Cameron’s Majority, Caribbean’s Moment: Reparations on the Rise

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 July 2015 | Period covered: January–June 2015

Key Developments at a Glance

• Conservative Party wins UK general election on 7 May 2015 with unexpected parliamentary majority.
• Cameron government signals continued refusal to discuss reparations or review hostile environment.
• CARICOM Reparations Commission maintains ten-point programme; academic case grows stronger.
• Jamaica parliament set to formally debate and vote on a reparations resolution in coming months.
• Deportation charter flights to Jamaica continue; campaign groups win individual case stays.
• Hostile environment right-to-rent rules to be extended nationally from pilot in West Midlands.

The United Kingdom general election of 7 May 2015, which confounded virtually every opinion poll and returned David Cameron’s Conservative Party to power with an outright parliamentary majority of twelve seats, has significant consequences for the Jamaican and Caribbean diaspora in the United Kingdom and for the broader Caribbean-British relationship. The prospect of a Labour government — which had signalled at least a willingness to review some elements of the hostile environment immigration policy — has been replaced by the certainty of five more years of Conservative government under a Prime Minister whose Home Secretary, Theresa May, has built the most aggressive immigration enforcement architecture in modern British history.

The Election Result and Its Implications for the Diaspora

The Conservative majority — the first outright majority government since John Major’s in 1992 — confirms that the hostile environment policy framework will not be dismantled or even significantly reviewed in this parliament. Theresa May, reappointed as Home Secretary, has spoken of extending the right-to-rent provisions — trialled in the West Midlands since late 2014 — to the whole of England. The Immigration Act 2014 continues to be implemented, including its “deport first, appeal later” provisions and its requirements on NHS trusts to charge overseas visitors for care. For Caribbean-born residents whose documentation is inadequate to the demands of this system, the election result offers no relief.

Community organisations working with elderly Caribbean-born residents who are struggling to prove their right to remain — to rent, to work, to access healthcare — report that cases are increasing in number and complexity. The combination of legal aid cuts, which have made free legal assistance extremely difficult to obtain, and the increasingly aggressive enforcement of hostile environment checks across a wider range of public services and private transactions is trapping more individuals in administrative limbo. In some cases, individuals are losing long-held employment because employers, facing civil penalties for employing undocumented workers, choose to terminate contracts rather than investigate the nuances of pre-1973 Commonwealth immigration status.

Within the Labour Party, which is conducting a leadership election following Ed Miliband’s resignation, there are voices calling for a more fundamental rethinking of immigration policy as it applies to long-settled Commonwealth citizens. But that debate is internal and its outcome uncertain. The governing party has no such debate underway. The hostile environment is not a crisis being managed; it is a policy being extended.

CARICOM’s Reparations Commission: Building the Case

The CARICOM Reparations Commission, established in 2013 and operating under its ten-point programme for reparatory justice adopted formally by CARICOM heads of government in March 2014, has continued through the first half of 2015 to develop the academic, legal and political architecture of the Caribbean’s reparations claim against Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal. The commission, chaired by Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, has been working with international lawyers to build a formal legal claim and with historians to document the economic and demographic damage inflicted by the slave trade and centuries of colonial exploitation.

The ten-point programme includes demands for a formal apology from European governments, a repatriation programme, an indigenous people’s development programme, a cultural institution programme, a public health crisis programme, an illiteracy eradication programme, a technology transfer programme, a debt cancellation programme, a psychological rehabilitation programme, and a science and technology development programme. The commission has made clear that it is not seeking cash payments alone but a comprehensive programme of reparatory actions that address the persistent structural inequalities left by slavery and colonialism.

In Britain, the academic community has become an increasingly important ally of the reparations movement. The Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project at University College London, which has published searchable records of every person who received compensation from the British government for the “loss” of enslaved people following abolition in 1833, has generated significant public debate about the scale and continuity of wealth derived from slavery. Its findings have been used by CARICOM and by diaspora advocates to put flesh on the bones of the economic case. The total paid by the British government to approximately 46,000 slave owners in 1833 — £20 million, equivalent to 40 per cent of the Treasury’s annual expenditure — and the loan raised to fund that payment, which was not fully repaid until 2015, has struck many observers as perhaps the most powerful single argument in the reparatory justice debate.

Jamaica’s Parliament Prepares to Act

Jamaica’s parliament is preparing to move beyond moral support for the reparations cause and towards a formal legislative position. Under the government of Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller — who has been among the most consistent and vocal advocates for Caribbean reparatory justice among serving heads of government — the Jamaican parliament is expected to debate and vote on a resolution formally committing Jamaica to the pursuit of reparations from Britain and other former colonial powers.

For Jamaica, the case has particular resonance. As one of the most intensively exploited slave economies in the history of the Atlantic world — an island whose plantation economy generated enormous wealth for British merchants, financiers and Crown revenue while inflicting incalculable suffering on the enslaved Africans and their descendants who constituted its workforce — Jamaica bears the marks of that history in its contemporary inequality, its economic structure, and the particular character of its diaspora. The Jamaican community in the United Kingdom is itself, in part, a product of that history: people who came to rebuild a country that their ancestors had helped to enrich.

The upcoming parliamentary vote is expected to pass with bipartisan support, reflecting the broad consensus across Jamaica’s two main political parties that the reparations cause is one whose time has come. The Jamaica Labour Party opposition has been broadly supportive of the commission’s work, and there is no significant voice within Jamaican public life arguing against the principle of seeking redress.

Deportations: The Campaign Continues

The question of deportation charter flights from the United Kingdom to Jamaica remains a live source of tension in the bilateral relationship. Campaign organisations including Detention Action, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, and a range of Jamaican diaspora groups in the UK have continued through the first half of 2015 to challenge individual deportations in court, winning stays in cases where individuals can demonstrate that their connection to Jamaica is negligible and their family and community ties are entirely in the United Kingdom.

The broader policy framework has not changed. The Home Office continues to apply the mandatory deportation provisions of the UK Borders Act 2007 to foreign nationals with criminal convictions, including individuals who arrived in the UK as young children and have grown up entirely in Britain. Jamaica’s government has pressed through diplomatic channels for a more individualised assessment of the circumstances of those subject to removal orders, and has reiterated that the deportation of individuals with no meaningful ties to Jamaica is damaging to bilateral relations and to the communities in Jamaica to which they are returned. The Cameron government has shown no inclination to revisit the framework.

Diaspora Remittances and Economic Ties

Despite the political tensions in the UK-Jamaica relationship, the economic ties between the two countries remain robust and significant. Remittances from the Jamaican diaspora in the United Kingdom continue to constitute a meaningful share of Jamaica’s total remittance income, which represents one of the island’s most important sources of foreign exchange. The Bank of Jamaica’s data for the first quarter of 2015 shows remittances running at broadly consistent levels with previous years, reflecting the resilience of diaspora economic engagement even in periods of political difficulty.

Community organisations in the United Kingdom also report continued strong participation in diaspora philanthropy — community development projects, educational scholarships, and disaster relief that supplements formal government-to-government aid. The relationship between the Jamaican community in Britain and their island of origin remains a complex, intimate, and deeply human one that the political tensions of the Cameron era have not severed. But those tensions are real, and the community is watching carefully to see whether Cameron’s expected visit to Jamaica later this year will offer anything more substantive than warm words and a continuation of the status quo.

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; BBC News; Reuters; The Guardian; CARICOM Reparations Commission; Legacies of British Slave-Ownership database (UCL); UK Parliament Hansard; Detention Action; Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants; Bank of Jamaica; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK).

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