The Dirty Secret of the Slavery Reparations Scam

The Telegraph has a piece by the peer and educational consultant Anthony Sewell – Baron Sewell of Sanderstead, CBE (pictured). He’s also Chair of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. In ‘The slavery reparations scam has a dirty secret’, Sewell flags up the hypocrisy of a Caribbean ruling elite who, despite having benefited from a first-class British-type education themselves, are bent on turning the younger generation into disaffected grifters while failing to live up to their people’s expectations:

In their manic drive to persuade Britain to pay reparations, a cohort of Caribbean activists and leaders is lobbying for the cleansing of the curriculum to make it less ‘Western’.

In particular they want the curriculum to reflect the history of slavery so as to foster resentment in a new generation that will continue lobbying Britain for reparations.

It’s interesting that this campaign is being led by Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, who has been at the forefront of demanding reparations. She has argued that this new emphasis on slavery reparations in the curriculum should help the Caribbean “reframe its identity”.

What Mottley forgets is that her own country, Barbados, has one of the best education systems in the world. For years Barbados topped the region in terms of its O-level and A-level results, and continued to top the league when it came to the new Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) exams.

At the heart of Barbados’s success, however, was the dedicated following of a traditional British education – she and her peers being the beneficiaries.

The dirty secret that Caribbean leaders won’t tell you is that their post-independent countries have been kept from anarchy because of the great British legacy of ‘school’ and ‘church’. They have provided not only a moral integrity, but enabled the great outpourings of literature and the arts that have come from the region.

At the heart of the activism of today’s Caribbean leaders, however, is a kind of self-hatred, which sees some of them rejecting the British influence that helped shape their islands. This is fundamentally wrong.

In Jamaica there are no big protests from the young calling for reparations. For them, they want to know why so many of their community leaders never deliver on their promises. They are smart enough to realise that, like young people in Britain, they need an education which can take them to jobs and a secure future.

Tony Sewell’s piece is worth reading in full.