‘Kicking and screaming!’

THE 2026 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) opens in St John’s, Antigua, today amid a deepening rift over slavery and reparation, with Caribbean leaders welcoming British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s openness to a formal apology for chattel slavery but firmly rejecting his dismissal of reparation as “not the right answer”, insisting that reparatory justice must remain at the heart of the talks.

Burnham’s position in an op-ed for The Guardian newspaper in England, days before his arrival in Antigua and Barbuda for the summit, was immediately seen by Dr Ralph Gonsalves, senior advisor and elder for The Repair Campaign, as Britain yielding to mounting international pressure to negotiate.

“They coming to the table, but they coming kicking and screaming,” Gonsalves, who served as prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines for 24 years, told the Jamaica Observer on Saturday.