The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee holiday now over and Prime Minister Boris Johnson having won the parliamentary No Confidence Motion called within hours after the majestic holiday ended, it’s back-to-basics as Britain bristles under the pounding power of food prices with inflation at a 40-year high, fuel costs at the highest in 17 years (a full tank of petrol now costing drivers over 100 Pounds) – and the Sterling already sliding this year at 7% below the US Dollar.
Like everyone everywhere else, Britons are also now increasingly finding it harder, by the day, to pay the always-rising costs of living as more families depend on food and soup kitchens today than this time last year, more students depend on free school meals now than ever and more people go hungry across all of Great Britain.
PM Johnson loudly promises to steer Britain through the very-inclement post-Brexit weather, now worsened by everything from Climate Change to COVID-19, Supply Chain paralysis and the impending world food and economic crisis that started unfolding before the Ukraine war.
A political maverick all his life, the sitting prime minister carries the lapels of successfully beating the public opinion odds and becoming Lord Mayor of London (2008 to 2016), replacing then Prime Minister Theresa May as Conservative Party Leader in 2019 and leading the Tories just months later into its biggest election victory since 1987 (under Margaret Thatcher).
But never mind PM Johnson’s ever-effervescent character, Britain is now set to register the lowest growth rate among the world’s richest nations; and with no end in sight for worsening conditions, his enemies from within have already decided Boris is a liability and may not be able to lead them to victory at the next general elections in 2024, so he must go.
As more of the world’s richest countries start feeling the feelings of more citizens feeling the punch of the new poverty pinch, the UK will definitely need new and old friends to do business with in the new global dispensation, but London will first need to get right by its closer-to-home Commonwealth partners and start addressing old and new problems that continue to distance it from them, particularly in the Caribbean, Africa and India.
For example, last month’s move by Britain to invite the brightest students from universities worldwide, except from South Asia, Latin America and Africa, doesn’t spell well for London’s future ties with education ministers in the Commonwealth member-states affected.
UK-Caribbean trade is growing by leaps and bounds, but the region can no longer be seen and treated as only a traditional source of raw and refined products, but also one where human resources exist at greater levels than ever, with growing pools for sharing with caring partners.
Agriculture has been central to the UK’s historical relationship with the Caribbean, which legacy is also badly in need of repair through sharing scientific and technological expertise and other reparatory resources that can enable its former colonies to overcome the wide gap created by and maintained between Slavery and Colonialism.
Food now accepted (more than ever) as being more valuable than money, ex-colonies, as new nations and republics, will keep those factors in mind in the new rounds of trade arrangements forced by the expanding economic inequalities and imbalances being caused by the collisions of current global crises.
The Caribbean’s calls for Reparations to repair the continuing historical damage caused through Slavery and Indentureship won’t just go away and the Royal Family got a rude awakening to that fact when Princes Charles, William and Edward visited the region in the past six months ahead of the Jubilee.
Boris Johnson never goes down without a fight and halfway through his term he earlier this week employed the choice language of a rhythmic ancient mariner to say: “The headwinds are strong, but our engines are stronger…” –but he also knows these are not normal times and current headwinds are not generated by normal weather.
Across the Atlantic, US gas prices are also at an all-time high and inflation also at a 40-year high, with consumer price inflation at 8.3% in April and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, while admitting that she earlier “called it wrong” on inflation, also employed Johnsonian language on Thursday to say the US “is facing a slowdown, not a downturn…”
Britain is already planning for the 200th anniversary of the legal Abolition of Slavery in 2034, but freedom of the slaves was conditional on six years of giving the same slave labour to their former masters — free of chains and free of charge, until Indentureship allowed for replacement of the freed Africans by Indian labourers transported on the same slave ships.
Caribbean Community (CARICOM) nations’ collective call in 2013 for Reparations for Slavery and Native Genocide is approaching its 10th year and the call by these 14 former British and European colonies for Reparations for Slavery is one area Britain and PM Johnson will come face-to-face with, sooner than later.
With no sign Queen Elizabeth plans to address the issue before departing the throne, a future King Charles will also get an earlier chance than expected to take the recent expressions of royal regret to next logical level of making the simple ‘full and formal apology’ still being requested 188 years after London outlawed the atrocious Slave Trade.
The least Britain can do in these new times is to start climbing-down from its traditional high-handed Mother Country approach and respond positively — and with all due respect — to the 14 sovereign Caribbean nations’ outstanding (eight-years-old) repeated requests for discussions with London and Brussels on repairing the continuing damage from TransAtlantic Slavery.
If Britain and Europe continue to refuse to respond in quicker time to the growing demands for compensation through reparations from CARICOM, Africa and India, the next stop in the ex-colonies’ determined legal pursuit of Reparatory Justice will undoubtedly be the International Criminal Court (ICC).