Nigel Farage has vowed to hit countries with visa bans if they pursue reparations (Image: Getty)
Nigel Farage will stop issuing visas to foreign nationals whose Governments are demanding trillions in slavery reparations.
Reform UK said they will not “allow Britain to be slapped around and ridiculed on the world stage” as a host of Caribbean and African countries claim they should be compensated.
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Mr Farage’s party said Jamaica, Barbados, Nigeria and Kenya are amongst those formally demanding extraordinary sums of money.
The United Nations last month voted to insist that Britain and other former colonial powers should pay reparations for slavery, with a UN judge claiming the amount owed could be in the region of £18trillion.
The resolution, tabled at the UN General Assembly by Ghana, said countries such as Britain should now begin “good-faith dialogue on reparatory justice, including a full and formal apology, measures of restitution, compensation”.
But Reform’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf said: “A growing number of countries are demanding reparations from Britain.
“These countries ignore the fact that Britain made huge sacrifices to be the first major power to outlaw slavery and enforce this prohibition.
“Astonishingly, of the countries demanding reparations, Tory and Labour governments issued 3.8 million visas to their nationals and sent them a staggering £6.6 billion in foreign aid over the last 2 decades.
“Enough is enough.”
By backing the resolution, the UN members affirmed “the importance of addressing historical wrongs affecting Africans and people of African descent”, and accepted that “claims for reparations represent a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres even said that the wealth of many Western nations was “built on stolen lives and stolen labour”.
A UN judge sensationally claimed the UK is likely to owe more than £18tn in reparations for its historical role in slavery.
British authorities were participants in the trade, which saw millions of Africans enslaved and forced to work, especially on plantations in the Caribbean, between the 16th and 19th centuries.
But Britain played a key role in ending the slave trade through Parliament’s passage of a law to abolish slavery in 1833.
Reform UK has vowed to fight the campaign, insisting “we will not allow British taxpayers to be insulted and their money wasted”.
Party officials added: “We are putting these countries on notice.
“From this point, should any country formally demand reparations from Britain, a Reform government will respond by immediately halting the issuance of new visas to their nationals. We have already committed to scrapping foreign aid.
“A United Kingdom with Nigel Farage as Prime Minister will have a backbone, and stand up for our national interest.”
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch slammed Labour for remaining silent during the controversial UN vote.
She raged: “Russia, China and Iran vote with others to demand trillions in reparations from UK taxpayers…and the Labour government abstain.
“Britain led the fight to end slavery.
“Why didn’t Starmer’s representative vote against this?
“Ignorance…or cowardice? We shouldn’t be paying for a crime we helped eradicate and still fight today.”
The Foreign Office said the UK will not pay repatriations.
A spokesperson said: “The transatlantic slave trade was abhorrent. We recognise its horrific impacts and the ongoing strength of feeling it arouses.
“We are committed to deepening respectful, long-term partnerships with African countries, rooted in mutual respect, that deliver real change for people’s lives.
“The UK’s position on reparations is clear – we will not pay them.”
Nigel Farage vows bombshell move as countries demand trillions in slavery reparations
Nigel Farage and Reform UK have taken a hard-line position against international demands for reparations linked to Britain’s historical role in the transatlantic slave trade, proposing a major change to Britain’s visa policy if the party were to enter government.
The issue has returned to the political spotlight as Caribbean countries prepare to intensify their campaign for reparatory justice and consider legal and diplomatic routes for pursuing their claims.
Reform UK has said that a future government would stop issuing visas to nationals of countries that formally demand slavery reparations from Britain. The proposal was announced in April by Reform’s then home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf and has subsequently become part of the wider political argument surrounding the issue.
The controversy comes after a United Nations General Assembly resolution in March described the transatlantic trafficking and enslavement of Africans as the “gravest crime against humanity”. The United Kingdom did not support the resolution, abstaining instead. The British government has maintained that it recognises the horrific nature of slavery but does not accept that it has a legal obligation to pay reparations for historical acts.
For Farage and Reform, the dispute represents a wider question about Britain’s relationship with its past, its international obligations and the limits of government responsibility for historical wrongdoing.
What Reform has proposed
Reform’s proposal is straightforward in principle.
Countries that formally pursue reparations from Britain would face restrictions on new UK visas under a Reform government. The proposal would potentially affect visitor, student, family and work visas, rather than being limited to a particular category of immigration.
Reports in April identified 19 countries as being in the group targeted by the proposal, including Caribbean states such as Barbados, Jamaica, the Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago, alongside countries including Ghana and Nigeria.
Reform has argued that countries seeking financial compensation from Britain should not simultaneously benefit from access to Britain’s immigration system.
The party has presented the policy as a response to what it regards as an unfair attempt to make modern British taxpayers financially responsible for historical events.
However, the proposal has faced strong criticism from Caribbean representatives.
The CARICOM Reparations Commission condemned the proposed visa restrictions, arguing that Caribbean governments were pursuing reparative justice rather than attempting to punish Britain or damage its economy. Sir Hilary Beckles, chairman of the commission, said that penalising countries for pursuing reparations would amount to punishing victims for seeking redress.
The dispute therefore involves two fundamentally different interpretations of what reparations represent.
Why are reparations being demanded?
The modern reparations campaign is not simply a demand for a single cash payment.
CARICOM’s reparatory justice framework includes a range of proposals, including a formal apology, development programmes, repatriation for people who wish to return to Africa, cultural institutions, health initiatives, education, technology transfers and debt cancellation.
The Guardian’s explainer on the issue notes that campaigners describe reparations as a broader process of acknowledging historical harm and attempting to address its continuing consequences.
Caribbean governments and campaigners argue that slavery and colonialism created long-term economic and social consequences that did not disappear when slavery was abolished.
Their argument also points to Britain’s historical role in the slave trade and the economic benefits derived from enslaved labour and colonial systems.
The British government accepts that slavery inflicted enormous suffering and left lasting scars. But it disputes the legal basis for retrospective compensation.
That distinction is at the heart of the current argument.
The British government’s position
The UK’s official position is not that slavery was acceptable or insignificant.
The government has repeatedly described slavery and the transatlantic slave trade as abhorrent and acknowledged the scale of the suffering involved.
Its disagreement concerns the legal consequences.
In its explanation of the March UN vote, the British government argued that modern international prohibitions on slavery developed after the period during which the transatlantic slave trade took place.
The government therefore maintains that there is no legal obligation to provide reparations for acts that were not prohibited by international law at the time they were committed.
The government also stressed that the UN declaration was political rather than a legal ruling.
Britain nevertheless participated in discussions surrounding reparations. UK officials attended a high-level consultative conference in Accra in June 2026, but the government said it could not endorse the conference’s outcome document because it relied heavily on the March declaration.
That position was reiterated in September.
The House of Commons Library reported that Downing Street’s position was that Britain “does not and will not pay reparations”, while acknowledging the wrongs of the past and expressing a desire to work with other countries on current challenges.
Where did the “trillions” figure come from?
The headline figure surrounding the debate has attracted enormous attention.
Some reparations advocates and commentators have discussed potential claims running into trillions of pounds. One widely reported figure has been £18 trillion.
But it is important to understand what such figures represent.
There is no agreed bill for £18 trillion that has been formally presented to the British Treasury and accepted as a legally established debt.
Rather, enormous figures have emerged from attempts to quantify the historical economic consequences of slavery, lost labour and colonial exploitation.
Different methodologies can produce dramatically different estimates.
Some approaches attempt to calculate the economic value of labour extracted through slavery. Others consider lost development, intergenerational inequality, colonial extraction or the opportunity costs associated with centuries of exploitation.
Those calculations are inherently contested.
The Guardian has noted that CARICOM itself emphasises a broad reparatory programme rather than simply demanding a single payment designed to “break” Britain.
That distinction is important when assessing political claims about Britain being presented with a straightforward multitrillion-pound invoice.
The historical argument over compensation
There is also a particularly sensitive historical issue involving Britain’s abolition of slavery.
When Parliament abolished slavery across most of the British Empire in 1833, compensation was paid to slave owners for the loss of what was then legally recognised as property.
Enslaved people themselves did not receive compensation.
According to historical estimates cited by the Guardian, the compensation paid to plantation owners would be worth roughly £17 billion in today’s money. The debt incurred by the British government to finance that compensation was not finally repaid until 2015.
Reparations campaigners point to that history as evidence that the economic consequences of abolition were distributed in a profoundly unequal way.
Opponents of modern reparations argue that today’s taxpayers should not be held personally responsible for actions committed by governments, companies and individuals generations ago.
That disagreement cannot be resolved simply by producing a single monetary figure.
It is fundamentally a debate about historical responsibility and how it should be treated in the present.
The UN resolution
The dispute intensified after the UN General Assembly adopted its March declaration.
The resolution, spearheaded by Ghana on behalf of the African Union, received 123 votes in favour. The United States voted against it, while Britain abstained.
The UK subsequently explained that it could not support several fundamental propositions contained in the text, particularly those relating to the application of modern international law to historical acts.
The British government nevertheless acknowledged the historical horror of slavery and said that modern slavery and the slave trade are rightly prohibited under international law.
The disagreement is therefore not over whether slavery was morally abhorrent.
It is over whether present-day governments have a legal or financial duty to compensate for historical acts.
Caribbean pressure is continuing
The issue has not disappeared following Britain’s rejection of financial reparations.
In September, Caribbean leaders were reported to be developing a coordinated action plan that could include legal strategies for pressing Britain to negotiate over reparations.
The CARICOM Reparations Commission has indicated that international legal avenues are being considered, including potential approaches to international courts.
The issue is also expected to feature prominently at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua and Barbuda later this year.
That gives the dispute a broader diplomatic dimension.
Britain’s relationship with Caribbean Commonwealth countries has historically involved deep political, cultural and economic ties. A prolonged dispute over reparations could therefore affect conversations that extend well beyond the question of compensation itself.
Why Farage has intervened
For Farage, the issue fits into a much wider political argument about national sovereignty and Britain’s relationship with international organisations.
Reform UK has consistently argued for greater control over immigration and a more restrictive approach to international obligations that it believes constrain British governments.
The reparations dispute provides another example of that position.
The proposed visa restrictions would therefore represent more than an isolated immigration measure. They would connect immigration policy directly to Britain’s foreign-policy response to historical claims.
Supporters of the Reform proposal can point to the fact that Britain already has a stated policy of refusing financial reparations.
Critics, however, argue that using immigration restrictions against nationals of countries pursuing a diplomatic or legal claim could have consequences for ordinary people who have no involvement in their governments’ positions.
That is one of the central questions raised by the proposal.
The political debate in Britain
Public opinion on reparations is also divided.
A YouGov poll reported by the Guardian in March found that 60 per cent of the public opposed reparations, while support was substantially higher among Black adults.
Those figures illustrate why the issue has the potential to become politically contentious.
For Reform, opposition to reparations fits naturally alongside its wider emphasis on controlling immigration and resisting policies that it believes place additional obligations on British taxpayers.
For campaigners seeking reparative justice, however, the argument is about historical responsibility, inequality and the consequences of slavery and colonialism that they believe continue into the present.
The two sides are therefore starting from fundamentally different assumptions.
What happens next?
The immediate question is whether Caribbean governments will pursue legal action or continue primarily through diplomatic channels.
The September conference suggests that pressure is likely to continue.
The British government, meanwhile, has shown no indication that it intends to change its fundamental position on financial reparations. Its stated approach is to acknowledge the historical wrong while rejecting a legal duty to provide compensation.
For Reform UK, the proposed visa policy provides a clear political response: countries demanding reparations would face consequences under a future Reform government.
Whether such a policy would ultimately be implemented would depend on Reform forming a government and translating the proposal into legislation and immigration policy.
The dispute over slavery reparations is consequently becoming part of a much larger conversation about Britain’s history and its future.
The competing positions are increasingly clear.
Caribbean governments and reparations campaigners argue that historical injustice requires meaningful forms of repair. The British government accepts the historical wrong but rejects the claimed legal obligation to pay reparations. Reform UK goes further, proposing immigration consequences for countries that continue to pursue such claims.
The argument over the past is therefore becoming an argument about Britain’s present-day choices.
And with Caribbean governments preparing further action, the issue is unlikely to disappear from British political debate anytime soon.