Portia’s Jamaica, Abolition’s Eve: The View from Britain

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 2007 | Period covered: July–December 2006

Key Developments at a Glance

• Portia Simpson Miller leads Jamaica as the country’s first female Prime Minister, winning broad diaspora support.
• Britain’s bicentenary planning for March 2007 intensifies; Caribbean community demands more than remembrance.
• Blair government publishes bicentenary consultation; reparations advocates call it insufficient and evasive.
• Deportation flights to Jamaica continue; community legal groups document scores of removal cases.
• Caribbean community voices in Parliament press Home Office on immigration enforcement disproportionality.
• Jamaica general election expected in 2007; diaspora watches Golding’s JLP mount a credible challenge.

As 2006 draws to its close, the Caribbean diaspora in Britain stands on the threshold of a year that holds the potential to be genuinely historic. The bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act — the legislation passed on 25 March 1807 that prohibited British participation in the transatlantic slave trade — will fall on 25 March 2007, and the national debate about how Britain should mark that occasion has been building throughout the second half of the year. In Kingston, Portia Simpson Miller is completing her first year as Prime Minister and preparing to face a general election that she is expected to call before the year is out. For the Caribbean community in Britain, both dimensions of this moment — the historical reckoning demanded by the bicentenary and the political vitality of a Jamaica led for the first time by a woman — carry personal and collective significance.

Portia Simpson Miller: Jamaica’s First Female Prime Minister

Portia Simpson Miller became Jamaica’s Prime Minister in March 2006 following the retirement of PJ Patterson, who had led the country since 1992 and the People’s National Party through an unprecedented run of electoral success. Simpson Miller, who won the PNP leadership election convincingly, was sworn in as Jamaica’s seventh and first female Prime Minister — a historic landmark that was celebrated across the Caribbean diaspora in Britain with genuine pride. Her roots in the labour movement and her long record of advocating for working-class Jamaicans made her ascent particularly meaningful to members of the diaspora who identify with that tradition.

In the second half of 2006, Simpson Miller has been consolidating her leadership while managing a set of economic and security challenges that have constrained her government’s room for manoeuvre. Jamaica’s crime rate remains stubbornly high; the economy is growing but carrying a heavy debt burden; and relations with the international financial institutions have required careful management. The diaspora in Britain has engaged with Simpson Miller’s government with a combination of enthusiasm — for the symbolism of her leadership and for her stated commitment to social inclusion — and impatience at the pace of change on the ground. A general election is expected in 2007, and the JLP under Bruce Golding is presenting itself as a credible alternative government for the first time in many years.

The Bicentenary Debate: What Britain Owes

The debate within Britain about how to mark the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act has been running through the second half of 2006 with increasing intensity. The government has established a bicentenary committee and consulted on a programme of events; the BBC has commissioned documentaries and educational materials; and museums including the National Maritime Museum and the Museum of London are developing exhibitions. The official programme is substantial. But it has also, in the view of Caribbean community organisations and reparations advocates, been carefully designed to avoid the most politically demanding conclusions that the bicentenary invites.

The central question is whether Britain will use the bicentenary to issue a formal government apology for the slave trade and the system of slavery it supplied. This is a question on which the Caribbean community and CARICOM have been clear: they want an apology, not merely an expression of regret or a commemoration of abolitionists. The distinction matters legally and politically, because an apology creates a basis for engaging with the reparations question in a way that an expression of sorrow does not. The government’s consultations have circled around this question without answering it, and the indications from Downing Street are that Tony Blair will not use the bicentenary to issue a formal apology. Community organisations are preparing to make the case loudly and publicly when the bicentenary arrives.

The reparations argument in Britain is being made with increasing sophistication and with the growing support of academic institutions. University College London’s Legacies of British Slavery database project, which is documenting the individuals who received compensation from the British government when enslaved people were freed in 1833 — compensation paid to the enslaver, not the enslaved — is providing an empirical foundation for arguments about the scale of the wealth transfer that British slavery represented. The research is showing that many of the fortunes that built British banks, insurance companies, and trading houses were founded on the proceeds of plantation slavery, and that the connections between the wealth extracted and contemporary British institutional power are traceable and documented.

Deportations and the Diaspora’s Legal Battles

Through the second half of 2006, Caribbean community legal organisations have continued to document and challenge the programme of deportation charter flights to Jamaica that the Home Office operates on a regular basis. The individuals affected are typically people who have lived in Britain for significant periods, who came as children or young people, who have family here, and who are being removed on the basis of criminal convictions. Community legal advisers report that the appeal process is inadequate, that legal representation is difficult to obtain for those in immigration detention, and that the courts’ willingness to uphold Article 8 rights in deportation cases is inconsistent and unpredictable.

Black MPs and peers at Westminster — including members of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Race and Community — have raised these issues with ministers and pressed for a more systematic review of deportation policy as it affects Caribbean-heritage residents. The government’s position is that the law is being applied correctly and that criminal convictions by definition require consideration of whether continued residence is in the public interest. Community organisations dispute both the proportionality of current practice and the adequacy of the framework for weighing family and community ties against the deportation imperative. As the year ends, the legal battles continue, and the human cost continues to be borne by the families left behind.

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; New Nation; BBC News; Reuters; AP; The Guardian; Runnymede Trust; Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants; UCL Legacies of British Slavery project; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK); House of Commons Hansard.

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