The UK Dilemma: Climate Change, Slavery and Reparations

By Deborah Ancell

Question: what do slavery and climate change have in common? Answer: both trigger demands for reparations from struggling Less Developed Countries (LDCs). Slavery has ended with reparations unpaid; climate change endures with misnamed and obscured reparations paid.

Mr Ed Miliband, the United Kingdom’s (UK’s) current Foreign Secretary, disagreed with paying reparations to LDCs for the UK’s role in historical slavery. However, he did not acknowledge that the UK already pays reparations to LDCs for historical emissions. LDCs claim they have suffered loss and damage because emissions derived from the Industrial Revolution (the base period for emissions measurement) warm today’s planet, changing the climate and hindering their economic growth. Believers in anthropogenic global warming (AGW) (previously ‘manmade climate change’) claim climate reparations are owed. Their belief was enabled by redefining climate change, splitting it into ‘natural’ and ‘anthropogenic’.

Mr Miliband attended the 3-4 November 2026 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Antigua in the hot, sunny Caribbean. He was under pressure from local politicians to make reparations for the UK’s historical role in global slavery. (Slave owners were both British and non-British, but it was mainly British blood and treasure that stopped that vile trade.) To mollify their demands, Mr Miliband juggled existing budgets within the UK’s national debt to fund £40 million of infrastructure and ‘green energy’ in Caribbean islands. He insists these funds are not slavery reparations, which would raise the challenge of fairness. Who would pay the reparations, and to whom? Unfairly, any reparations paid today would be paid by Britons who never owned slaves (or, because of immigration) could be paid by relatives of former slaves. How far back in history should reparations requests consider? Should Britons ask for reparations from the Vikings, the Romans or the Barbary corsairs? Why aren’t the historical slave-trading nations of the Arabian Gulf or Africa, or current slave-employing nations (e.g. China, Democratic Republic of the Congo) being asked for reparations?

The same slavery questions apply to requests for AGW reparations. Over decades, the UK has collected £billions in environmental taxes under legislation designed to reduce fossil fuel consumption and emissions output. AGW believers claim that taxing fuel consumption today to reduce lingering emissions tomorrow will ensure habitable, future climates. The UK has forwarded more than £3.5 billion to LDCs ostensibly to compensate them for today’s harms resulting from the UK’s historical emissions. The main culprit was considered to be atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, which are actually essential for plant growth. Irrespective and unfairly, UK taxpayers are paying reparations for unidentifiable harms from emissions discharged by unidentified, historical emitters. Since they are now dead, they are avoiding their responsibilities. This is analogous to paying slavery reparations for the actions of past generations.

The United Nations’ (UN) role in these two claims is significant. Its environmental – ‘green’ – funds are intertwined with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDGs provide global life guidance ranging from children’s education through to energy generation and building designs. They also include compensation for the unevidenced impact of historical anthropogenic emissions. The SDGs are a global wealth redistribution mechanism. There is no evidence of a direct link between historical anthropogenic emissions and any unfavourable climate effects today, such as rising seas, increased flooding or devastating wildfires that damage LDCs. Irrespective, various UN bodies, often populated by members of LDCs, believe the links between emissions and underdevelopment are established and justify compensatory reparations from developed nations. When explaining their underdevelopment, LDCs claim they lack agency while overlooking corruption, difficulties transacting business, and misgovernance.

In 2023, the UN requested that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) determine States’ obligations under the three UN climate agreements—the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement. Involving the judiciary awarded gravitas and credibility to the unevidenced concept of AGW. Successive UN agreements were intended to ensure that emissions reductions would prevent global temperature rises exceeding 1.5°C to 2°C above pre-Industrial Revolution levels. The ICJ focused on AGW’s unfavourable effects on Small Island Developing States (SIDS), perceived as particularly vulnerable to any adverse effects of (anthropogenic and natural) climate change. Dangerously, the current British Government interprets the ICJ’s ‘advisory opinions’ as instructions to act. (Another ICJ ‘advisory opinion’ recommended the Chagos Islands give-away.)

The 14 ICJ Judges (including eight from LDCs) issued a 132-page non-binding, ‘advisory opinion’. It outlined that international law could be breached if nations failed to protect the climate system from ‘significant harm’ caused by anthropogenic emissions. The ICJ accepted the UN’s view that anthropogenic emissions led to “adverse effects of climate change [which] may impair the effective enjoyment of human rights”. The opinion noted that climate change “caused widespread adverse impact and losses to nature and people”. AGW, it claimed, would lead to a man-made climate emergency requiring complete changes in lifestyles to avoid a ‘self-inflicted’ and an “existential problem of planetary proportions that imperils all forms of life and the very health of our planet”. These purported effects included global warming since the mid-20^th Century caused by anthropogenic emissions from fossil fuel burning. The ICJ’s authoritative sources were  UN climate reports (which exaggerate the science) and the widely discredited scientific consensus. The ICJ claimed that the largest source of anthropogenic emissions was CO₂ from fossil fuel combustion and that ‘the collective and aggregate effects of … anthropogenic as well as natural sources … cause damage to the climate system’. Despite recognising the two sources of CO₂ – natural and anthropogenic – the ICJ did not identify any means of distinguishing between harms caused by either natural sources or those purportedly of anthropogenic origin (for reparations). Nor did the ICJ consider that CO₂ emissions might not be at fault. Attribution, harm and damage must be identifiable and measurable if reparations are to be calculated. 

The ICJ advises that any States breaching the multiple UN climate agreements should incur legal responsibility and cease the wrongful activity, provide non-recurring guarantees, and pay for any loss or damage. This could trigger demands for billions or even trillions in climate change “prevention funds”, or “‘reparations’ for past and ongoing damages, and money for ‘adaptation measures’ that ‘victimised’ countries will have to take to minimise … damage from climate change caused by developed nations”. Additionally, AGW ‘victim nations’ could ultimately demand “an end to fossil fuels and petrochemicals, despite our needing them to power vehicles, generators, furnaces, and factories, and manufacture 6,000 petrochemical products” including electric vehicle components, solar panels, wind turbines, transformers and batteries. The implications are significant. The UK should be very wary of acting on future ICJ advisory opinions.

Reparations for ‘victims’ do not build successful economies. With different cultures and outlooks, former British colonies (e.g. Singapore, Botswana, India) have succeeded. Many expanding SIDS (e.g. Maldives, Fiji) proclaim the dangers of AGW but accept reparatory ‘green’ funds to exploit warming oceans, encouraging tourism and building new airports, roads and hotels. These actions are inconsistent with economies that fear being overwhelmed by AGW-induced ocean rises. The developing science linking anthropogenic emissions, increased temperature and compensation for harm is an incomplete and insufficient basis for strategic economic policies.

Successful nations have an enterprise culture, low corruption, transactional simplicity and good governance. They avoid making strategic economic policy based on victimhood. Mr Miliband’s stance on slavery reparations is at odds with the previous, unacknowledged acceptance of the UK’s current payments for unevidenced AGW harm. The ICJ advisory opinion on climate reparations legitimises and exposes these ongoing payments. It also exposes the UK’s duplicitous stance in accepting the ICJ’s advisory opinion on Chagos Islands as an instruction. If the UK accepts the ICJ’s Chagos Islands advisory opinion as a precedent, why would it reject the ICJ’s advisory opinion on climate change?

Biography:

Deborah Ancell PhD MSc(Dist) BCA is an economist and author. Her debut novel Boiling Frog$ – a climate media conspiracy (Bruges Group) dissects the fake news and fraud embedded in anthropogenic climate change. Her Substack (under development) is djancell.substack.com.