Go Home Vans and Reparation Dreams: Britain’s Contradictory Message to the Caribbean

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 2014 | Period covered: July–December 2013

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Key Developments at a Glance

• Home Office ‘Go Home’ billboard vans deployed in six London boroughs, July–August 2013 (Operation Vaken).
• Vans tour Barking, Barnet, Brent, Ealing, Hounslow and Redbridge — areas with large Caribbean communities.
• Operation condemned as racist by community groups, MPs and the UN; Home Office defends it as effective.
• Immigration Bill 2013–2014 introduced; drafts right-to-rent and ‘deport first, appeal later’ provisions.
• CARICOM Reparations Commission formally established in 2013; Caribbean-wide advocacy intensifies.
• Jamaica under PNP/Portia Simpson Miller; deportation flights continue to generate bilateral tension.

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Few images have crystallised the state of Britain’s relationship with its Caribbean community more sharply than that of a billboard truck, commissioned by the Home Office and driven through the streets of Brent, Hounslow and Barking, bearing the message: “In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.” Operation Vaken — the name assigned internally to the Home Office’s advertising campaign targeting undocumented migrants in six London boroughs through July and August 2013 — has generated a controversy whose reverberations are still being felt as this year ends. For the Jamaican and Caribbean diaspora community, whose members live in precisely the areas targeted and who in many cases have been settled in Britain for fifty or sixty years, the vans represented something more specific than a general immigration enforcement measure: they represented a statement about who belongs in Britain and who does not.

Operation Vaken: What Happened and What It Meant

Operation Vaken was conceived within the Home Office as a means of encouraging illegal immigrants to voluntarily leave the United Kingdom. Trucks carrying large billboard displays — bearing the message “In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest” alongside a telephone number for a voluntary departure service — were driven through six London boroughs: Barking and Dagenham, Barnet, Brent, Ealing, Hounslow and Redbridge. These boroughs were selected on the basis of data showing high concentrations of migrants, and the campaign ran for approximately one month between 22 July and 22 August 2013.

The response was immediate and fierce. MPs of all parties condemned the campaign as xenophobic and reminiscent of the “Pakis Go Home” graffiti of the 1970s that Caribbean and South Asian communities in Britain have spent decades fighting against. The Liberal Democrats, then members of the coalition government with the Conservatives, distanced themselves from the campaign. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on racism, Mutuma Ruteere, described the vans as “dangerous” and called for their withdrawal. The Metropolitan Police expressed concern about community relations in the affected areas.

Community organisations in Brent — one of the most diverse boroughs in Europe, where Jamaican, Guyanese, Barbadian and other Caribbean-heritage residents have lived for generations — reported that residents were distressed and frightened, and that the vans were being experienced not as a targeted message to undocumented migrants but as a generalised statement of unwelcome directed at anyone who was visibly different. That this was the effect, if not the explicit intention, of driving “Go Home” vans through the heartlands of the Caribbean diaspora in London required no sophisticated analysis to understand.

The Home Office’s assessment of the campaign’s effectiveness was, by any measure, underwhelming. A subsequent evaluation found that eleven people left voluntarily as a direct result of Operation Vaken — at an estimated cost to the public purse of £10,000 per departure. Home Secretary Theresa May defended the campaign, saying it was “effective” and had achieved its objectives. Critics pointed out that the ratio of harm done to communities and to community relations relative to the number of people who actually left was all but impossible to defend on cost-effectiveness grounds.

The Immigration Bill: The Next Phase of the Hostile Environment

Operation Vaken was not an isolated incident but a signal of the direction of travel for Home Office immigration policy. In November 2013, the government introduced the Immigration Bill 2013–2014 to parliament — a wide-ranging piece of legislation that will, when enacted, represent the most comprehensive extension of the hostile environment since its introduction. The bill includes the right-to-rent provisions that will make landlords enforcers of immigration law; the “deport first, appeal later” provisions that will remove the right of most deportees to appeal while remaining in the UK; restrictions on access to driving licences and bank accounts for those without immigration status; and further restrictions on access to the NHS.

Campaign groups including the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, Amnesty International, and the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association are coordinating a parliamentary campaign against the bill’s most harmful provisions. Caribbean-heritage MPs have been active in the debates, raising specific concerns about the impact on long-settled Commonwealth citizens whose documentation does not meet the bill’s requirements. But the coalition government has a majority and the political will to use it, and the prospects of significantly amending the bill appear limited.

The CARICOM Reparations Commission: A Caribbean Response

Against this backdrop of British state hostility towards migrants — a hostility that the Caribbean community experiences as directed, at least in part, at them — the establishment in 2013 of the CARICOM Reparations Commission represents a Caribbean assertion of historical standing and moral claim that sharply contradicts the signal sent by the “Go Home” vans. Where the Home Office is telling the Caribbean community to leave, the reparations commission is making the case that Britain owes a debt to the Caribbean that it has not yet begun to repay.

The commission, under the leadership of Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, has spent 2013 developing the intellectual, legal and political foundations of the Caribbean reparations claim. Regional commissions have been established in individual CARICOM member states, including Jamaica, to document national histories of enslavement and colonialism and to develop country-specific components of the broader regional claim. Academics, lawyers, economists and civil society organisations across the Caribbean have been engaged in a process of consultation and research that is building, systematically and deliberately, the case that will be presented to European governments.

In Jamaica, Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller has given the commission her personal support and ensured that the Jamaican government’s diplomatic and institutional resources are engaged in the reparatory justice project. Jamaica’s contribution to the commission’s work draws on the University of the West Indies’ Mona campus’s formidable historical and legal expertise, and on the deep well of public sentiment in a country where the memory of slavery and colonialism is not academic but deeply personal and present.

Deportation Flights: A Continuing Injustice

Deportation charter flights from the United Kingdom to Jamaica have continued throughout the second half of 2013, and campaign groups have continued to challenge individual deportations in court with mixed results. The legal framework governing mandatory deportation of foreign nationals with criminal convictions remains in place, and the government has shown no inclination to revisit it. Individual cases that have attracted public attention — individuals who arrived in the UK as young children and have spent their entire lives here, whose families are here, who speak with British accents and have no meaningful ties to Jamaica — have highlighted the human cost of a policy that treats residence in Britain as a privilege that can be withdrawn rather than a right that has been established over decades.

As 2013 ends, the Caribbean community in Britain confronts a contradictory and troubling picture. A government that is drafting legislation to make the Caribbean diaspora’s rights more precarious is the same government that is being asked by CARICOM to acknowledge and redress the colonial injustices that brought that community to Britain in the first place. The gap between those two positions — between the “Go Home” van and the reparations claim — is not merely a policy disagreement. It is a statement about history, belonging, and what Britain owes and to whom. As 2014 begins, the community is determined that the statement will not go unanswered.

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Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; BBC News; Reuters; The Guardian; Home Office (UK); UK Parliament Hansard; CARICOM Reparations Commission; Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants; Amnesty International UK; Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association; Runnymede Trust; Jamaica High Commission London.

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