Politicians and campaigners are due to host the second national conference on reparations this weekend, as the issue continues to dominate the Commonwealth summit.
The All-party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations (APPG-AR), a group of cross-party MPs, plans to build on the growing momentum to provide reparations and justice to countries blighted by transatlantic slavery.
Last year’s conference was attended by 850 people, with 22 sessions discussing a range of policy issues from the restitution of artefacts to land rights, education, trade unionism, planetary repair, economics, law and culture.
This year’s conference, entitled From Acknowledgment to Action, will focus on how policymakers and campaigners can move towards concrete policy ideas for reparations on a local, national and international scale.
The Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, chair of the APPG-AR, said: “Reparations are not about relitigating historic injustices, they are about remedying the deep-rooted inequalities that still shape our world today. At a time when there is growing awareness of how racial hierarchies that endure to this day were constituted to justify the enslavement and colonisation of African peoples, state-led action on reparations is sadly lacking.”
The conference follows the widely criticised remarks by Keir Starmer, who, while travelling to the conference, told reporters he wants to “look forward” rather than have “very long endless discussions about reparations on the past”.
Lavinya Stennett, the founder and chief executive of the Black Curriculum, is speaking on the education panel. She told the Guardian she is doing so to discuss “the inaccuracy and gaping omission in our curriculums on the role Britain played in chattel slavery – which makes it all the more permissible for current leaders to dismiss reparations”.
She added: “I am also going to connect with others to discuss reparative language – a type of education that supports all people to learn and engage, beyond initial feelings of guilt, shame and remorse.”
The equality and human rights campaigner Prof Gus John, who will also be speaking at the event, said: “For reparations, think reparatory justice. Colonialism created sustainable generational wealth for the British ruling class, including the monarchy and the church, which is evident to this day. This is matched by cyclical poverty and vulnerability to climate change in the nations and among descendants of the people that created that wealth.
“Justice demands that there is restitution and rebalancing so that there is equity in the distribution of life chances.”
