Reform UK would stop issuing visas to people from any nation that continues to demand compensation from the UK for its position within the transatlantic commerce in enslaved people, the get together has stated.
Zia Yusuf, the get together’s residence affairs spokesperson, advised the Daily Telegraph that the decision for reparations was “insulting”.
He claimed 3.8m visas had been issued during the last 20 years to people from countries calling for reparations.
For 4 centuries, seven European countries, together with the UK, enslaved and trafficked greater than 15 million Africans throughout the Atlantic. Historians have linked wealth from enslavement to mass industrialisation within the west.
Last month, the UN voted to explain the transatlantic slave commerce as the “gravest crime against humanity” and known as for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”.
The landmark decision was backed by the African Union and the Caribbean Community (Caricom). It had been proposed by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, who stated: “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, whereas the US voted towards the decision, which was not legally binding.
Yusuf advised 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 stated the “bank is closed and the door is locked” for anybody who needed 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 beforehand pledged to scrap worldwide assist for countries demanding reparations.
In 2023, a report on reparations for the transatlantic slave commerce, written and compiled by Patrick Robinson, a former decide of the International Court of Justice, concluded the UK alone should pay $24tn (£18.8tn) as reparations for transatlantic slavery in 14 countries.
Last yr the Caricom Reparations Commission (CRC), which was set as much as progress the Caribbean’s pursuit of justice for centuries of enslavement and colonisation by European countries, addressed misleading press reports that recommended the fee’s intention was to “break the British Treasury” by demanding trillions of kilos.
The CRC’s chair, Prof Sir Hilary Beckles, talking at a lecture in London throughout its first official go to to the UK, stated the fee’s final intention was for the UK and its former colonies to determine mutual methods for a mutually helpful 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 stated in the course of the lecture.
