Flatbush to Kingston

After the scandal came the reviews, the task forces and the promises. The Caribbean community had heard promises before. This time, it intended to hold them to account

Briefing

• Wendy Williams appointed to lead Windrush Lessons Learned Review.
• Windrush Taskforce processes documentation applications for affected individuals.
• Home Office proposes compensation scheme framework; community criticises design.
• Notting Hill Carnival marks 70th anniversary of Windrush arrival.
• Jamaica diaspora organisations in New York increase advocacy after scandal.

The months that followed the Windrush scandal’s eruption in April 2018 were a period of institutional activity that the Caribbean community watched with the specific, informed scepticism of those who had seen institutions produce activity before without producing change. The Windrush Taskforce, established by Sajid Javid shortly after his appointment as Home Secretary, was processing applications from individuals seeking to confirm their right to remain in Britain. The Windrush Lessons Learned Review, led by Wendy Williams of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, was gathering evidence about how the hostile environment had been designed and implemented and how it had affected the people it was designed to affect.

These were significant responses. The Taskforce was a concrete service that was, in practice, helping some of those who had been wrongly classified as undocumented to regularise their status and access the services and employment they had been denied. The Lessons Learned Review was a genuine inquiry, with a remit that included examining the culture and decision-making of the Home Office over the preceding years. Community organisations and advocacy groups engaged with both, providing evidence, supporting claimants, and monitoring the pace and quality of the institutional response. But the pace was slow, and the culture — of a Home Office that had, for years, treated Caribbean-born British residents as a compliance problem rather than as citizens — did not change as a result of a change of personnel and a set of formal processes.

Notting Hill Carnival: A Fraught Celebration

Notting Hill Carnival 2018 fell in the summer following the Windrush scandal’s exposure, and its significance was felt in ways that went beyond the annual logistical and celebratory rituals of the event. This was the 70th anniversary of the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush, and Carnival — itself a product of the Caribbean community’s post-war settlement in Britain — carried the weight of that anniversary. The decorations and sound systems and costumes that filled the streets of Notting Hill, Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park were, in 2018, part of a celebration that was simultaneously a statement: the Caribbean community had been in Britain for seven decades, had built Carnival from nothing into the largest street festival in Europe, had made Britons out of children who left islands for a country that had not always wanted them, and was still here.

The policing of Carnival, as in every year, was a subject of community concern. Operation Trident, the Metropolitan Police unit established to tackle gun crime in Black communities, had been active in the preceding years. The relationship between the police and the Caribbean community at Carnival reflected the broader, long-standing tensions between the community and an institution that had too often treated its members as suspects rather than citizens. In the Windrush year, those tensions carried an additional charge.

The Compensation Design Debate

In the second half of 2018, the Home Office was developing the framework for the Windrush compensation scheme that would open in April 2019. The consultation process that preceded the scheme’s design brought together community organisations, legal advocates and individual victims. The feedback was consistent on several points: the burden of proof required of claimants was too high; the categories of harm that could be compensated were too narrow; the amounts proposed for certain types of loss were insufficient; and the administration of the scheme by the Home Office — the same institution that had caused the harm — was a fundamental structural problem.

The Home Office accepted some of these points and rejected others. The scheme that would eventually open in April 2019 incorporated modifications from the consultation but retained features that advocates had warned would prevent many eligible people from accessing compensation. The pattern — of a government that consulted, acknowledged concerns, and then implemented a scheme that fell short of what had been asked — was familiar enough to those who had engaged with public consultations on issues affecting the Caribbean community over the preceding decades.

The Diaspora Beyond Britain

The Windrush scandal resonated beyond Britain. In New York’s Flatbush neighbourhood, home to one of the largest Jamaican communities outside Jamaica, community organisations and diaspora advocacy groups followed the story closely and increased their public engagement with it. The story of British citizens — people who had come from the same islands as the Flatbush community, who were in many cases related to families in Brooklyn and the Bronx — being stripped of their rights by the government of the country they had spent their lives building, was not abstract. It was personal and it was political.

In Jamaica, the government continued its diplomatic engagement with the British government over the Windrush outcomes. The Jamaican High Commission in London was a point of contact for affected individuals and for the advocacy community. The broader conversation about what Jamaica’s relationship with Britain should look like — constitutionally, diplomatically, economically — was now being conducted against the backdrop of an event that had demonstrated, with uncomfortable clarity, the risks of a relationship in which one party held all the institutional power.

The Jamaican diaspora ended 2018 in a state of watchful engagement. The scandal had produced promises. The community was now doing what it had always done: watching to see which promises would be kept, which would be diluted, and which would be forgotten. From Wendy Williams’ review room to the community centres of Hackney and the diaspora offices of Flatbush, the work of holding Britain to account had only just begun.

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