Seven years ago Caricom, the body that represents 10 Caribbean nations and 18 million people – most of them of African heritage – asked European nations to start talks about the legacies of transatlantic slavery. In Britain, the headlines mis-reported this as a demand for £4.7 trillion in compensation. The comment was generally derisory. What cheek! Hadn’t we done our bit when we gave them their freedom and then, even more generously, their independence?

Visiting Jamaica as Prime Minister in 2015, David Cameron ruled out talks about reparations. He said people in the Caribbean should ‘move on’. But he did hand over money for Jamaica’s decrepit penal system, then so terrible that the British Government’s plan to deport Jamaica-born offenders had run into trouble on human rights grounds. Since then British development aid to the region has, again, been cut.

‘Moving on’ is not a lifestyle choice. The legacies of slavery’s brutality and racism, of the decades of neglect that followed emancipation, all remain powerful brakes on development as they are on the human spirit. That’s what I heard when I visited Jamaica and Tobago and the plantations where my Scottish ancestors owned and bred enslaved people.

READ MORE: How slavery made the modern Scotland

Meanwhile, Britain and North America still greedily exploit Caribbean people. Teachers, doctors and nurses are lured away by the promise of salaries five times what they can earn at home. Visiting schools in Jamaica, I was told that maths and science teachers are almost impossible to recruit. This is a legacy of negligent colonialism.

Why should any of this matter to Scots today? Well, Britain was more deeply involved in plantation slavery than any other European nation, and, per capita, the Scots more than the English. Visit Jamaica, Tobago or Guyana and you find Scots names and places everywhere: genetic research reveals that 70% of people in Jamaica have some Scottish DNA.

It wasn’t just posh Scots, like my ancestors, who benefited from slavery. Ordinary men travelled in their thousands to work in this boom industry – Robert Burns nearly went to Jamaica. Scottish weavers made the clothes the enslaved people wore, salted Scots herrings fed them. Glasgow bankers were financing the slave trade and the plantation economy. By 1800, slavery-related industries accounted for 12% of British GDP.

When slavery came to an end in 1834, the British government compensated all owners, per head of enslaved person. The Gladstone family, from Leith, pocketed £127 million in today’s money for the 2,508 people they owned in Guyana and Jamaica. My family, who co-owned 198 people, received £1.5m. The enslaved received nothing.

“Was anything good done with the money?” I was asked more than once in the Caribbean. Depends on your point of view. The Gladstones bought Fasque Castle (with a lot of change left over). The Dick family set up a scholarship fund – for children in Aberdeenshire, not the Caribbean – that still exists today. Other Scots bought railway shares.

My three-times grandfather Sir Charles Dalrymple Fergusson, who lived at Newhailes House in Musselburgh, did build schools and churches for the poor of East Lothian. But he did nothing for the newly-liberated poor of St Thomas parish in Jamaica who had neither education nor land.

Since I published my book on this, I’ve heard from people who find themselves in circumstances similar to my family’s: not necessarily wealthy because of slavery, but aware that their privilege today is linked to that time. None of us feel guilt – that is useless. But we do feel shame, not least at our ignorance about what happened. That’s coupled with a realisation that our propagandising education, which saw the British empire as a benevolent enterprise, taught us to deny the real effects that the racist systems of colonialism still have now.

READ MORE: Frederick Douglass: the slave who became a Scot. Ian Houston's Letter from America

I am ashamed that four times as many black people as white in Britain have died of Covid-19, and that most of our former Caribbean colonies are still so poor. I am disgusted that the London government has refused even to discuss the legacies of slavery with the Caribbean nations who were once our colonies, while decrying re-examination of the history.

So how about Scotland? Why don’t we open talks with Caricom? We see ourselves a progressive, outward-looking nation. Reparative justice is not just about money: it is a plan for greater friendship and cooperation through reconciliation. These are good. As Richard Holloway has said of the task of healing the damage done by slavery “We should do it joyfully, because it is the right thing to do.”

Alex Renton and Sir Geoff Palmer will be discussing the legacies of British slavery at the Boswell Book Festival on 12 June (online only). Blood Legacy: reckoning with a family’s slavery past is published by Canongate. www.bloodlegacybook.com @axrenton