On: Caribbean calls for return of British Virgin Islands - and for King Charles to...

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.