SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley has described as “asinine” a suggestion by a U.K. lawmaker that Britain’s former colonies should repay it for its historic investment in them.“I cannot believe we are being asked to respond to the suggestion that the descendants of the enslaved should pay for the machinery that oppressed them,” Mottley wrote on X late Thursday. “The Caribbean does not owe Britain for slavery, for colonial extraction, or for laws that treated African people as chattel. We are not asking for charity. We are asking for justice, and history itself has already told the truth.”She was speaking after Suella Braverman — a former British Home Secretary who is now a member of the anti-immigration Reform UK party — wrote in a post on X on July 3 that the British Empire “did so much good for the world.” Braverman was writing in response to another parliamentarian who noted that Jamaica planned to lodge a formal petition for reparations later this year.“If the government is seriously thinking about this then former colonies should pay the British back for the considerable investment, effort and contribution that this country made which laid the foundations for many flourishing democracies today,” Braverman wrote.