Tottenham to Kingston

The architect of the hostile environment resigned; the compensation scheme opened; the Caribbean community in Britain noted both events and waited to see if either meant what it was supposed to mean

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Briefing

• Windrush Compensation Scheme opens on 3 April 2019.
• Theresa May announces resignation as PM on 24 May 2019.
• Brexit defeated three times in Commons; UK granted extensions to Article 50.
• Caribbean high commissioners push for faster Windrush redress.
• Windrush Day established: 22 June marks annual commemoration.

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On 3 April 2019, the Home Office opened the Windrush Compensation Scheme. On 24 May 2019, Theresa May announced that she would resign as Prime Minister. The two events were separated by seven weeks and were connected by a chain of cause and effect that the Caribbean community in Britain had been watching, with varying degrees of hope and scepticism, for more than a year. May was the Home Secretary who had designed and implemented the hostile environment policy. She was the Prime Minister under whose government the Windrush scandal had been publicly revealed. She was the person who had stood before Caribbean leaders in April 2018 and promised that those wrongly affected would be compensated. The question, in the spring of 2019, was whether compensation would come, and whether her departure would bring any meaningful change in the Home Office culture that had created the problem.

The Windrush Compensation Scheme, designed over the months following the scandal’s eruption, was the government’s formal acknowledgement that British citizens had been wrongly harmed by British state policy. It covered loss of employment, loss of access to the NHS, wrongful detention and deportation, and other categories of loss that the review process had established as directly attributable to the hostile environment’s enforcement. The scheme’s existence was an important concession. Its design, as advocates had warned in extensive submissions during the consultation period, contained structural flaws that would prevent many of those most seriously harmed from accessing it.

The Scheme’s First Months

From the moment it opened, the Windrush Compensation Scheme faced criticism on several grounds. The requirement to prove specific financial losses through documentary evidence was, as critics had predicted, a significant barrier for older Caribbean-born claimants who had lived largely cash-based lives, whose employers had long since closed, and whose landlords had not kept records of the rent payments that had been disrupted when the hostile environment made their employment illegal. The claims process was complex. Support available to navigate it was limited. And the compensation amounts, where awards were made, were contested: community advocates argued that the rates used to calculate loss of earnings, in particular, were too low and failed to capture the full human and economic cost of what had happened.

Caribbean high commissioners, who had been formally engaged by the Foreign Office and Home Office since the Commonwealth summit in April 2018, continued to press for faster progress and broader eligibility. The Jamaican high commissioner, like her counterparts from Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and other islands, had constituents in Britain who were affected by the scheme and who were reporting experiences of the claims process that ranged from manageable to genuinely distressing. The diplomatic channel was active, but its product — in terms of the pace and generosity of compensation — was not yet visible in the figures.

May’s Resignation: What It Meant

Theresa May’s resignation was received in the Caribbean community with a response that was more complicated than either celebration or mourning. May had been Home Secretary from 2010 to 2016, the period during which the hostile environment was designed, implemented and intensified. She had commissioned the net migration target that had driven the hostile environment’s creation. She had, on multiple occasions as Prime Minister, been given early warnings about the problems being caused to settled Caribbean communities and had not acted. The community had legitimate reasons to associate her tenure in office with harm done to its members.

But May’s departure did not mean the departure of the Home Office culture that had produced the hostile environment. Sajid Javid, who had been appointed Home Secretary after Amber Rudd’s resignation in April 2018 and had shown some willingness to engage with the Windrush issue, was himself departing the Home Office with May. The question of who would succeed both of them, and what approach a new administration would take to the outstanding Windrush obligations, was one that the community watched closely through the Conservative leadership contest of the summer.

Windrush Day: Naming and Remembering

One concrete outcome of the previous year’s advocacy was the establishment of Windrush Day: an annual commemoration on 22 June, the date in 1948 on which HMT Empire Windrush had docked at Tilbury carrying 492 Caribbean passengers. The date had been used by Caribbean community organisations for commemoration for years. Its formal recognition by the government — announced in 2018 and first observed nationally in 2019 — was welcomed as an acknowledgement of the Windrush generation’s significance to British history, even if that acknowledgement did not substitute for the compensation still owed to those who had been harmed.

In Tottenham, in Brixton, in Handsworth and across the Caribbean communities of Britain, Windrush Day was marked with community events, church services, school programmes and public discussions. In Jamaica, and among the Jamaican diaspora in North America and Canada, the day was observed as a moment of reflection on the particular history of those who had left the Caribbean for Britain in the post-war decades, on what they had built and what they had been put through, and on what was still owed.

Brexit’s Shadow

The first half of 2019 was dominated, in British politics, by the Brexit crisis. Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement was defeated in the House of Commons three times. The UK was granted two extensions to the Article 50 period. European elections were held, in which the Brexit Party came first and the governing Conservatives came fifth. The political system appeared to be in a state of managed dysfunction. For the Caribbean community, the Brexit crisis was not irrelevant to its own concerns: the hostile environment had been partly justified, in its early design, by the need to bear down on illegal immigration, and a post-Brexit immigration system would need to manage migration flows without the buffer of EU freedom of movement. How that system would be designed, and by whom, mattered.

The Jamaican diaspora in Tottenham and in Kingston was watching the British political crisis with the detached attention of a community that had long understood that British politics was not designed with its interests at the centre, but that its outcomes fell on Caribbean communities in Britain with the full force of policy. The resignation of one Prime Minister, the launch of one compensation scheme, and the arrival of another constitutional crisis — none of it altered the fundamental relationship. But all of it mattered to the people living in it.

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