Sir Hilary vows to fight for Britain to pay for its atrocities
SIR HILARY Beckles, chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Reparations Commission and vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, has said that the admission from the British Treasur y that former colonies continued to pay for the abolition of slavery was further evidence that slavery is not of the distant past and irrelevant. This fact, he said, is contrary to position taken by British politicians, such as former Prime Minister David Cameron in his address to the Jamaican Parliament in September 2015. Cameron refused to enter in reparation talks with the Caribbean.
“His thesis was clear, ‘slavery is in the past, let’s forget it, let’s move on, the people of the Caribbean should get over it.’ And that there is no benefit to either side or to humanity by addressing this matter in the formal sense. In other words, the position of the British government was that they have moved on, and that they have long moved on from this matter.
DECEPTIVE THESIS
“The research, however, has now shown the prime minister of Britain, in making this presentation to the Parliament of Jamaica and the people of the Caribbean, that his thesis was deceptive,” the reparations commission chair charged.
Sir Hilar y lashed Cameron, arguing that at the time of his presentation in the Parliament, he was fully aware that the Bank of England and the Treasur y were still paying persons who still held t he bonds which financed the payback to slave owners, and the controversial issue had, in fact, not moved on.
“This transfer of public money to the private holders of the slave bonds makes it a presentday activity. We consider this to be an immorality. We consider this to be a duplicity and public dishonesty,” Sir Hilary declared, further vowing to fight for Britain to pay f or the atrocities it perpetrated in the Caribbean.