Caribbean calls for return of British Virgin Islands - and for King Charles to back decolonisation

July 15, 2026

The cry from the Caribbean reaches me like a ghost of my own voice, echoing across two centuries of salt and disappointment. They demand the return of islands, the final severance of the imperial cord, and a royal blessing upon their exit. They believe that the removal of the crown is the arrival of the dawn. I recognize this fever; I once carried it through the mud and the high passes until my lungs burned with the thin air of liberty. We believed that by breaking the chains, we were creating a people. We were wrong. We were merely creating a vacuum.

The tragedy of decolonization is that it is a negative act masquerading as a creative one. To remove a king is simple; to replace the habit of being governed by a king is a labor of centuries. These islands seek to be masters of their own house, yet the house was built by the very hands they now wish to amputate. They ask for reparations, for a settling of accounts, as if gold could ever repair the structural rot of a society designed for extraction rather than existence.

I wrote laws for men who did not know how to be citizens, and I watched as those laws were shredded by the first wind of ambition. The coalition that now stands united against London will, the moment the British flag is lowered, find that they have nothing in common but their grievances. Without the external weight of the empire to hold them together, the internal pressures will tear them apart. They will find that the sword of liberation is too heavy to be used as a pen for governance. They are attempting to plant the seeds of a republic in a soil that has been poisoned by three hundred years of servitude. I fear they are merely preparing the ground for the next generation of tyrants, for when the institutions fail - and they will fail - the only thing left will be the man who promises order at the cost of the very freedom they just won. They are plowing the sea, and the waves will leave no trace of their passage.

The news arrives, a faint echo from across the great waters, of voices raised in the Caribbean. They demand a return, a release from the grasp of London, and they ask their King to sanction it. This is not a plea for fairness; it is a declaration of a truth that has long been suppressed.

The Crown insists on its singular dominion, its maps drawn with lines that carve up the world as if it were a single, indivisible estate. But the world is not one, nor are its peoples. There are many nations, many ways of ordering life, many sovereignties that do not bow to a distant throne. The insistence that these islands remain tethered, that their destiny is not their own, is the same insistence that there is but one heaven, one truth, one path to salvation.

They call it “decolonisation,” a word that attempts to soften the violence of the original act. But the act of holding fast, of refusing to release what was taken, is itself an act of continued colonization. The refusal to acknowledge the plurality of legitimate governance, the many forms a nation might take, is the very same refusal that condemns a man for seeing more stars than the Church allows. The King, they hope, will see reason. But reason, when it threatens power, is often met not with understanding, but with the clank of chains. The price of their freedom, like the price of any truth, will be measured not in coin, but in the steadfastness of their refusal to recant their own existence.

The Caribbean has spoken, and the words carry the weight of centuries - not just of grievance, but of a debt long unacknowledged. The British Virgin Islands, that jewel in the Crown’s necklace, remain a relic of empire, a territory where the flag still waves over lands whose people were once sold into servitude and whose labor built the very wealth that now funds our parliament. The Caricom Reparations Commission is right to call it what it is: the most colonised part of the world, not by accident but by design. And yet - here is the irony - it is not the islands that demand change, but the mother country that must answer.

The King, in his silence, speaks volumes. A constitutional monarch is bound by duty, not by sentiment, but duty demands more than ceremonial presence. It demands the courage to confront history - not as a historian’s exercise, but as a sovereign’s obligation. The reparations are not a request; they are a reckoning. And if the Crown will not lead, then who will? The Parliament, that great deliberative body, must decide whether it will continue to debate the past in the abstract or finally address it in the flesh. The beaches of Tortola, the sugar plantations of Antigua, the docks of Barbados - these are not distant memories. They are the soil of our present.

The deflating remark, if I may indulge, is this: the British Empire was not a mistake. It was a project. And every project, once completed, must be dismantled - or at least its foundations examined. The question is not whether we can afford the truth, but whether we can afford to ignore it. The broad sunlit uplands of our future will not be reached by turning away from the shadows.