By Sumayya
King Charles III will face “shameful parts” of United Kingdom history with “complete honesty” when he speaks to Commonwealth leaders next week, Buckingham Palace said on Saturday, during a time of new attention on Britain’s part in past global slavery.
The statements come after Prime Minister Andy Burnham shared that he was willing to have the U.K. officially say sorry for its part in the slave trade, but he refused to pay the money damages demanded by some Caribbean nations.
These issues have come up again as Charles travels through the Caribbean before giving a speech on Tuesday at the meeting of Commonwealth government leaders there, which Burnham is also planning to attend.
“The King will not run away from facing the most shameful parts of the past during this trip,” a palace speaker said.
“You can therefore expect him to speak about them in his speech with complete honesty, true sadness, and respect for the larger talks that will be happening between the correct governments on this problem.”
The palace pointed out that the king, who reached Antigua and Barbuda late Friday before the meeting there, will be speaking in his job as the head of the 56-member Commonwealth, which is made up mostly of past British colonies.
“It would not be right for him to speak about specific policy matters connected to the U.K. government’s stance,” the speaker said.
They added that the king will “mostly focus on encouraging real solutions and working together to handle global problems and chances.”
Pressure over slavery
Facing pressure from Commonwealth nations over Britain’s important part in global slavery, Burnham wrote an opinion article printed earlier Saturday that argued: “We need to face up to the past”.
Writing in The Guardian newspaper, he promised to have “hard talks” to protect the future of the Commonwealth, offering a “planned discussion with the people affected”.
“Listening to demands for an official apology on behalf of the British government will form an important part of this process and I am open to them,” Burnham wrote.
Showing “sadness and regret for the pain and suffering of so many millions of people” caused by the slave trade and its connections to modern times, he maintained that paying money damages was not “the right answer”.
“I do not think that British people today can be held responsible for past wrongs, no matter how terrible, that happened in a different time under different laws and in which they had no personal part,” he wrote.
The center-left British leader also announced he would start a new plan to change debt rules for the poorest Commonwealth nations, guided by past Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
He promised to work with “global partners” to help those nations pay back money “over a longer time frame and with better costs”.
Demands for payments
These problems have been a big focus during 77-year-old Charles’s current nine-day trip to three Caribbean nations.
“I do believe there should be a saying sorry,” a receptionist named Daliesha Murray told AFP as the king reached The Bahamas on Tuesday, where small groups of protestors waved signs saying: “Pay what you owe us.”
The king recognized “the great suffering of the past” during that visit.
In Guyana on Friday, he visited a place where local people were executed during British ruling times, stopping to think in a movement seen as showing his awareness of that past unfairness.
Before a meeting with Charles during that visit, Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali told ITV News that admitting past wrongs was just a “first step.”
“Now, moving to the official saying sorry is the next step,” he said.
Britain has never officially said sorry for slavery or agreed to pay money damages.
The country made money for hundreds of years from ruling other lands and from slavery, but argues it also led the way in stopping slavery later.
In the year 1833, the U.K. parliament passed a law to end slavery in most parts of the British Empire.
In a sign of the political disagreement inside the country that Burnham could face for giving an official apology, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said Saturday there was “no need” for it while repeating that she is against paying money damages.
She urged the Commonwealth to “look ahead” and “not endlessly backward”.
“Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and area took part,” she wrote on X.
“We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically helpful today”.
