Conversation, yes. A bill, no.
He offers calm. Any rancour is the Governments’ choice. And the Caribbean’s own reparations action plan keeps legal options in reserve, international courts included, should Britain go on saying no. Call it the Brussels reflex: when the argument stalls, go and find a judge.
Britain needs no pretence about its past. In the years before 1807, British ships carried more Africans across the Atlantic than any other nation’s. Then Britain became one of the first great powers to ban the trade and spent the next sixty years campaigning to stamp it out. Nobody did more, or paid more, to end it at sea.
France tells a different story. In 1825, Paris made Haiti pay 150 million gold francs, later cut to 90 million, in return for recognising an independence Haitians had already won by force of arms. Two centuries later, Emmanuel Macron’s answer was a commission of historians. Haiti is a member of Caricom.