Well, who would have guessed? Emboldened by Mauritius’s success in persuading Keir Starmer to surrender the Chagos Islands – which were never even part of Mauritius in the first place – the African Union is reported to be planning to take Britain to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to demand reparations for slavery and colonisation. Their case is pretty feeble, and for reasons which ought to be obvious. You can’t compensate slaves who lived 200 years ago by making cash transfers to nations from which they were taken, especially when the tribal kingdoms which existed when the slaves were taken were themselves involved in the slave trade. Moreover, the money being used to pay the reparations would in many cases be coming out of the pockets of UK citizens who were descended from slaves: in many cases it would be the descendants of the innocent paying the descendants of the guilty. As for compensating modern day African nations for colonialisation it........

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