What the reparations debate says about Britain

In politics, it can be hard to tell the difference between a passing fad and an emerging orthodoxy. Those who don’t pay too much attention to progressive dogma can find themselves caught out. Ideas we may previously have dismissed as political fashion accessories for radical poseurs can suddenly turn into the kind of inevitability to which we are encouraged to reconcile ourselves. 

Ideas like Net Zero made such a transformation, practically overnight — as, briefly, did a bewildering array of concepts relating to gender. Out of all of the radical ideas being touted today, I think “reparations” for transatlantic slavery is the most likely to be next.

Until recently, it was the kind of idea that was indulged in supposedly serious places only because of its harmless outlandishness. It is now being taken deadly seriously, by a number of African and Caribbean governments, the Church of England, and several prominent black British public figures. Polling demonstrates that a broad majority of the British public are, somewhat unsurprisingly, firmly opposed to the idea, other than among the Afro-Caribbean community itself among whom reparations are overwhelmingly popular. 

Does support for reparations among British citizens of Afro-Caribbean heritage say anything about their degree of “integration” in British society?  My instinctive reaction was that, of course, it did. In an episode of The Critic Show in January, in which Tom Jones and I discussed Samuel Rubenstein’s review of Sir Lenny Henry’s book The Big Payback, I ventured the thought that Sir Lenny coming out for reparations in this manner represented the end of the line for the vision of a supposedly multicultural Britain. Others, however — including those who have no time at all for the reparations campaign — have firmly resisted this, and have insisted we should think about it in political terms, not as an issue of integration. 

During the 1980s and 1990s, Lenny Henry became a living icon for the idea of a monocultural but multiracial Britain that was referred to erroneously as “multicultural”. Along with other television personalities such as Sir Trevor MacDonald, Moira Stewart, Ainsley Harriott, Floella Benjamin and Andi Peters, as well as sportsmen like Ian Wright and Frank Bruno, Henry was part of a cohort that transformed the way in which the British public thought about Afro-Caribbean British people. Lenny Henry and Ian Wright in particular were so quintessentially English in the way that they spoke, joked and presented, that it was almost jarring to remember that they were both born to parents who moved to this country from overseas. 

There is a tendency to describe Afro-Caribbeans as the best integrated of Britain’s visible ethnic minorities

This had a profound effect on the way that people in Britain thought about the entire Afro-Caribbean community. They were thought of as English people who just randomly had different coloured skin, rather than as immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. This was very different to the way in which people thought about the South Asian diaspora who arrived after the expulsions from East Africa, or Pakistani or Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants and their descendants. For these groups, there seemed to be far higher cultural barriers that prevented intermixing with the general English population, as well as linguistic and religious differences that made them more profoundly distinct. One result of this is that people became more likely to think in terms of practical factors when considering disparities in outcomes between British Asians and the rest of society, whereas disparities between Afro-Caribbeans and the rest of society are put down to irrational prejudice and systemic injustice. 

Nevertheless, there is a tendency to describe Afro-Caribbeans as the best integrated of Britain’s visible ethnic minorities. Partially, this is down to the relatively high degree of genuine integration of Afro-Caribbeans into the white working class, including relatively commonplace interracial relationships (and slightly less common interracial marriages) resulting in a substantial mixed race population in certain places. Although the latter was more likely to happen in smaller cities like Nottingham or Wolverhampton where the rate of Afro-Caribbean migration was low enough that the community could not develop the autonomy that it became able to sustain in areas of London or Birmingham. 

I have written previously about the mechanisms of cultural integration by which immigrant communities can be inducted into the mainstream — and that this is far easier in more communal societies with common institutions and lower levels of privacy. This was the case in industrial, working class areas of British cities during the 19th and 20th centuries, and earlier Afro-Caribbean arrivals in the 1950s and 60s were probably among the last cohorts of arrivals to Britain to undergo this form of genuine social induction. However, there are some important caveats to apply to this. 

Firstly, that this went on unevenly. In larger cities particularly, Afro-Caribbeans arrived quickly and in large enough numbers that they could cluster in homogenous bubbles rather than live among the working class English. Secondly, the process of integration that did go on was interrupted at a relatively early stage by economic change, which saw heavy industries leave the inner city areas where Afro-Caribbeans overwhelmingly settled, leading to an exodus of the now car-owning white working class out of the cities. Thereafter, the Afro-Caribbeans would make up a far larger proportion of the inner city population, which they would share either with those whites who lacked the wherewithal to leave, or else with other immigrant groups. 

In places where larger Afro-Caribbean communities had retained a greater degree of autonomy, there was a far higher degree of intermixture with later waves of arrivals from Africa itself. The latter distinction was never really appreciated by mainstream British society; both Africans and Afro-Caribbeans were just thought of as “black”. In such places, particularly in London, a new subculture was formed around the affinities between African and Afro-Caribbean culture, with less emphasis on the points that either group had in common with English culture. This became thought of as a new “Black British” urban culture, however the terminology became confused with the other use of the word to describe the “English people with different coloured skin” phenomenon embodied by people like Lenny Henry and Ian Wright. 

On the other hand, in those places where there had been a higher degree of intermixture and with a larger mixed-race population, the Afro-Caribbeans and the “left behind” white remnant population forged a distinct Anglo-Caribbean subculture. This culture is much more specifically English rather than British. In the now post-industrial urban areas in the Midlands and the North West, along with certain bits of London, the English and the Caribbeans were left to reinforce each other’s worst shared traits — reckless hedonism, social libertinism, and a lack of interest in educational or economic attainment. The result was family breakdown, generational crises of addiction and worklessness, and chronic criminality. The welfare system acted as enabler in chief.  

There are other elements in the diaspora where integration with British culture has regressed

To summarise, there are elements of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora that have a high degree of cultural integration into British culture. There are also superficial cultural affinities that are mistaken for more profound forms of cultural integration. But there are other elements in the diaspora where integration with British culture has regressed. In particular, the creation of a generic “Black” subculture in London — which enjoys considerable cultural and counter-cultural cachet — combining African and Afro-Caribbean elements, undermines the claim that there is a distinct and well-integrated Afro-Caribbean British community.  

What is completely absent across the board is a high degree of economic integration. While there are many people of Afro-Caribbean extraction who are economically and culturally part of the British mainstream, this is largely something that they have attained individually or on a family basis, rather than as part of a recognisable social or generational pattern. 

Integration is the process by which previously distinct peoples become a part of a common whole. Cultural integration means either one group adopting the customs, norms and understandings of the other, or else the forging of a new set of customs based on elements of both. Economic integration is the process by which new arrivals are inducted into the mechanisms by which people in a particular country find work and prepare to find work, in order to sustain themselves independently; the outcome should be that they do not think of themselves as economically separate from the rest of the population. 

And it is this latter point that has been most clearly exposed as having not happened as a general phenomenon among Afro-Caribbeans when we consider the support for reparations for transatlantic slavery. I base this on an assumption — and others may disagree — that there isn’t a strongly held and well thought out view among those supporting the idea that there is a strong historical and moral case why they personally are due restitution as a result of transatlantic chattel slavery centuries ago, and that there is a meaningful financial loss to be made good. I think it’s more likely a simple case of not looking a gift horse in the mouth, and that the economic circumstances of the community generally justify a financial transfer. If anything, I suspect that this instinct may be even stronger among those individuals of Afro-Caribbean descent who have personally achieved economic security in Britain, who may feel embarrassment at their own success relative to their kin. 

There will be a temptation at this point to argue that the British state has failed in its responsibility to ensure that a minority population were given access to opportunity, and that quite possibly this negligence was a result of implicit racial prejudice. This has resulted in that community remaining economically marginal. This opens an entirely different debate about the nature of the state’s duties and role in the economy which I do not propose to address here — suffice to say that in recent years, multiple agencies of the state have indulged the mythologising that has gone on around the initial influx of Afro-Caribbeans into postwar Britain. 

This mythology holds that Afro-Caribbeans answered Britain’s call after the war to rebuild the shattered nation, and in particular to raise up the new National Health Service. The arrival of the SS Empire Windrush fulfilled a form of destiny and laid the cornerstone for the new, multicultural Britain. This would indicate clear economic responsibility for the new arrivals on the part of the government. Pointing out that there was no such call for workers, and that the Attlee Government actually tried to block the embarkation of migrants from the Caribbean, is now considered profoundly politically incorrect. 

But my objective here is not to weigh the balance of rights and obligations — merely to consider the question of whether the fact that British Afro-Caribbeans’, as presumed beneficiaries, support for reparations in contrast to the opposition of the British public as a whole, says anything about the integration of the former.  My argument is that the processes by which the Afro-Caribbean diaspora ought to, or might have been, inducted into the mainstream of British economic life were left incomplete, and that this cannot be separated from their overall integration which should be a mutually reinforcing economic and cultural phenomenon. 

This has resulted in the community — which is for the most part functionally indistinct from a broader “Black” urban identity — having its own self-perceived economic interests which are separate from, and sometimes at odds with, those of the rest of the population. It should also be noted that no pro-reparations body of work has sought to single Afro-Caribbean Britons out as recipients; instead works such as Henry’s (co-written with Marcus Ryder) treat black Britons as a singular group, regardless of whether their forebears were enslaved and transplanted to the New World or not. This is framed as redress for ongoing racism and injustice. 

The most powerful argument against the idea that support for reparations raises questions around integration is that many native British people also consider the public purse to be a cash cow, with little regard for long term fiscal impacts on tax-payers in the future. In fact, even by including some thoughts on how the British state could cover the long term costs, rather unserious though they may be, Henry and Ryder arguably go further than many advocates for perpetually growing NHS budgets or the pensions triple lock do in considering the economic impacts of their case. Furthermore, while they may not constitute anything like a majority, there are a substantial number of white people who support reparations as a necessary gesture. Perhaps, by calling for the government to make a huge economic transfer to people who are alive today at the expense of taxpayers in the future, reparations campaigners are in fact signalling how well integrated they really are into contemporary British debate. 

Furthermore, a great deal of Britain’s economic politics over the last century or more has been driven by subsections of British society with their own distinct and often mutually antagonistic economic interests. Until recently this was dominated by competing class interests with different approaches to taxation and ownership, and more recently it has been interest groups based on generational cohorts with conflicting positions on fiscal transfers and housing policy. Clearly, there is precedent for British people defining themselves as part of distinct economic interest groups without anybody questioning their belonging to the nation as a whole. Although it was always regarded as legitimate to appeal to the collective economic health of the country, particularly to the welfare of future generations, in order to argue against sectional special pleading — and sometimes to delegitimise opponents’ positions, such as Thatcher’s damning of the trade unions as “the enemy within”. 

Nevertheless, arguing for direct cash transfers on racial lines to one specific group from the state still represents a massive departure from established norms of British politics, or from the assumptions of a singular non-racial British identity that citizens were encouraged to buy into from the 1970s onward. The fact that the modern conception of reparations originated with foreign governments — specifically with the Abuja Proclamation of 1993 and later CARICOM — shows at least a willingness by black British advocates of reparations to identify their interests with those of other countries over those of Britain when it is economically convenient. This would most certainly raise questions around loyalty that we would find unacceptable if it were undertaken by almost any other diaspora group.  

More broadly, it leaves open the question of whether the British public can reasonably be asked to welcome additional arrivals from elsewhere in the world, if those people or their descendants will later use their position within British society — as voters or advocates or even as British politicians — to agitate for economic transfers to themselves and their countries of origin. Most obviously, this is a particular concern with arrivals from other former British colonies with ideas about “compo for colonialism”. India is the biggest worry, but of course, the list of countries with whom Britain had no entanglements between the 17th and 20th centuries is a pretty short one. 

Ultimately, I think the point can be argued either way. Perhaps race and ancestry are just another economic characteristic justifying reasonable self-identification in a pluralistic, democratic society. But I think it’s at least equally legitimate and reasonable to argue that it means that the community are only British when it suits them to be. Either way, I really cannot see this issue leading to the kind of relaxed approach toward issues of race and identity that viewers might have hoped for as they watched The Lenny Henry Show back in the 1990s.