Liberals don’t realise it yet, and perhaps they never will, but Reform has just done them a massive favour. Nigel Farage’s party has announced that a Reform government would deny visas to nationals of any country seeking slavery reparations from the UK. The party’s home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, says those countries which try to ‘use history as a weapon to drain our treasury’ will find ‘the bank is closed and the door is locked’. This appeals to the sorts of voter the Reform coalition is built on: fed up with Britain being taken for a ride, resentful of the shame-drenched view of the nation’s history advanced by its ruling elites, and disaffected by a political class that cannot be relied upon to resist reparations because doing so might inadvertently advance British national interests.

However, you needn’t be minded to vote Reform to appreciate the value of this latest policy as a spine-stiffener for ministers and civil servants. Reparations are firmly on the agenda. In March, Ghana, with the support of the African Union and the Caribbean Community, passed a resolution at the UN General Assembly declaring the trans-Atlantic slave trade – ‘trans-Atlantic’ being the operative word – as ‘the gravest crime against humanity’ because of, among other reasons, the ‘enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialised regimes of labour, property and capital’. The text says ‘reparations represent a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs against Africans and people of African descent’. This time the operative term is ‘of African........

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