Seven years ago Caricom, the body that represents 10 Caribbean nations and 18 million people – most of them of African heritage – asked European nations to start talks about the legacies of transatlantic slavery. In Britain, the headlines mis-reported this as a demand for £4.7 trillion in compensation. The comment was generally derisory. What cheek! Hadn’t we done our bit when we gave them their freedom and then, even more generously, their independence? Visiting Jamaica as Prime Minister in 2015, David Cameron ruled out talks about reparations. He said people in the Caribbean should ‘move on’. But he did hand over money for Jamaica’s decrepit penal system, then so terrible that the British Government’s plan to deport Jamaica-born offenders had run into trouble on human rights grounds. Since then British development aid to the region has, again, been cut.