills shortages in teaching, health, social care and the Prison Service.

At a press conference on Tuesday where Farage was asked if the party had done any modelling on cost and the impact on UK employers, he said they would not backdate the visa block.

Keir Starmer has previously said the UK would not pay reparations, but No 10 has indicated the country could support some forms of reparatory justice, such as restructuring financial institutions and debt relief