Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Update — April to June 2007

Published: 2 July 2007 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways

• Tony Blair Resigns After Ten Years as British Prime Minister
• Gordon Brown Sworn In Immediately as Blair’s Successor
• London and Glasgow Terror Plots Disrupt British-Jamaican Communities
• Apple Launches iPhone, Transforming Diaspora Family Communications
• Jamaica Election Looms With PNP and JLP in a Close Race
• Remittances Hold Strong Through the First Half of 2007

Introduction: Britain’s Week of Extraordinary Change

The final five days of Q2 2007 — from 27 to 30 June — delivered, in rapid succession, the end of a decade of Blair government, the launch of a device that would change how the world communicates, and attempted acts of terrorism in London and Glasgow that put British-Caribbean communities on alert. We publish on 2 July 2007 with these events still barely 48 hours old. This update draws on Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and Caribbean diaspora media through 30 June 2007.

Blair’s Departure: Ten Years That Shaped British-Jamaican Life

Tony Blair’s resignation as Labour Party leader and Prime Minister, delivered in his Sedgefield constituency on 10 May and followed by the transfer of power to Gordon Brown on 27 June 2007, ended a decade in which British-Caribbean community life had been shaped, in important ways, by Labour’s social policy priorities. The Blair government had introduced the national minimum wage, which had a disproportionate positive impact on the low-wage sectors where significant numbers of British-Caribbean workers were employed. It had invested substantially in the NHS — a service in which Caribbean workers were heavily employed and on which Caribbean communities depended disproportionately. It had introduced tax credits and other transfers that had improved the household economics of the working-poor communities where Caribbean settlement was concentrated.

Blair’s legacy for British-Caribbean communities was not uncontested. The Iraq War — which Blair had supported with unqualified commitment despite the largest single-day protest in British history on 15 February 2003 — had damaged his relationship with the progressive coalition that included British-Caribbean community organisations. The institutional racism findings of the Macpherson Report into the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the Stephen Lawrence murder — commissioned by Blair’s Home Secretary Jack Straw in 1999 — had produced important race equality legislation and police reform commitments under his government, even if implementation remained contested. On balance, the British-Caribbean community’s assessment of ten years of Blair was broadly positive, tempered by Iraq and by the sense that much of the work on institutional racism remained unfinished.

Gordon Brown’s succession was welcomed by Caribbean community organisations that had worked with him during his decade as Chancellor. Brown’s economic stewardship — including the investment in public services that had benefited Caribbean communities — had been a positive feature of the Labour government’s record. His commitment to international development, including the campaign for debt cancellation that he had championed through the G8, resonated with communities with Caribbean roots in the developing world. The question was whether Brown’s premiership could sustain Labour’s social investment programme in an economy showing the first signs of the financial stress that would define the years ahead.

London and Glasgow Terror Attempts: British-Jamaican Communities on Alert

The discovery of car bombs in London’s West End on 29 and 30 June 2007 — the night after Blair’s formal departure — and the burning vehicle attack on Glasgow Airport on 30 June put Britain on its highest counter-terrorism alert as Gordon Brown’s first days in office began. The attacks — which were foiled by the alert response of individuals who noticed the suspicious vehicles — were attributed to a cell of individuals motivated by Islamist extremist ideology and linked to individuals who had also planned the attacks.

For British-Jamaican communities whose own experience of the 7/7 bombings of July 2005 had been profound — and whose members used the London transport network that had been targeted in 2005 — the new plots generated the familiar combination of heightened anxiety and the determined refusal to allow terrorist acts to alter daily life that had characterised the British public’s post-7/7 response. Community leaders in London, Birmingham, and other major urban centres moved quickly to reassure community members about security, to maintain the community’s established relationships with local police services, and to reinforce the distinction between the violent extremism of a tiny minority and the mainstream practice of any religious tradition.

The iPhone: A Device for the Diaspora

Apple’s launch of the first iPhone on 29 June 2007 — the same day as the London car bomb discoveries — was, from the perspective of Jamaica’s diaspora communities, a device whose implications were immediately apparent. The ability to combine mobile telephone, internet, email, and camera in a single pocket-sized device — described by Steve Jobs at the January 2007 announcement as ‘an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator’ — had particular significance for communities whose family and social networks spanned multiple countries and time zones.

The diaspora’s remittance transfer relationships, its family communication patterns, its consumption of Jamaican media and music, and its maintenance of community connections across geographic distance were all, potentially, transformable by a device that put internet connectivity in every pocket. The iPhone’s initial US-only availability and high price point — $499 for the 4GB model, $599 for the 8GB — meant that its immediate reach into lower-income diaspora households was limited. But the device’s category-defining launch established a trajectory of smartphone development that would, within a decade, fundamentally reshape how diaspora communities communicated with Jamaica and with each other.

Jamaica: The Election Approaches

Jamaica’s constitutionally required general election — the last possible date was April 2008 — was widely expected to be called before the end of 2007. Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller’s PNP government, now in its seventeenth consecutive year in office, was navigating the difficult terrain of a government that had been in power long enough to accumulate the fatigue that attaches to any government and that was under economic management criticism from both the JLP opposition and independent economists.

Bruce Golding’s JLP was mounting what appeared to be its most competitive electoral challenge in nearly two decades. The Jamaica election was being followed by diaspora communities with the interest that attaches to a genuinely competitive contest whose outcome was uncertain. Remittances through H1 2007 were maintaining the approximately US$2.0 billion annual pace. We report next from 2 October 2007, by which time the Jamaica election will almost certainly have been called and possibly decided.

This Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora and Returnee Update is researched and published by Jamaica Homes News. Sources include Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and PICA. All figures and developments are accurate as of the publication date, 2 July 2007.

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