Obama’s Dawn, Britain’s Recession: A Diaspora at the Crossroads

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 July 2009 | Period covered: January–June 2009

Key Developments at a Glance

• Barack Obama inaugurated as 44th US President on 20 January; Caribbean diaspora in Britain responds with historic emotion.
• UK recession deepens; Black and minority ethnic unemployment rises sharply in first quarter of 2009.
• G20 summit in London, April 2009: Brown hosts global response to the financial crisis.
• UK Border Agency expands detention estate; campaigners document rising deportations to Jamaica.
• Golding government in Kingston faces growing pressure over crime levels and governance concerns.
• Caribbean cultural events across UK cities maintain community solidarity through the economic downturn.

The first half of 2009 opens with an event that resonates far beyond the borders of the United States. The inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th President — the first Black man to hold that office — is experienced by Caribbean communities across Britain as a moment of collective significance that is difficult to overstate. Watch parties fill community centres, churches, and living rooms across London, Birmingham, Manchester, and every other city with a substantial Black British population. The tears are not only of joy; they carry the weight of generations of struggle, of the Windrush arrivals and their children and grandchildren, of every indignity absorbed and every aspiration suppressed by the structures of racial hierarchy. And then they are set against the daily reality of a British economy in recession and a political debate on immigration that grows more hostile by the month.

Obama and the Weight of History

The election of Barack Obama in November 2008 and his inauguration on 20 January 2009 are understood within the Caribbean diaspora in Britain not merely as an American political event, but as a statement about the possibilities of Black life in the Western world. For the Windrush generation and their descendants, who built their lives in a country that often told them, explicitly and implicitly, that they did not fully belong, Obama’s ascent carries a symbolic charge that is deeply personal. Community leaders across Britain speak of members who wept, who called relatives in Jamaica, who felt for the first time that something had shifted in the world’s understanding of what Black people could achieve and be.

There are, of course, careful voices in the Caribbean community who urge against conflating American racial politics with British ones, and who point out that Obama’s election does not, in itself, address the structural inequalities that persist in employment, housing, education, and criminal justice in the United Kingdom. The Runnymede Trust’s response to the inauguration is measured: celebration, yes, but no basis for complacency about the persistent racial gaps in outcomes that British data continue to document. Still, the emotional fact of Obama’s presidency is real, and its effect on the self-perception and political engagement of younger Caribbean-heritage British people is something that community organisations are beginning to observe and document.

Recession and its Racial Dimension

The global financial crisis of 2008 has become, in the first half of 2009, a British recession of significant severity. The UK economy contracted sharply in the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, and unemployment has risen consistently throughout the period. The Office for National Statistics data, supplemented by analysis from the Runnymede Trust and the Trades Union Congress, consistently shows that Black and minority ethnic workers are experiencing unemployment rates that rise faster and fall more slowly than those of White British workers in comparable recessions. This pattern — last in, first out, as the labour market tightens — is familiar from previous downturns, but no less damaging for that familiarity.

For the Caribbean community, the recession’s effects are compounded by the concentration of employment in public services, which are under spending pressure, and in sectors including retail, hospitality, and transport that are among the first to cut hours and headcount when demand falls. The financial consequences ripple through to Jamaica, where remittance flows from Britain are beginning to slow. The Bank of Jamaica has reported the trend, and community financial advisers in the UK are working with members to help them maintain their financial commitments to family at home while managing their own reduced incomes. The IMF has agreed a loan facility with Jamaica in May 2009 to help the island manage its fiscal position, a development that underscores how the global crisis is reshaping the Caribbean’s economic options.

Deportations, Detention and the Border Agency

The UK Border Agency, established in April 2008 as an executive agency of the Home Office, has continued to expand its enforcement operations across the country. Deportation charter flights to Jamaica — a practice that has drawn persistent criticism from Caribbean community organisations, civil liberties groups, and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants — have continued, with individuals being removed who campaigners argue have deep ties to Britain, in some cases having lived in the country since childhood. The cases that attract attention are typically those of people who arrived as children with parents settling under right-to-abode provisions, grew up in Britain, and are now being treated as foreign nationals whose criminal convictions make them subject to deportation.

The human consequences of these removals are documented in detail by organisations including Bail for Immigration Detainees, Amnesty International, and Caribbean community legal advice centres. Children separated from fathers deported to a country they may barely remember; women whose partners have been removed after decades of lawful residence; elderly parents who find themselves without the children who cared for them. The government’s position is that foreign nationals who commit serious crimes have no right to remain in the UK, and that the courts have upheld the exercise of deportation powers in the overwhelming majority of cases. Caribbean community organisations dispute both the proportionality of the policy and the adequacy of the appeal processes available to those facing removal.

Jamaica: Governance Under Pressure

In Kingston, the Jamaica Labour Party government of Bruce Golding, which took office in September 2007, is confronting the dual pressures of a global recession and a domestic security crisis. The murder rate, which had already made Jamaica one of the most dangerous countries in the world per capita, has not fallen in the way the government promised during the election campaign. The relationship between garrison communities and political parties — a relationship that has distorted Jamaican democracy for decades — continues to shape both the security landscape and the government’s room for manoeuvre. For the diaspora in Britain, governance failures in Jamaica are both a source of anxiety and a point of engagement: many diaspora organisations have long argued that sustainable development in Jamaica requires fundamental political reform, and are watching the Golding administration with a mixture of expectation and apprehension.

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Bank of Jamaica; Caribbean National Weekly; BBC News; Reuters; AP; The Guardian; Runnymede Trust; Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants; Bail for Immigration Detainees; Amnesty International UK; TUC; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK); UK Parliament Hansard.

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