The Reparations Scam

The narrative of decolonisation has plenty of useful idiots (I sometimes prefer craven amplifiers), most notably in the Middle East, but some of its biggest and loudest absurdities are to be found elsewhere...on our side of the pond for example.

Take Belize, where PM Johnny Briceño has become a leading mouthpiece for the Caribbean slavery reparations scam. (This specifically targets the UK even though history’s largest slave economy was overseen by France and the French contribution to abolition was, er…)

The Guardian, amongst others, have lapped this up in almost every piece they have published recently about our neighbour.

Oddly missing from these articles is any name-check for the most awkward of facts behind Briceño’s opportunistically stuck out palm.

Following emancipation — which had commenced with the successful trouncing in 1798 of a 'Spanish Armada' around St George's Caye — every inhabitant of the settlement was granted full civil rights in 1832.

Already during that same decade, black Belizeans had risen to the summit of government and the justice system which, in the wider context of the situation elsewhere in the hemisphere at this time, is genuinely extraordinary.

And then, following that, thirty years later in 1862, Belize became a crown colony with a governor appointed from Britain.

This new colonial situation surely, up to independence in 1981 — and to some extent beyond that date — protected the tiny country from further attempts at forced re-absorption into the nearby Spanish-speaking, republican sphere, with a concomitant loss of its rather uniquely English take on politics, law, civil rights and relative racial tolerance.

Many Belizeans are descended from Yucatecos to whom the British offered sanctuary. Ditto Mayan communities in the south who had fled the conflict in Guatemala. Some are descendants of Confederate troops who resettled there after the American Civil War. Those of African descent are a minority and a minority within this minority — the Garifuna — were never enslaved.

Belize's GDP per capita is today about 30% higher than that of Guatemala, and significantly higher than every nation in Africa, with the sole exception of Botswana, with whom there is near parity.

Yet today the party of government is even considering withdrawal from the Commonwealth on purely ideological, 'anticolonial' grounds, which would frankly represent an act of economic self-harm along the lines of Brexit.

Many of the contemporary British taxpayers who would presumably be simultaneously required to provide compensation, have ancestors in their immediate or deeper past with frankly far worse experiences of conquest, oppression, enslavement and exploitation.

So perhaps the rather sad truth here is that either the Guardian hacks don't know any of this, or they don't want you to know it: neither a good look for a platform priding itself on serious journalism.