A Prison, Not Reparations: Cameron’s Jamaica Visit and Its Bitter Legacy

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 2016 | Period covered: July–December 2015

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Key Developments at a Glance

• David Cameron visits Jamaica on 30 September 2015 — first British PM visit in fourteen years.
• Cameron offers £25m (“$37m”) for a prison to house deportees; explicitly rejects reparations for slavery.
• Cameron tells Jamaican parliament Britain should “move on” from the “painful” legacy of slavery.
• Jamaica parliament passes reparations motion in November 2015; CARICOM commission presses on.
• Caribbean diaspora organisations in Britain condemn Cameron’s remarks; academic and civic fury follows.
• Portia Simpson Miller’s PNP government presses reparations case formally with UK counterparts.

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It will be remembered as one of the most tone-deaf acts of British diplomacy in the modern era. When David Cameron stepped off a plane in Kingston on 29 September 2015, he became the first British Prime Minister to visit Jamaica since Tony Blair in 2001. The visit was billed in Downing Street as a celebration of the historic friendship between Britain and Jamaica, a sovereign Commonwealth partner and the island that gave the world Usain Bolt, Bob Marley, and a cultural energy out of all proportion to its three million people. What it produced instead was a moment of such spectacular diplomatic misjudgement that it has dominated Caribbean-British relations for months, energised the reparations movement across the region and the diaspora, and left a legacy of bitterness that a single speech could scarcely have been calculated to generate.

The Speech That Shook the Caribbean

Cameron addressed a joint session of the Jamaican parliament on 30 September. Before doing so, he met Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller and announced that the United Kingdom was committing £25 million — equivalent to approximately $37 million US — to a new correctional facility in Jamaica. The purpose of the prison, explicitly stated, was to facilitate the removal of Jamaican nationals with criminal convictions from the United Kingdom. As the Caribbean press was swift to observe: Britain was offering Jamaica a prison to make it easier to deport Jamaicans to. This was the gift.

In his parliamentary address, Cameron acknowledged that the history of the transatlantic slave trade was “deeply, deeply, shameful,” but made clear that his government would not entertain the question of reparations. “I hope that as friends who have gone through so much together since those darkest of times,” he said, “we can move on from this painful legacy and continue to build for the future.” The phrase “move on” landed in Jamaica, the Caribbean region, and the diaspora like a deliberate provocation.

CARICOM Reparations Commission chair Professor Sir Hilary Beckles of the University of the West Indies responded within hours. Beckles described Cameron’s remarks as “a stunning display of ignorance,” noting that Jamaica and the Caribbean region were not seeking to “stay in the past” but to obtain the resources to build the future that centuries of enslavement and colonialism had denied them. He noted that the wealth of Britain, including the mansions and estates owned by Cameron’s own ancestors, was built on the labour of enslaved Africans, and that the question of reparatory justice was not an emotional appeal to history but a legal and economic argument with mounting international traction.

Outrage in Jamaica, the Caribbean and the Diaspora

The reaction to Cameron’s visit and his parliamentary speech has been volcanic, sustained, and has crossed political lines that rarely align. In Jamaica, the opposition Jamaica Labour Party joined the governing People’s National Party of Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller in condemning the substance of the PM’s remarks. In the Caribbean media — in the Gleaner, the Nation in Barbados, the Trinidad Express, and across regional television and radio — the dominant response has been one of outrage tempered by a grim recognition that Cameron’s position was entirely predictable from a British government that has consistently refused to discuss reparations.

In the United Kingdom, Caribbean-heritage community organisations including the Society of Caribbean Lawyers, the Ligali Organisation, and a range of diaspora groups have issued statements condemning the Cameron remarks. Academics and writers including Professor David Olusoga, Afua Hirsch and Gary Younge — who have been among the most powerful voices articulating the case for reparations to British audiences — published responses in the national press that reached beyond the Caribbean community to a wider readership. The effect has been, paradoxically, to place reparations more visibly on the British public’s agenda than they have been in many years.

The £25m prison offer has attracted particular ridicule. Critics noted that this sum is vanishingly small relative to the billions of pounds that British slaveholders and their descendants received in compensation when slavery was abolished in 1833 — compensation paid not to the enslaved, but to the enslavers. The Legacies of British Slave-Ownership database maintained by University College London has documented in detail the scale of that compensation payment, and the families and institutions that benefited from it. Cameron’s own family connections to the slave economy have been the subject of newspaper reporting. The contrast between what Britain paid to slaveholders and what it is now prepared to offer their victims’ descendants has struck many as the starkest possible illustration of what the reparations debate is actually about.

Jamaica’s Parliament Votes for Reparations

In the weeks following Cameron’s visit, Jamaica’s parliament moved to formalise its support for the reparations cause. A parliamentary resolution affirming Jamaica’s commitment to pursuing reparatory justice from Britain for the slave trade and slavery was debated and passed, sending a formal political signal from the Jamaican state that the issue would not be allowed to rest. Prime Minister Simpson Miller, speaking in the parliamentary debate, drew directly on the anger generated by Cameron’s remarks, noting that Jamaica’s people and their descendants in the diaspora had not forgotten, could not forget, and would not be asked by any visiting statesman to pretend that centuries of exploitation had no lasting consequences.

The parliamentary vote aligned Jamaica more explicitly with the CARICOM Reparations Commission’s ten-point programme and gave additional momentum to the regional reparations push. CARICOM heads of government, meeting in their December 2015 inter-sessional, discussed the implications of Cameron’s visit and reaffirmed their collective commitment to the reparatory justice agenda. The commission’s chair, Professor Beckles, welcomed the Jamaican parliamentary action and described it as a critical step in building the legal and political architecture that the reparations claim would require.

The Hostile Environment: Continuing in the Background

While the drama of Cameron’s Jamaica visit has dominated the second half of 2015 for the diaspora community, the operational reality of life for Caribbean-born British residents under the hostile environment continues unchanged. The right-to-rent checks introduced under the 2014 Immigration Act are being rolled out nationally. Community organisations continue to receive cases of individuals unable to prove their lawful right to remain and being denied housing, employment, or NHS care as a result.

Deportation charter flights to Jamaica continue. Campaign groups continue to challenge individual cases in the courts. The Home Secretary, Theresa May, shows no indication of reviewing the policies whose disproportionate impact on the Windrush generation — a term not yet in common use but describing a reality that is very much present — is being quietly documented by legal aid charities and community organisations. The gap between Britain’s rhetorical relationship with the Caribbean and the practical reality of its treatment of Caribbean Britons has never felt wider.

As 2015 ends and 2016 begins, the Caribbean-British relationship is defined by that gap. Cameron’s visit has crystallised, for many in the diaspora and in the Caribbean, a sense that Britain’s official posture towards its Caribbean partners — warm words, historical acknowledgement, and practical refusal to engage with redress — is no longer adequate. The reparations argument is gaining academic rigour, legal substance and political momentum. And in the communities of the United Kingdom, a generation whose right to be here was never in question is watching, with growing alarm, the machinery of the state insisting that they prove it.

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Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; BBC News; Reuters; The Guardian; AP; CARICOM Reparations Commission; Legacies of British Slave-Ownership database (UCL); UK Parliament Hansard; Jamaica High Commission London; Runnymede Trust; Ligali Organisation.

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