Handsworth to Kingston

The storm came in September, and the diaspora mobilised within hours. The other crisis — the one being built in the bowels of the Home Office — would not become visible for another seven months

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Briefing

• Hurricane Irma strikes Eastern Caribbean on 6 September 2017; deadliest in recorded history.
• UK response to British Overseas Territories criticised as inadequate and slow.
• Caribbean diaspora across Britain raises millions for hurricane relief.
• Brexit impact on Caribbean British workers begins to be documented.
• Hostile environment in operation; cases of harm to settled Caribbean residents accumulating.

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On 6 September 2017, Hurricane Irma — a Category 5 storm, the most powerful Atlantic hurricane ever recorded at the time of its landfall — struck the northern Leeward Islands. Barbuda was left, in the words of its prime minister, ninety per cent destroyed. Anguilla, a British Overseas Territory, suffered devastating damage. The British Virgin Islands were devastated. Saint Maarten, Saint Barths, Saint Kitts and the Turks and Caicos Islands were all struck. The storm then moved north and west, hitting the Florida Keys and Florida’s mainland. Before it dissipated, it had caused destruction across a swathe of the Caribbean that included British territories for which the United Kingdom government bore direct responsibility.

The UK government’s initial response was widely criticised as inadequate. The military deployment to British Overseas Territories was slower than many expected. Aid reached affected communities days after the immediate crisis, when the need was most acute. Boris Johnson, then Foreign Secretary, visited the affected areas and was photographed. The criticism — from opposition MPs, from Caribbean governments, from the diaspora communities in Britain — was that Britain’s responsibilities to its Caribbean territories had been treated as secondary to other demands on government attention, and that the response reflected a long-standing ambivalence about those territories’ place in Britain’s priorities.

The Diaspora Response

In Handsworth, in Brixton, in Chapeltown and across the Jamaican and wider Caribbean community in Britain, the diaspora response to Hurricane Irma was immediate, organised and substantial. Community fundraising events were arranged within days of the storm. Caribbean community organisations coordinated appeals. Churches held special services and collections. The informal networks that had always been the backbone of diaspora solidarity — the WhatsApp groups, the sound system networks, the church associations and the community centres — became channels for practical assistance. Millions of pounds were raised, though the logistics of getting money and supplies to affected islands in the storm’s immediate aftermath presented their own challenges.

Jamaica itself was spared the worst of Irma, with the storm tracking north of the island. But the broader Caribbean solidarity that characterises the diaspora — the understanding that a storm in Anguilla or the BVI is not a foreign disaster but a family emergency — meant that Jamaican community organisations were fully engaged in the relief effort. The storm also prompted, in community discussions, a sharper articulation of the argument for Caribbean political solidarity and for a more assertive relationship between Caribbean governments and former colonial powers on questions of climate vulnerability, adaptation funding and disaster response.

Brexit and Caribbean Workers

The second half of 2017 brought continued uncertainty about Brexit and its implications for British citizens of Caribbean heritage. The formal legal position remained clear — Caribbean-British citizens were not EU nationals and their status was not affected by Brexit in legal terms — but the atmosphere of the Brexit debate, with its repeated emphasis on immigration control and border management, was creating anxiety in communities whose right to be in Britain had often been treated as provisional rather than guaranteed. Community organisations were receiving enquiries from Caribbean-heritage British citizens asking whether Brexit would affect their status — a measure not of legal confusion but of the deep and rational insecurity that had been produced by decades of experience with an immigration system that did not always distinguish between different categories of non-white people.

The hostile environment was still operating below public consciousness. The cases of Caribbean-born British residents being denied NHS treatment, losing jobs, being detained and facing deportation were accumulating in the files of community legal clinics and advocacy organisations. The Home Office was processing removals with an administrative efficiency that had not distinguished adequately between those who had no legal right to be in Britain and those who had been British residents for decades. The scandal that would erupt in April 2018 was being built, case by case, in the second half of 2017 and before. The community organisations knew it was happening. They had not yet found the means to force it into national view.

Jamaica: Sixty Years and Forward

Jamaica celebrated its 55th year of independence in August 2017. The Holness administration was managing a period of economic adjustment, working with the IMF on a programme of fiscal consolidation that was producing debt reduction and improving macroeconomic indicators while compressing public services and placing stress on the most economically vulnerable. The diaspora’s contribution to Jamaica’s economy — through remittances, through investment, through the repatriation of skills and capital by returnees — was a crucial buffer against the austerity that the fiscal consolidation entailed.

For the Jamaican diaspora in Birmingham’s Handsworth and across the Caribbean communities of Britain, the second half of 2017 was a period of mobilisation — for the storm-affected Caribbean, for the pending challenge of Brexit, and for the long-building crisis of the hostile environment that would become visible only after the damage was already done. The Jamaican diaspora was, as it had always been, doing multiple things at once: maintaining connections to Jamaica, building lives in Britain, watching a political landscape that had never been fully designed with them in mind, and preparing — always preparing — for the next thing that would require them to fight for what should never have needed fighting for.

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