Black History Month

Bell Ribeiro-Addy Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Clapham and Brixton Hill) (Lab)]

I am always very pleased to speak in this House during Black History Month. I say that not out of ceremony, but out of conviction. I believe that it matters for black Britons watching today to see this Parliament take time to reflect on our history, our struggle and our contributions. It matters that our story is not confined to footnotes or commemorative months, but recognised as part of the very fabric of British history. Each October, I believe this debate should be on the Order Paper as a matter of course, yet too often it has been absent or dependent on the will of a few determined Members. Let me thank all those involved in ensuring that this debate takes place during Government time.

Many of my colleagues will rightly use this opportunity to honour the giants of black British history—the leaders, thinkers and ordinary people who achieved extraordinary things, often in the face of unimaginable obstacles. I pay tribute to them all, but today I want to use my time differently. I want to speak frankly about why, decades after the civil rights movement and years after Black Lives Matter brought millions to the streets, we still have not tackled racism in this country and beyond. I want to say plainly that we have not tackled racism because we have not fully committed to repairing the inequality we had a part in creating. We have not committed to reparatory justice.

In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, more than 240,000 people signed a petition calling on the Government to include Britain’s role in colonialism and enslavement in the national curriculum. It became one of the most signed petitions ever submitted to Parliament and that moment felt like a turning point. I sat in the debate that followed. I remember the sense of hope that at last we would be honest about our past, honest about the empire that built Britain’s wealth and honest about the lives it destroyed, because hundreds of thousands of British people wanted it. Yet five years on, and 39 years after Black History Month was founded in the UK, very little has changed. Britain’s colonial past is still treated as an optional topic, not a foundational one. Black British history is still squeezed into one month and often taught only by those teachers who go above and beyond, using their own time and resources.

Many young people grow up learning in history a lot about our monarchy, but not about our empire. The history of our monarchy is important—it speaks of how our country came to be. Some might be surprised to hear that I am a fan of the odd period drama. Those stories are very interesting, but it has to be wrong that some never hear about Queen Nanny of the Maroons, Mary Prince, Olaudah Equiano, the Bristol bus boycotts, or even the role of the British state in the enslavement of millions. That speaks to the fact that our country does not want to engage with these issues. Young people are taught about industrial innovation, but not about who paid the human cost for that progress. That cherry-picking of what to teach points to something more worrying, because we also miss out on learning about other working-class struggles, such as the miners’ strikes and the suffragettes —those stories that educate us on the power we hold as citizens and the things people have done to challenge injustice. We cannot say that this nation is facing its history when it still refuses to teach it fully.

We have talked a lot about patriotism recently. Let me be clear: I do not believe that patriotism is about pretending that our history was glorious and benign; patriotism is about being honest enough to confront the truth, because only a nation unafraid of the truth can hope to build a just future. I believe that in order to stand firm in pride and power, as the theme of this Black History Month asks, we must address these issues, because where is the pride in not recognising you are wrong, and where is the power in not tackling global injustices that have failed to be repaired?

Last night, I had the honour of delivering the National Union of Journalists’ Claudia Jones memorial lecture. Claudia Jones, the journalist, activist and mother of the Notting Hill carnival, taught us something very powerful. She taught us that the struggle against racism can never be separated from the struggle against imperialism. She wrote:

“Imperialism is the root cause of racism. It is the ideology which upholds colonial rule and exploitation.”

That is not just a historical observation; it is a diagnosis of the present. When far-right politics rises across Europe, when migrants are scapegoated and when global inequalities widen, Claudia Jones’s words feel prophetic. She understood that racism at its root is not about personal prejudice or isolated ignorance. Too often, we try to reduce it to the “few bad apples” argument. Racism is structural. It is the operating system of an economic and political order built through empire that exists today. It is the logic that justified, and still justifies, stolen land, stolen labour and stolen wealth. It is the logic that said that some people are disposable so that others might prosper.

Racism did not appear by accident. It has no factual basis. Racism was engineered. That is why I say that we cannot dismantle racism without repair. If racism is built into the economic foundations of this country—in land, in labour and in capital—then the remedy must also be material. We cannot tackle a problem without getting to its roots. It was not enough for us to express deep regret and other platitudes. It was not enough for us to change a few names and statues and call it progress. We must repair the harm structurally, economically, culturally and politically. That is the very heart of the global movement for reparations.

This year, the all-party parliamentary group for Afrikan reparations, which I chair, hosted the third annual UK reparations conference. We saw hundreds of activists, scholars, lawyers and community leaders come together from across the world and the message was clear: the demand for repair is no longer a fringe issue; it is a moral and political necessity. And yet in Britain we still refuse to apologise for our role in enslavement and colonialism. We refuse to return stolen artefacts. We even refuse to return human remains, denying dignity even in death. We refuse to engage meaningfully with reparatory justice. Even last year, when the Commonwealth nations called for a mere discussion on reparatory justice, we said no. What does that sound like, given the history of the Commonwealth? Our country has not apologised, it has not repaired and it has not made amends.

But the tide is turning and young people are asking the right questions. Institutions are beginning to confront their own archives. The debate can no longer be buried or delayed. We have to be clear that reparations are not only about money. How could they possibly be? If people think the call for reparations is a call for cash, they have not been listening. How can it be? What amount of money could ever really compensate for what happened, which was one of the greatest crimes in human history: enslavement, trafficking, genocide, ecocide, widespread theft and everything in between. Reparations are about truth, restitution and transforming relationships between nations, between communities and between the past and the present. Reparations are about acknowledging that Britain became one of the richest nations on Earth not just through industry and ingenuity, but through the extraction of human life and labour from Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and beyond.

When enslavement was abolished, it was not the formerly enslaved who received compensation; it was the enslavers. They were paid the modern equivalent of billions of pounds for the loss of human property. British taxpayers, including black Britons, finished paying off that debt in 2015. That is not distant history; it is the present. It is certainly the present in my taxpaying history. Meanwhile, the descendants of those who endured generations of forced labour received nothing—to this day, not even an apology. Their names were often erased from the story of their own liberation. Freedom has been paraded as a gift. When I talk about reparations, I, the descendant of enslaved and colonised people, am often told that I should be grateful that Britain abolished the slave trade. I am proud of the role that this country, my country, played in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, but that alone cannot be absolution. I am sorry, but I cannot see how, just because an arsonist feels guilty, we would absolve them for starting the fire in the first place.

The injustice I speak of did not end with that emancipation. It continued through colonial rule, through the Berlin conference that carved up Africa without a single African present, through artificial borders and economic dependency, and through the extraction of resources that continues to this day. It means that at the UN in 2025, African nations still have to get up and ask to be included in the UN Security Council, despite the fact that African and Caribbean nations make up the majority of the countries in the world. When people ask, “Why reparations?”, I ask in return, “Why did we ever think that freedom without repair was enough, or that it was freedom at all?”

In this Parliament, I am proud to be part of the legacy of the late, great Bernie Grant, who stood in this very Chamber and called for reparations when few dared to. Without truth, there can be no justice. Without justice, there can be no healing. That is why the all-party parliamentary group believes we need a commission for truth and reparatory justice. The commission would not simply investigate the past; it would examine how legacies of that past are alive in the present in the racial wealth gap, health inequalities, educational disparities and the policing of black communities.

None of these patterns is accidental. They were built, and because they were built, they can and must be dismantled, but that will happen only if we have the political courage to do so. To do it, we have to move away from this lazy, reductionist style of politics, which often talks about what we cannot do instead of talking about what we can do.

Every major institution in this country—banks, universities, the monarchy, museums—carries traces of wealth extracted through colonialism and enslavement. The evidence is in the bank ledgers and shipping records and in the foundations of buildings across this city. That history does not belong in footnotes; it belongs in how we shape our policies today.

No individual group needs permission to demand justice. The call for reparations is grounded in international law, in human rights and in the moral truth that those who profit from crimes against humanity have a duty to repair them. This is not about guilt or unpicking the past, as I have been accused of doing previously—it is about responsibility. It is about not division, but healing.

However, healing cannot begin when the truth has not been told. That is why the teaching of black history as British history is in itself reparatory. If we are serious about tackling racism, we have to be serious about this repair. Racism is about not just words or attitudes, but material conditions—who owns wealth, who holds power, and who has access to housing, healthcare, safety and dignity. Racism persists because the harm has never been repaired.

The call for reparations has survived centuries because it speaks to something beyond politics. It speaks to the human need for recognition, justice and dignity, and to the possibility of renewal—not just for the nations that were wronged, but for Britain itself, because black Britons are part of that story. I could be the richest person in this country and rise to the highest office in this land, but I understand that I will never escape racism; by its very nature, until there is justice for every single person who looks like me, nothing will change in that regard.

Now the world is changing and our place in it is precarious if we do not change our attitude, which still feels rooted in empire. I want our country—my country—to be looked on with respect and admiration, not because it never got anything wrong, but because we had the courage to put what we got wrong right.