Suella Braverman, the former Home Secretary who now sits as a Reform UK MP, has called for Britain’s former colonies to pay reparations to London for what she describes as the “investment, effort and contribution” the empire made in building them.
In a post on X, Braverman, who defected from the Conservative Party to Reform UK earlier this year and continues to sit as a Reform MP, entered the ongoing reparations debate by declaring: “The British Empire did so much good for the world.” She went on: “Of course slavery was abhorrent but to expect the British people of the 21st century to pay for actions that took place in the 18th century has no basis in law.”
Why that specific claim doesn’t hold up
The claim that British taxpayers today have no connection to the financial legacy of slavery is demonstrably false. According to the UK government’s own records, British taxpayers were still paying off a £20m loan taken out in 1835 to compensate slave owners, not enslaved people, for abolition. That sum amounted to roughly 5% of UK GDP at the time, equivalent to more than $3bn in today’s money. The government confirmed in 2018 that the loan was only fully repaid in 2015, meaning British taxpayers spent generations servicing a debt created specifically to compensate the owners of enslaved people. Braverman’s argument that no financial thread connects the 21st-century British public to slavery is simply not accurate as a matter of historical record.
Braverman’s fuller argument
Braverman went further than simply rejecting reparations, arguing the relationship should run in the opposite direction entirely: “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.”
Her comments were made in response to Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who had shared a Guardian report that Jamaica intends to take its case for reparations directly to King Charles later this year through a formal petition. Ribeiro-Addy said it was “getting harder and harder for British institutions to maintain their favoured tactic of simply ignoring calls for repair.”
What the economic evidence actually shows
The premise underlying Braverman’s argument, that Britain “invested” in its colonies for their benefit, is not supported by the economic history of colonial rule. Colonial economies were structured to extract resources, labour and wealth for the benefit of London, not to develop colonised societies on their own terms.
Research by economist Utsa Patnaik, published by Columbia University Press and drawing on almost two centuries of data, found that Britain extracted approximately $45 trillion from India alone during the colonial period. This aligns closely with the historical account historian William Dalrymple has given elsewhere, describing how India and China together produced around 70% of global GDP in the classical world, with India alone accounting for up to 35-40% of global GDP in the 18th century, a share that collapsed dramatically under British extraction, engineered not through government administration initially but through the East India Company, a private corporation operating from a single office in the City of London.
At its territorial height, the British Empire covered roughly a quarter of the world’s land surface, a scale of dominion that makes the claim of benevolent “investment” difficult to reconcile with the basic mechanics of how that empire was actually financed and administered.
The reaction
Braverman, who is of Indian heritage and whose parents migrated to Britain from former colonies, drew immediate and substantial criticism online. One user wrote: “‘Of course slavery was abhorrent but’ is a wild way to start a sentence.” Another responded directly to the substance of her claim: “The British empire didn’t invest, it stole its colonies’ wealth and resources to benefit the British empire, not its colonies.”
Braverman’s broader political trajectory
Braverman defected from the Conservative Party to Reform UK earlier this year at a veterans launch event, crossing the floor while retaining her seat rather than resigning to contest a byelection. She subsequently said she “believes in by-elections” in principle while declining to trigger one herself following her own switch, a position that drew criticism for its apparent inconsistency, and one that Reform has faced similar criticism over with other defectors. Andy Burnham has separately criticised both Braverman and Robert Jenrick over their immigration records during the Makerfield hustings, pointing to their roles in shaping the immigration policy debate before their respective moves toward Reform.
As a sitting Reform MP, Braverman’s comments carry more direct political weight than they would from a backbencher without a party platform, or a former minister with no current elected role. Her intervention effectively becomes Reform’s most senior recent statement on the reparations question, whether the party intends it to represent official policy or not.
Why this argument keeps resurfacing
Braverman’s intervention is not an isolated one. The argument that colonised nations owe Britain gratitude, infrastructure or institutions, rather than the reverse, recurs periodically in British political debate whenever the reparations conversation gains renewed attention, as it has with Jamaica’s planned petition to the King. What distinguishes this instance is both the specificity of the historical claim Braverman made, that there is “no basis in law” connecting contemporary British taxpayers to the financial legacy of slavery, a claim directly contradicted by the government’s own confirmed repayment timeline for the 1835 slave owner compensation loan, and the fact that it comes from a sitting MP for a party currently leading national polling.
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