The issue of paying for the past however does remain and has reared its head closer to home in recent months, with the news that the German debt to Greece from World War II exceeded the Greek debt to the European Central Bank by no less than 38 billion Euro. The Greeks however have since been coerced into accepting a structural adjustment package in order to receive a loan from the same people who owe them money, confusing to say the least.
The impact of colonialism upon Africa and the Caribbean is almost impossible to quantify. The human and physical capital extracted by Britain and others has done much to create the unequal global system which exists today, but David Cameron believes that bygones should be bygones in this instance and requesting reparations would be unjustifiable.However, Jamaica is still crippled by its national debt. In the last decade, interest payments on this debt have exceeded the total tax revenue of the country and 45 percent of this package belongs to foreign creditors, including those in the UK. This debt, Mr Cameron believes, is not something which can be part of a forgotten past.
Since the election in 2015, Tory austerity has stepped up a gear, and policies like the sell off of the public stake in RBS for below its market value reflect the issue Jamaica faces. In the global political economy, there is one rule for the capitalist oligarchy of Western corporates, and another for those who built these places, be they workers in Britain, or the citizens of colonies in the Caribbean and Africa.
The economic policies of austerity; bailouts, quantitative easing and public sector cuts are a scam. They are a scam based upon the idea that money owed must be paid, and debt cannot simply be written off. As logical as this may seem, in practice debt is written off all the time, in 2008 when the banking system crashed, the debts of corporate banks were never collected, and Greece never received the debt it was owed from Germany.
Cameron's claim that Britain has repayed its debt by freeing the Jamaican people it enslaved in the first place is as ridiculous as it sounds. The reduction in national deficit at the cost of public services, while the rich are handed valuable assets (which the public paid to save) for pittance is as woeful a gift. The simple fact is that some don't have to play by the rules which have enforced suffering on the people, and simply draw a line under history and begin again after this point. So surely we can draw a line under debt and begin again now? Whether this happens in Jamaica or in the UK, or both, wouldn't that be the best solution?
