Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Update — July to September 2007

Published: 2 October 2007 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways

• JLP Defeats PNP by One Seat; Golding Is New Prime Minister
• Portia Simpson Miller Concedes After the Tightest Result in Decades
• UK’s Northern Rock Bank Run Shocks British-Jamaican Savers
• Bolt Takes 200m Silver at IAAF World Championships in Osaka
• US Subprime Crisis Signals Growing Danger to Global Economy
• Diaspora Investors Assess New JLP Government’s Economic Direction

Introduction: Jamaica’s Political Earthquake

The Jamaica general election of 3 September 2007 — which ended with Bruce Golding’s Jamaica Labour Party winning 32 of the 60 parliamentary seats to the PNP’s 28, a single-seat majority achieved with 49.8 per cent of the popular vote — is the defining event of Q3 2007. Barely four weeks old as we publish, the result is still being processed by a diaspora that had expected a much closer-run contest and received one that, in its extraordinary closeness, raised questions about what a one-seat mandate could deliver. This update draws on Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, IAAF, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, and Caribbean diaspora media through 30 September 2007.

Jamaica’s Election: What the One-Seat Majority Means

The result — announced in the early hours of 4 September after a count that was not resolved until well past midnight — produced scenes of celebration in JLP-supporting communities in Jamaica and in their diaspora counterparts that were matched by genuine surprise at the scale of the PNP’s defeat. PNP leader and outgoing Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, who had become Jamaica’s first female Prime Minister in February 2006 and had led the party with a commanding personal approval rating, conceded the election with dignity. Her concession speech acknowledged the electorate’s judgment and the PNP’s need for renewal after eighteen years in office.

Bruce Golding’s victory was the culmination of a political journey that had included a decade-long break from the JLP, during which he had formed and led the National Democratic Movement before returning to the JLP in 2002. His campaign had emphasised governance reform, the eradication of corruption, and economic modernisation. For diaspora community organisations, his governance reform agenda offered the prospect of the institutional improvements — in customs administration, in property registration, in business licensing — that had been the consistent complaint of diaspora investors considering Jamaica return.

The one-seat majority’s fragility was immediately recognised as a governing constraint. Any by-election loss, any crossfloor move, any constituency result that went the wrong way would eliminate the majority entirely. Diaspora investors who had been hoping for the political stability that a clearer mandate would have provided were recalibrating. The new government’s ability to push through the structural economic reforms that Jamaica’s fiscal situation required would depend on maintaining every single vote in every single parliament division. The 3rd Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference — the next in the biennial cycle — would be held under this new government in June 2008. Preparations were already beginning.

IAAF Osaka: Bolt’s Promise on the World Stage

The 11th IAAF World Championships in Athletics, held in Osaka from 25 August to 2 September 2007, provided the global athletics showcase within which a young Usain Bolt served notice of what was coming. Tyson Gay of the United States dominated the sprint events — winning both the 100m and 200m gold medals — in a championship that established him as the world’s foremost male sprinter. Bolt, competing in the 200m, took the silver medal behind Gay in a time that confirmed his position as the second-fastest man in the world over that distance at that moment.

For Jamaica’s diaspora athletics community, Osaka offered the tantalising glimpse of a talent that had not yet peaked but was visibly approaching. Bolt’s physical presence — his extraordinary height for a sprinter, his relaxed running style, the sense of untapped reserve even in championship races — was the subject of intense discussion among the track and field community. Those who had watched him at the 2002 World Juniors in Jamaica, where he had run a world junior record in the 200m, knew that they were watching a developing phenomenon rather than an arrived one. Beijing 2008, where Bolt would be 21, was already being discussed in diaspora track communities as the moment of full emergence.

The Jamaican women’s team continued to maintain the national presence in global sprinting that had characterised the past several years. Veronica Campbell-Brown was among the medal contenders, and the depth of Jamaica’s women’s sprint programme — built through the inter-secondary schools championships system that had been producing elite talent for decades — was the subject of growing international attention.

Northern Rock: The First Crack in Britain’s Financial System

The queues that formed outside Northern Rock branches across the United Kingdom on 14 September 2007 — the first visible bank run in Britain since 1866 — were shocking not merely for their historical rarity but for what they revealed about the fragility of the financial system’s infrastructure. Northern Rock had been a growth success story of the post-2000 UK financial sector: a former building society turned bank that had grown rapidly by funding mortgages in the wholesale money markets rather than through traditional retail deposits. When those money markets froze in August 2007 — as the US subprime crisis began to contaminate the global credit markets on which Northern Rock’s business model depended — the bank was immediately exposed as a business without a viable funding source.

For British-Jamaican savers who held Northern Rock accounts, the bank run and the government’s subsequent emergency guarantee of all deposits provided the assurance that their money was safe. But the episode raised deeper questions about the security of the financial system as a whole, questions that community organisations were already beginning to address through financial literacy and savings security workshops. The US subprime crisis — which had triggered Northern Rock’s crisis through the global credit market freeze — was now visibly a global phenomenon rather than a US domestic one.

Remittances through Q3 maintained the approximately US$2.0 billion annual pace, with the summer season’s school preparation and back-to-school transfers providing the quarter’s seasonal boost. We report next from 2 January 2008, when the new JLP government’s first full quarter will be complete and the US financial situation’s full implications will be clearer.

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

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