Dawn Butler

It is a pleasure and a privilege to take part in this debate on the Floor of the House in Government time for the first time ever. I thank the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for East Grinstead and Uckfield (Mims Davies) for her excellent speech. It is a pleasure to co-chair the all-party parliamentary group on women in Parliament. Talking about footballers, Raheem Sterling is from Brent—a proud Brent boy—as is Rachel Yankey, and they do amazing things in the community. I thank the Minister for her moving and excellent speech. I am sure the Nigerians would disagree about jollof rice, but I will try not to get too involved in that. As she said, she is the first woman of Ghanaian decent at the Dispatch Box. I remember that when I stood at that Dispatch Box in 2009, and I was the first black woman ever to stand there as a Government Minister, it was so moving and I almost felt as though I had the weight of history on my shoulders. I congratulate her on that, and also on the Windrush announcement. That is a phenomenal announcement, and a lot of people today will be very grateful for it. I would like to thank Wendy Williams, Jacqueline McKenzie, Martin Forde and Patrick Vernon for all the work they have done on Windrush. Reclaiming narratives is important for this Black History Month, because it is not about explaining black history, but about reclaiming some of the narratives out there changing some of the assumptions. I always remember a teacher saying to me at school, “Don’t assume, because when you ‘assume’ you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’.” When I met Pam, whose family owned a cotton farm in Mississippi for over 100 years, I was expecting all these stories about uprisings and everything, and she just told me about the entrepreneurship, the sustainability and the fair pay. I was so enthralled by her story—mytunika.com—that I purchased the shirt I am wearing today, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) for helping me iron it. The thing about business is that it is easy for someone to make huge profits if they do not have to pay people, if they do not have to provide accommodation, if they do not have to treat them fairly and if they can treat them as if they are nobody. No one with a conscience or any compassion would say that is a good business model, but six years ago, in 2018, I received a message, as did everybody else in the country, to inform me that we had finished paying the reparations owed. The message said: “The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015. Which means that living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade.” I was absolutely shocked when I received that message. I thought, “I won’t consent to my taxpayer’s money paying slave owners compensation.” The British Government paid £20 million, which was 5% of GDP at the time, and that is now the equivalent of about £100 billion. This money was paid to compensate slave owners for lost capital associated with freeing slaves—40% of the UK’s budget. So there is a precedent for paying reparations for slavery; it has just been paid to the wrong people.