Holness Wins, Brexit Shocks: A Half-Year That Changed Everything

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

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Key Developments at a Glance

• Andrew Holness and the JLP win Jamaica’s general election on 25 February 2016 by three seats.
• Brexit referendum on 23 June 2016: Leave wins 52% to 48%, Cameron resigns the following morning.
• Caribbean diaspora in Britain shocked and anxious about rights, status and the post-Leave climate.
• Hostile environment policies continue to ensnare Commonwealth citizens without formal documentation.
• CARICOM reparations advocacy continues; UK government still refuses any engagement.
• Deportation charter flights to Jamaica draw sustained campaign opposition and legal challenges.

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No six-month period in recent Caribbean diaspora history has delivered as many seismic shifts as the first half of 2016. A bitterly contested Jamaican general election in February produced a historic change of government. And on 23 June, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in a referendum result that sent shock waves through political systems from Washington to Brussels to Kingston — and left Caribbean communities in Britain confronting a morning of profound, unprecedented uncertainty about what their country has become and what it intends to become next.

Jamaica Votes: Holness and the JLP Return to Power

Jamaica’s general election of 25 February 2016, called by Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller and the People’s National Party, produced one of the most dramatic results in the island’s modern political history. The Jamaica Labour Party, under the leadership of Andrew Holness — who at 43 becomes one of the youngest prime ministers in the country’s history — won 33 of the 63 seats in parliament, compared to 30 for the incumbent PNP. The margin was narrow, the campaign fierce, but the result was clear: Jamaica had a new government.

Holness, who served a brief stint as Prime Minister in 2011–2012 following the resignation of Bruce Golding, now returns to the office with a full mandate. His government’s priorities are centred on economic growth, crime reduction, and fiscal consolidation — but the diaspora relationship with the United Kingdom is also a significant dimension of Jamaica’s foreign policy agenda. Remittances from the UK, the United States and Canada collectively constitute one of the most important sources of foreign exchange for Jamaica. The welfare and rights of Jamaicans abroad are therefore not merely a matter of principle but of national economic interest.

The Holness administration has indicated early continuity with the Portia Simpson Miller government’s support for CARICOM’s reparations agenda, and has reaffirmed Jamaica’s opposition to deportation flights involving individuals brought to the UK as children. The new government has also signalled its intention to raise diaspora issues at Commonwealth meetings, and Holness is expected to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting scheduled for 2018 in the UK — a gathering that will take on, as this quarter ends, an entirely different character in the light of the events of 23 June.

Brexit: The Morning Everything Changed

The United Kingdom’s referendum on European Union membership, held on 23 June 2016, returned a Leave majority of 52 to 48 per cent. David Cameron, who called the referendum and campaigned for Remain, announced his resignation outside 10 Downing Street the following morning. The result has sent the United Kingdom into political, constitutional and economic turmoil from which it has not yet emerged, and whose long-term consequences for the country and its relationship with the world are not yet knowable.

For Caribbean communities in Britain, the Brexit result has landed with a particular force that cannot be reduced to the question of immigration policy alone — though immigration policy is a central part of it. The Leave campaign’s rhetoric was saturated with the language of borders, control, and the nation. The poster produced by Nigel Farage showing a queue of dark-skinned refugees beneath the headline “Breaking Point” was condemned by mainstream politicians of all parties but was seen by millions. In communities across the country, Caribbean-heritage British residents who have lived here for decades — who are citizens, whose children and grandchildren were born here — report feeling, in the wake of the vote, more visible, more vulnerable, and less certain that the country they have helped to build regards them fully as its own.

The immediate post-referendum days have seen a disturbing rise in reported hate crimes. The National Police Chiefs’ Council reported a 57 per cent increase in hate crime reports in the five days following the vote compared to the same period in the previous year. Caribbean community organisations in Brixton, Hackney, Tottenham, Handsworth and other areas with large Black British populations have reported members describing experiences of racial abuse — in some cases from people explicitly invoking the referendum result as justification for telling them to “go back where they came from.” The irony, for families who have been in Britain for fifty or sixty years, is scarcely bearable.

What Brexit Means for the Caribbean Diaspora

The formal legal position of the Caribbean community in the United Kingdom is not directly affected by the Brexit vote. Caribbean-born British residents whose right to remain derives from Commonwealth immigration law — particularly those who arrived before 1 January 1973 — do not hold their rights by virtue of European Union membership. In law, Brexit changes nothing for them. Their right to be here predates the European Community and does not depend on it.

But law and lived experience are not always the same thing. Community groups are reporting an upsurge in calls from elderly Caribbean-born residents asking whether they will be “deported” as a result of Brexit, whether their benefits will be affected, or whether they will need a visa to continue living in Britain. These anxieties are unfounded in law but entirely understandable in context. A community that has already experienced the hostile environment’s depredations — the right-to-rent checks, the right-to-work demands, the NHS overseas charging regulations — does not feel that its rights are firmly protected against administrative overreach. Brexit, whatever its formal legal implications, does not make that climate feel safer.

There is also a broader concern about the direction of British politics. The Leave victory has empowered a political tendency that has, at its fringes, been willing to deploy racial anxiety as a political tool. The moderation of mainstream Conservative and Labour leaders has not eliminated the cultural temperature that the campaign generated. Caribbean community leaders are watching carefully to see who will succeed David Cameron and what direction the Conservative Party will take on immigration, race equality, and the place of minority communities in post-Brexit Britain.

The Hostile Environment Continues

Brexit has not interrupted the operation of the hostile environment policies introduced since 2012. The right-to-rent scheme, the right-to-work checks, the NHS overseas charging regulations, and the bank account restriction provisions continue to function, ensnaring Commonwealth citizens whose right to be in Britain is unimpeachable but whose documentation is inadequate to the demands of the system. Community organisations are receiving a steady flow of such cases. Legal aid charities are stretched. The Home Office, under Theresa May — who will shortly become Prime Minister — has shown no sign of reviewing the policy in light of its demonstrable impact on people with every right to be here.

For diaspora Jamaicans watching from Kingston, this combination of Brexit and hostile environment represents a troubling picture of Britain in 2016. A nation that owes so much to Caribbean labour, intellect and culture is sending signals — through its politics, its policies, and its streets — that the welcome is wearing thin. The Holness government, fresh from its election victory, must navigate this landscape as it seeks to protect and support the Jamaican community in the UK while maintaining the bilateral relationship and pressing, through diplomacy, for better treatment of those who have given Britain so much. As this half-year ends, the work ahead has rarely felt more urgent.

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Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; BBC News; Reuters; The Guardian; National Police Chiefs’ Council; Runnymede Trust; Operation Black Vote; Detention Action; CARICOM Secretariat; UK Parliament Hansard; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK).

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