On 29 November 1781, Capt Luke Collingwood faced a decision. He was in command of a ship called the Zong, which departed Accra with 442 Africans to be sold into slavery. However, the crew of the Zong kept getting lost on the way to Jamaica. Now their overcrowded “cargo” was ridden with disease and dehydration. Closing in on their destination, they realised that if these Africans died onshore, this would be a loss for the shipowners. But if they were “lost at sea”, the insurers would cover the cost. Soon, more than 130 people were thrown overboard, starting with the less commercially valuable women and children. At the resulting court case two years later, the main area of dispute was whether this action invalidated the financial payout. None of the city of London’s legal and financial institutions involved considered whether the mass drowning constituted a crime.

This episode from Britain’s inhumane and inglorious history of slavery came to mind this week when I read that in response to a recent, well-supported UN resolution recognising the historic crime of slavery, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK said it would deny all UK visas to people from countries seeking slavery reparations from Britain. Countries such as Nigeria, Jamaica and Ghana, from where Zong set sail all those years ago.

It is easy to forget that Reform was initially founded, in the not so distant past, as the Brexit party. And a key part of that Brexit vision was, in Farage’s own words, to reengage with our “kith and kin in the Commonwealth.” What happened to reconnecting to the “2.2 billion people that live within the Commonwealth” through our shared language, culture and history? A decade after the referendum that was supposed to fix all of our problems, Reform’s proposed punishment for any country that dares to submit a claim for reparations provides some insight into why Britain still cannot find its place in this rapidly changing and fractured world.

Reparations have been a well-established and legitimate part of international law for more than a century, with several treaties and legal instruments now in place to provide a juridical basis for doing so. The UN has developed comprehensive guidelines outlining when violations of international human rights law create a right to remedy and reparation. Germany has made reparation payments for the Holocaust and has committed to make aid-based payments to Namibia over the Herero-Nama genocide.

Britain is not the only country in history to have faced potential reparations claims; it is not even the only country being discussed in the current proposals being brought forward by countries in west Africa and the Caribbean. Countries are allowed to bring forward claims if they feel they have sufficient grounds. You don’t have to accept their claim, of course, and are free to challenge it, with the purpose of any legal system being to fairly adjudicate on the merits of an issue. But to try to threaten another party in order to stop them taking their case before the court doesn’t exactly scream of a nation that values democratic principles, let alone one that claims to be the home of the “rule of law”. It is the behaviour of a thug.

With this petulant backlash against countries that are supposed to be members of the Commonwealth family, Reform has illustrated the extent to which members of Britain’s political class still struggle to see former colonies as sovereign equals. It was a problem that was rendered starkly apparent when civil servants mockingly referred to the post-Brexit trade strategy as Empire 2.0, and soon found that Commonwealth countries weren’t exactly rushing to sign up to it. You cannot hope to benefit from a “shared history” with someone if you completely refuse to entertain, even for a second, just what their experience of that history was.

Also, whether we’re looking at economic growth, demographics or geopolitics, the reality is that the 21st century belongs more to countries like those former colonies of Britain than to the old master itself. In 2024, the UK signed a landmark enhanced trade and investment partnership with Nigeria to create frictionless trade with a country that the then business and trade secretary, Kemi Badenoch, accurately described as having “one of the fastest-growing economies in the world”.

How would slapping a blanket visa ban on Nigeria impact all the British businesses that have spent years setting up partnerships in that country – or the British universities that are now going into overdrive to try to recruit students from the English-speaking country with an exploding, youthful population? Over 44,000 students from Nigeria enrolled in UK universities in 2022, the third highest number from any country – and rising faster than anywhere else. Could our struggling higher education system do without them? What about Britain’s Commonwealth family in the Caribbean? If, say, Jamaica retaliated to Reform’s ban with restrictions on British citizens in return, this may not be too popular with the 230,000 of us who holiday on the island every year. Tough talk is all well and good until it means your supporters have to cancel that luxury cruise they saved up for. British politicians are already complaining that Caribbean countries are turning away from the Commonwealth towards China – but this is only going to accelerate in the wake of threats such as those by Reform.

The debate on reparations is as much about setting out the terms for the present and the future as it is about righting the wrongs of the past. If we actually looked at the precedents set in other countries, we would see that reparations are not limited to financial compensation, but can include a wide range of innovative policies, such as the patent-free sharing of green-energy technologies or the redistribution of voting power in international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It can help make countries that, for better or worse, are still intimately tied to Britain stronger partners in facing a turbulent global order.

At a time when finances are tight for everyone, it is understandable that many people in Britain may be concerned by the idea of another cost being imposed on the state through a Commonwealth reparations claim. But the response is not to try to threaten or intimidate a way out of the problem. The days of forcing the upstart natives to do what they are told through a bit of “gunboat diplomacy” are well behind us. And we are all the better for it. Those days created much of the inequality that continues to plague our world today, both domestically and internationally. Trying to face these challenges with inward-turning policies that cut us off from the world is simply not realistic. In front of us is an opportunity to sit down and properly consider the challenge of redesigning a world that is fair for all.

• Dr Kojo Koram is professor of law and political economy at Loughborough University. His latest book, The Next Fix, is out on 4 June

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