Like most people who grew up in Britain over the past century, I didn’t learn about Black British history in school in any meaningful way. For almost forty years, Black History Month has sought to fill this gap. In a nation that remains reluctant to face its imperial history head-on, it has provided a vital space to reflect on the struggles, successes and stories of Britain’s Black communities, excavating histories long excluded from our national narrative. It has shown a wider audience that Black history is integral to British history and that you cannot fully understand modern Britain without understanding the role that Black communities have played in it.
We honour our communities through commemorating and celebrating this history. But honour is about respect as well as recognition. And all too often, we still see daily examples of the disrespect faced by the Black community in ways that are inseparable from our country’s imperial past.
As my old history teacher said, “we study the past to live the present with an eye on the future”. This year’s theme is “Honouring Our Communities”. It is important to ask what honour truly requires. Because Black History Month can never simply be about showing gratitude for the change we have seen. It must always be an honest reckoning with how far there is still to go. Our North Star in all of these debates and discussions this month must be justice.
Seventy-eight years after the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, and eight years after the scandal broke, many of the people who helped rebuild Britain are still waiting for the compensation they are owed. The Home Office has paid out only a fraction, to a fraction of those eligible, while hundreds of claims sit undecided. Unlike survivors of other major state scandals, those impacted by the Windrush scandal are not entitled to free legal advice. Many in this elderly cohort have died without seeing a penny of justice. Others have given up, defeated by a scheme run by the very department that wronged them in the first place, asked again and again to prove their Britishness.
The case of the Windrush Generation, often rightly invoked as exemplars of the Black British contribution, illustrates perfectly the gap between symbolic memory and actual justice. It is rank hypocrisy to celebrate Windrush Day in June each year whilst failing to provide effective redress for the injustices they endured.
We must be cautious of complacent narratives about progress and continual improvement. Things can get worse as well as better. Just two summers ago, we saw the worst racist rioting in a generation. With mosques attacked and hotels housing asylum seekers set alight, Black and brown families were told, in the most direct terms imaginable, that they did not belong. Earlier this year, the same violence returned to Belfast. Homes were burned, families driven out overnight, migrants and people of colour hunted through their own streets by masked mobs organised online. Each time, the response from our politicians follows the same pattern: swift condemnation, promises that lessons will be learned, then silence, until it happens again. We cannot claim to honour our communities while the state continually fails to confront organised, ideological violence against them.
This violence has deep roots in an imperial ideology that sought to justify the mass trafficking, kidnap, torture and forced labour of millions of African people and the militarised seizure of a quarter of the world’s territory. Without steps to actively confront this ideology on the streets, on the airwaves, in our classrooms and our institutions, it can take hold all too easily and mutate into something worse still.
We still walk in the shadow of Empire. The wealth that built modern Britain, its banks, its insurers, its financial institutions, was seeded by profits from enslaved labour and colonial extraction. That money never really left; it just compounded and changed form. Our legal system still carries the fingerprints of empire, not least in the form of immigration rules that grew out of successive attempts to control who could call Britain home after empire collapsed. Our schools were built to teach a version of British greatness with the violence edited out, which is why so many of us grew up without knowing our own history. The countries hit hardest by climate breakdown today are, overwhelmingly, the same countries that were stripped of the resources and infrastructure to withstand it. And the aid Britain now offers a fraction of what was extracted in the first place.
Our foreign policy follows the same pattern. Britain continues to resist a conversation that African and Caribbean nations have been demanding for years. When CARICOM and the African Union call for reparations, our government’s answer is to change the subject, or offer cheery words about “looking forward, not back.” In a sign of changing times, UN delegates voted this year to recognise the Transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity. Britain’s abstention only places our country more at odds with a growing international consensus.
I don’t say any of this in despair. I say it because to tackle any issue, you have to get to its roots. Action can begin when we acknowledge not only this history but its enduring legacy and impact on life in Britain and the countries and people it colonised and enslaved.
It means climate adaptation funding that reflects historical responsibility, a curriculum that tells the whole story, and a government willing to sit down and talk about repair with the nations and descendants of those Britain enslaved and colonised.
This is the work of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations, which I’m proud to chair. It’s why I urge everyone reading this to join us at the 2026 UK Reparations Conference at Friends House, Euston, on 17th October. This is an important chance to bring reparationists together to move this conversation from the margins to the mainstream.
Commemoration matters. It reminds everyone that our history matters. But truly honouring our communities is ultimately a question of justice.