Gonsalves offers to meet Badenoch over reparations 

By Admin. Updated 4:24 p.m., Tuesday, November 3, 2026, Atlantic Standard Time (GMT-4).

Former Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves says he is ready to travel to London to sit down with British Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, after she came out against any British apology for the transatlantic slave trade.

Dr. Gonsalves, who is now Leader of the Opposition in St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), made the offer in an exclusive interview with One News SVG on Monday, November 2. He spoke from Antigua and Barbuda, where he is attending events linked to the 2026 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in his role as Senior Advisor and Elder of The Repair Campaign.

Speaking to broadcasters on Sunday, November 1, Mrs. Badenoch said an apology would be a “navel-gazing distraction”, the Guardian reported. She described slavery as an evil in which people from every continent and region took part, and asked whether Caribbean countries would also seek an apology from the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured and sold people.

She told Sky News that an apology would be “a lever to wedge open the door to ask for cash”, and argued that comments made by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair two decades ago made a fresh apology unnecessary.

Dr. Gonsalves did not mince words.

“I told them that the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, she’s wrong about what she has said. And her comments are not helpful,” he said, explaining that he had made the same point in interviews with the Guardian and the Financial Times.

He said he had suggested, in remarks carried by the Guardian, that he would go to London “if my dear sister, Kemi, would receive me”, so that he could explain what the reparations movement is really about.

“From what I’ve read, there are gaps in her knowledge and gaps in her understanding of the basis for reparatory justice,” he said.

That basis, according to Dr. Gonsalves, is the present-day underdevelopment and harm that can be traced back to native genocide and the enslavement of Africans. He said he always speaks of native genocide because of what happened to the Garifuna and Kalinago people of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

CARICOM’s own reparations plan records that between 1795 and 1797, around 4,338 captured Kalinago were deported to Balliceaux, and only 2,248 survived to be shipped on to Roatán, off the coast of present-day Honduras.

“If she gets a deeper understanding of the issues, she may amend her position,” Dr. Gonsalves said.
He pointed to the Caribbean as an example of how the issue can unite rivals. Across CARICOM, he said, governments and opposition parties alike support reparatory justice, even if some are more enthusiastic than others.

St. Vincent and the Grenadines, he noted, took the matter to CARICOM in 2013. That led to the creation of the Prime Ministerial Sub-Committee on Reparations, a decision to keep reparations as a standing item on the agenda of every CARICOM Heads of Government meeting, and the setting up of the CARICOM Reparations Commission under Professor Sir Hilary Beckles. Every member state was also asked to form its own national reparations committee.

The CARICOM Ten Point Plan followed in 2014. Dr. Gonsalves said the latest major revision was accepted in July this year.

The former prime minister also took aim at the way slavery ended in the British colonies. Britain did pay compensation in the 1830s, he said, but it went to the wrong people.

“They paid to the slave owners and not to the enslaved,” he said.

The CARICOM plan puts that payout to slave owners at £20 million, with roughly £16.5 million of it awarded in respect of enslaved people in the Caribbean colonies. Researchers at University College London have found that about half of the full sum went to absentee owners and their creditors living in Britain.

Dr. Gonsalves said the Caribbean must stay focused and encourage the British government and the opposition in Britain to work together on the issue.

“We have to push them to the limits of their possibilities,” he said.

END