The Rev Dr Michael Banner - 08/09/2026

Yesterday a party from Jamaica lodged a petition with the King, Jamaica's head of state, asking him to request legal advice from the judicial committee of the Privy Council. Specifically to ask 3 questions: Was the forced transportation of Africans to Jamaica legal? Was it a crime against humanity? And is Britain now under an obligation to provide some sort of recompense to Jamaica for slavery and its long term consequences?

Recently I was recently teaching my small daughter the rudiments of chess. As I explained them to her - it seemed rather striking to her and so to me - that though the king is the most important piece on the board, he is just about the most limited in the moves he can make. So it is for King Charles - lawyers and politicians will be scurrying round in Whitehall looking at the details of the petition and will tell him what he should or shouldn't say or do. But if a king is bound by the rules, he is bound even more fundamentally by his birth. We speak of family bonds, and it these bonds which made him King in the first place.

When Jesus called/chose? his first disciples he called two sets of brothers - brothers united by the bonds of family - Simon and Andrew, James and John. They were fishermen, not kings, and yet their role or station was no more chosen than kingship. They were fishermen because their father was a fisherman - their past determined their present and their future. So that when Jesus called them - and 'immediately they left their ship and their father' - he is subverting these bonds and summoning them to act against the expectations which seemed to define them. I always imagine this scene as it would be in a blockbuster film - it would end with a long and lingering shot of the father abandoned in his boat.

All of us, in our different ways, can be prisoners of our histories; and all of us may hear, in the call of Christ, a call to act against the confining expectations of these histories, for the sake of better futures. The King will receive his advice and do his duty. But we know that King Charles has not been frightened to challenge conventional wisdom and accepted beliefs - indeed he has been a bold leader on environmental matters. Perhaps, for all that kings don't have many moves, he could find a way to acknowledge the need to address effectively the wrongs of the past. However that may be, as a nation we have an opportunity to take a radical new course in response to the appeals from the Caribbean, which we have tended to brush off. Previous Prime Ministers have expressed regret – but let’s talk about the future not the past. The fact is that the nations of the Caribbean are still bound by the woeful consequences of a woeful history, a history of bonds far more heavy and grievous than the bonds of family.