Should India send Britain a cheque for the railways?
What about the grand imperial buildings of New Delhi, the cantonments that still dot the country or even the ports and endless railway tracks built during the Raj? Should Kenya chip in too? Jamaica? Nigeria?
That, remarkably, is the argument advanced by Suella Braverman, Britain’s former home secretary, who says former colonies should effectively pay “reparations” to Britain for the infrastructure the empire built during the colonial era.
Braverman, whose parents trace their origins to Goa and Tamil Nadu, suggested that Britain deserves gratitude rather than compensation for its imperial past.
“The British Empire did so much good for the world,” Braverman declared, prompting a tidal wave of criticism across many former colonies, from Kenya and Nigeria to Jamaica.
Her intervention came as a Jamaican delegation prepared to travel to Britain to press its case for reparations over slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.
Jamaica’s argument rests on the fact that many wealthy British families amassed fortunes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from sugar plantations worked almost entirely by enslaved Africans.
Braverman dismissed those demands, arguing instead that Britain deserved gratitude rather than compensation.
“If the government is seriously thinking about this, then former colonies should pay the British back for the considerable investment, effort and contribution that this country made, which laid the foundations for many flourishing democracies today,” she said.
The comments immediately reignited an old and bitter argument about the true balance sheet of empire.
Critics point out that Britain extracted vastly more wealth from its colonies than it invested in them and that railways, ports and administrative infrastructure were built largely to serve imperial interests: moving troops quickly, tightening political control and transporting raw materials to the coast for shipment back to Britain.
Others responded by reviving demands for the return of cultural treasures removed during the colonial era, most notably the Kohinoor diamond, which remains among the British Crown Jewels in the Tower of London.
Braverman went on to say that, “of course slavery was abhorrent.” But she insisted that “expecting 21st-century Britons to pay for 18th-century actions has no legal basis.”.
But Britain’s own history, though, throws a spanner in that argument.
When slavery was abolished in the 1830s, the government borrowed 20 million pounds sterling, around 5 per cent of the entire economy, to compensate slave owners for their “lost property”. In today’s terms, that amounts to several billion pounds. The enslaved received nothing.
And the debt did not disappear. It stretched across generations. In 2018, the British government confirmed that the final repayments were completed only in 2015, meaning taxpayers were still servicing that debt almost 200 years later.
Ironically, Braverman herself is in many ways a product of the empire she so passionately defends.
Her mother’s family originated in Tamil Nadu before moving to Mauritius during the colonial period, while her father, Christy Fernandes, came from a family that moved from Goa to Kenya, then another British colony. Braverman herself was born in London in 1980 and was originally named Sue-Ellen Cassiana Fernandes. Her first name was reportedly inspired by the glamorous character Sue Ellen Ewing from the hugely popular television series Dallas.
The publicity-loving politician first came to prominence as a junior minister handling Britain’s departure from the European Union following the Brexit referendum. She later rose to become attorney general under Prime Minister Boris Johnson before being appointed home secretary by Liz Truss during her famously brief 49-day premiership.
Although Truss quickly departed Downing Street, Braverman retained her post under the next prime minister, Rishi Sunak, before eventually leaving government after a series of political disputes and controversies.
Earlier this year, apparently concluding that her future in the Conservative Party was limited, she defected to Nigel Farage’s insurgent rightwing Reform UK.
Braverman has long cultivated an image as one of Britain’s most uncompromising conservative voices. She has repeatedly called for sharp reductions in both legal and illegal immigration and was one of the chief architects of the controversial Rwanda deportation scheme, under which asylum seekers arriving illegally in Britain would be flown to Rwanda while their claims were processed.
The policy consumed enormous political energy and legal resources before eventually being abandoned.
Her critics have frequently accused her of staking out positions even further to the right than many of her political allies in an effort to burnish her credentials with conservative voters.
Braverman’s latest statements followed comments by Labour politicians arguing that Jamaica’s case for reparations deserved serious consideration.
Her idea that former colonies should compensate Britain for the costs of empire turns history on its head.
For millions across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, the British Empire was not a charitable infrastructure project but a system designed to extract wealth, control populations and govern subject peoples for Britain’s benefit.
The railways may still run, the grand buildings may still stand and the cantonments may still exist, but for many in the former colonies the bill for empire was settled long ago — and it was not Britain that paid it.