‘We’re right behind you!’
The editors write: Since we launched our emergency campaign to save New Internationalist on 26 May, messages of support have been flooding in from around the world! We wanted to publish a few here that have been posted on our Crowdfunder page to say thank you!
1 I have been a subscriber to NI for many years… it is the best magazine for coverage of Global South, anti-colonial and collectivist issues I have come across. It needs to survive.
2 NI is one of the few publications out there that is unapologetically anti-capitalist. We need more of those, not less.
3 I loved this publication 30 years ago and I love it now. Keep telling the truths that the powerful want kept hidden.
4 Your work covering the struggle for justice and equity around the world is invaluable. I hope you can continue.
5 Though I sometimes disagree with your views, I am certain that an opposition and autonomous newspaper like NI should continue to exist and be available to all.
Down with the Drax dynasty
Britain extracted 25 million years of life and labour through slavery in Barbados, according to research by a team of international experts. Their report on reparations concludes that Barbados’s population of African descent has suffered damages estimated at up to $2tn (£1.5tn).
The moral debate over reparations falters on whether we can be held responsible for the ‘sins of our fathers’. This framing, however, ignores a stark historical and economic reality: reparations have already been paid. But to the wrong people.
Following the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, the British state paid £20 million in compensation – not to the enslaved, but to their owners for the ‘loss of property’. This sum represented a staggering 40 per cent of the Treasury’s annual income, equivalent to over £100 billion in relative economic power today. It was a debt so massive that the British government did not finish redeeming the loan until 2015 – meaning living British taxpayers, including the descendants of the enslaved, helped pay it off.
This capital flowed directly into the arteries of the modern economy, to Lloyd’s of London, along with the London Assurance and Royal Exchange Assurance.
The Drax family of Barbados is the archetype of this legacy. James Drax, an early English settler, built his fortune on enslaved African labour. Today, Drax Hall remains in family ownership, still operating as a sugar estate. His direct descendant, Richard Drax, served as a Conservative MP until July 2024, with income flowing to him through family trusts.
While these families channelled extracted capital into global commercial empires, the freed survivors were left to toil as sharecroppers – legally free but economically bound. The chasm between Black poverty and white wealth is no coincidence; it is an unpaid ledger. It is time to correct the ledger.
Why I...
...support remote education classes for girls in Afghanistan.
