The following is an open letter to Labour Party foreign secretary David Lammy from academic professor Gus John.
Dear Rt Hon David Lammy
Thank you for the above invitation.
I am puzzled as to why you as Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs should be hosting a reception in your office ‘on the occasion of Celebrating Black History Month’.
In an Opinion piece in the Guardian (19.10.24), Laura Trevelyan and Nicole Phillip wrote:
Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, noted that he was the first person to hold this office who was a descendant of enslaved Africans, and said this would inform his approach to governing.
I suspect that the reception you are hosting has much more to do with this happenstance than with ‘Celebrating Black History Month’.
Black History Month in any year, but especially this year, has no place in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office because the British state in the charge of any political party has forfeited any assumed right to piggy-back on Black History Month.
So, why is 2024 such a special year?
Black History Month may have a particular importance for you this year as the first British Foreign Secretary whose forebears were enslaved Africans, but you are a cabinet minister in a government that treats the Black Commonwealth as some increasingly irrelevant and anachronistic vestige of empire, same as the last government.
Sadly, though, the policies and practices we came to expect of the Tories are clearly par for the course for Labour, which is showing itself to be no less a ‘nasty party’, especially on issues of race and the British state.
2024 is special for various reasons.
It marks the 140th anniversary of the Berlin Conference when in 1884, 14 European countries, including Britain, got together to carve up the African continent and dispossess its people of their land, the wealth that lay beneath that land, their Ancestral traditions and their systems of social and economic organisation.
The Pan-Africanist and anti-colonial President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere famously said:
“We have artificial ‘nations’ carved out at the Berlin Conference in 1884, and today we are struggling to build these nations into stable units of human society… we are in danger of becoming the most Balkanised continent of the world.”
That conference took place after the trade in enslaved Africans formally ended and while the apprentice system that perpetuated its barbaric conditions was still in place. So, first, Europe dispossessed the continent of its people and exploited them as chattel labour to create wealth to develop Europe.
Then, to ensure the sustenance and growth of that wealth, they stole the entire continent and partitioned it among themselves so that they wouldn’t have to fight over possession of all of it.
2024 marks the end of UN’s International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-24) with its theme of: Recognition, Justice and Development. Two of the stated objectives of the Decade were to:
Promote a greater knowledge of and respect for the diverse heritage, culture and contribution of people of African descent to the development of societies
Adopt and strengthen national, regional and international legal frameworks according to the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and to ensure their full and effective implementation
The Conservative Government made it clear from the outset that it was not signing up to any of that and would not be engaging in any programme of action commensurate with those objectives. It kept its word throughout the decade.
Despite that, however, the Labour Manifesto signally failed to pledge your government to engage with this agenda and the endemic racism experienced by each new generation of people of African descent in the society.
Despite the findings and recommendations of the report by Martin Forde KC which your Party itself commissioned, the only nod in the direction of tackling systemic racism your government appears to make is in respect of Equal Pay.
One of the first initiatives your government announced was the Labour Party Curriculum Review, a review which seeks to ‘Build on the hard work of teachers who have brought their subjects alive with knowledge-rich syllabuses, to deliver a curriculum which is rich and broad, inclusive, and innovative.’
An obvious starting point for such a review might be to establish:
a) Just how many students experience the curriculum as being ‘rich and broad, inclusive, and innovative’
and
b) What correlation there might be between the curriculum that they are being force-fed and their levels of attainment?
Your government states that ‘the review seeks to make the curriculum more inclusive and reflective of the diverse society in the UK. This involves revising the content to include a broader range of perspectives, particularly those of marginalised communities. It also focuses on creating a more supportive environment for children with special educational needs and disabilities.
Britain has recently experienced the worst manifestations of racial hatred, Islamophobia and xenophobia arguably since the late 1960s. White children of an increasingly young age are committing the most egregious forms of race-hate crimes, including murder.
Yet, the government sticks with this trope of making the curriculum more inclusive and reflective of the diverse society in the UK. And when it talks about ‘revising the content to include a broader range of perspectives, particularly those of marginalised communities’, do such communities include those white communities that feel that ‘their country’ is no longer theirs and ‘want it back’?
Since the 1944 Education Act, this country has stubbornly refused to define and structure a role for schooling and education in dealing with the Legacy of Empire and the racism that imperialism and colonialism etched into the very DNA of the Britain that huge swathes of the population agonise to keep ‘White’.
Yet, speaking to the Holocaust Educational Trust in September, Keir Starmer focused solely on Holocaust education in the curriculum review and what he was going to mandate in advance of the findings and recommendations of that review:
We’ve got to be bolder and more defiant about the national importance of Holocaust education. As you will all know, the Holocaust is on the curriculum at Key Stage 3. And there is currently a review of our national curriculum.
But tonight, I am making two decisions in advance of that review.
First, the Holocaust will remain on the curriculum come what may. And second, even schools who do not currently have to follow the national curriculum will have to teach the Holocaust when the new curriculum comes in.
For the first time, studying the Holocaust will become a critical, vital part of every single student’s identity. And not just studying it…learning from it too.
So tonight, I want to set up a new national ambition.
That as part of their education, every student in the country should have the opportunity to hear a recorded survivor testimony. And I want us to fulfil this ambition, in this precious period. While we have survivors and still able to help us get this right.
This government will continue funding Lessons from Auschwitz. And I can confirm that tonight we are providing at least £2.2 million next year to do that.
Keir Starmer made another financial commitment on behalf of us all:
Just as I fought to bring my party back from the abyss of antisemitism, I promise you I will do the same in leading the country.
So yes, we will build that national Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre. And build it next to Parliament. Boldly, Proudly, Unapologetically. Not as a Jewish community initiative. But as a national initiative. A national statement of the truth of the Holocaust…And its place in our national consciousness. And a permanent reminder of where hatred and prejudice can lead.
I need not remind you, an avowed ‘descendant of enslaved Africans’ that the history of European genocide did not begin in 1939-1945.
Keir Starmer talks about ‘a critical, vital part of every single student’s identity’ and about ‘a national initiative’ and ‘its place in our national consciousness’ as if Britain had been an ally of Adolf Hitler to the same degree that the USA is an ally of Netanyahu and Israel, ‘iron clad support’ and all.
He is abusing his power as prime minister of post-imperial and still colonial Britain to erect a hierarchy of holocausts as if Britain’s imperial history and the enduring legacy of that history at home and across the world are on no consequence. That should have no place in our national consciousness. There should be no ‘national statement’ of the truth of Britain’s imperial barbarism and the impact of that on enslaved Africans and on us as their descendants, let alone on the ‘national consciousness of white Britain’.
Given Britain’s imperial past and the blood of millions of enslaved Africans that is still dripping from that parliament building itself, why should Keir Starmer and the Board of Deputies of British Jews want to join the British state in giving the descendants of enslaved Africans a hefty kick in the teeth by building that Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in the shadow of the Parliament?
Why is Keir Starmer not concerned about the travesty involved in the British state’s commitment of £150m to build that memorial, while arguing that it could not afford the £4m Memorial 2007 requested in order to build a monument to enslaved Africans in Hyde Park?
But then, Keir Starmer has demonstrated in myriad ways that he does not give a toss about systemic racism in Britain and the way Black and Global Majority people continue to experience the society and its institutions, let alone the Labour Party itself.
It stands to reason, it seems to me, that building that memorial and learning centre as proposed is one sure way of ensuring that the nation will be forever focused on combating antisemitism. One would hope that the cost of guarding it is not one which we as taxpayers that are having it imposed upon us would be made to pay.
This brings me to the issue of reparations and reparatory justice.
On 23 October 2023, the BBC reported that Rishi Sunak’s government had made it clear that it had no plans to pay reparations. The BBC reported:
Earlier this year, Foreign Minister David Rutley set out the government’s position. He said the government believed “the most effective way for the UK to respond to the cruelty of the past is to ensure that current and future generations do not forget what happened, that we address racism, and that we continue to work together to tackle today’s challenges”.
On 18 October 2024, it was reported that your government ‘has said there will not be an apology over Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, when King Charles and Sir Keir Starmer visit the Commonwealth summit in Samoa next week’.
A Downing Street spokesperson had already ruled out financial reparations.
Last year, the King spoke of his “greatest sorrow and regret” at the “wrongdoings” of the colonial era on a visit to Kenya, but stopped short of an apology, which would have depended on the agreement of ministers’. The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, to be held in Samoa on 25 and 26 October, will bring together the leaders of 56 countries.
For reparations, think reparatory justice. Colonialism created sustainable generational wealth for the British ruling class, including the Monarchy and the Church, which is evident to this day. This is matched by cyclical poverty and vulnerability to climate change in the nations and among descendants of the people that created that wealth. Justice demands that there is restitution and rebalancing so that there is equity in the distribution of life chances.
Reparatory justice is not just financial reparations. It is a process, not a single act. It requires acknowledgment of loss and harm, restitution and repair and a commitment to non-repetition.
Your government is hellbent on insisting that this is all in the past and that the present generation should not be made to bear the burden of responsibility for any of it. Clearly, the only holocaust that matters and the only memorialising and learning that should be funded is in respect of the Jewish holocaust.
Black History Month exists in order to rectify this erasure and to remind the nation and the world that Africa and by extension all its diaspora have a history that both predates and encompasses imperialism and colonialism.
It is self-affirming, while at the same time a measure of political resistance to the hegemony of western epistemology and constructions of African history and its intersection with the history of British and European imperialism and colonialism.
It is not to be appropriated by you, or by the British state of which you are a part, however much you might want Black folk to join you in celebrating the fact that you have made history by becoming yet another ‘first’ in this endemically racist society.
The British state has a history of indulging in performative inclusiveness. As such, it bears the hallmark of hypocrisy and hubris.
As I argue in my book, Don’t Salvage the Empire Windrush, Britain betrayed black citizens who had given most of their adult life to building this country, wrongly classifying them as undocumented and deporting them to countries in circumstances where all they could hope for was an early death.
Yet, despite the horrors of the ‘Windrush scandal’ and the state’s ongoing failure to compensate those so egregiously wronged, Britain unashamedly “issues Windrush postage stamps, coins, and even British Empire medals for ‘services to the Windrush generation’ in place of acknowledging the reality of the perennial struggles to build communities of resistance against systemic racism and class oppression and to promote racial and social justice.
The romanticised trope about those colonial subjects answering the call to come and rebuild Britain eschews any consideration of the conditions of penury and economic destitution that necessitated so many coming here in order to survive, or the fact that even as they fought off racists in and out of institutions as they rebuilt Britain, typically on lower wages and in the worst working conditions, they had to send money and goods back home to help those whom they left behind to subsist and to boost their countries’ GDP.
Meanwhile, Britain continued to flourish through the recycling of generational wealth made on the backs of our Ancestors”.
All of this, Mr Lammy, is the backcloth against which you will be celebrating Black History Month as a member of Keir Starmer’s cabinet and against which he and the British monarch will be meeting those heads of Commonwealth states in Samoa.
Against that backcloth, as a self-respecting descendant of enslaved Africans with a spiritual connection to my Ancestors, I will not be joining you in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to celebrate Black History Month.
In Strength!
Prof Gus John
Featured image via the Canary
