Jamaica Diaspora Annual Roundup 2019

Annual Review | Published: 31 December 2019 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways: 2019 in Six Lines

• Boris Johnson Becomes UK PM in July and Delivers Brexit by Year-End
• December UK Election: Conservative Landslide of 80-Seat Majority
• Windrush Lessons Learned Review Commissioned Under Wendy Williams
• Holness and JLP Win Jamaica Election With Strengthened Majority
• Jamaica Remittances Reach US$2.6 Billion: A New Record
• Hong Kong Protests and Global Climate Strikes Define the Year

The Year in Review

2019 was the year Brexit finally happened — in political terms if not yet in legal effect. Boris Johnson’s replacement of Theresa May as Conservative leader and prime minister in July — following May’s three failed attempts to get her withdrawal agreement through Parliament — brought a politician whose “Get Brexit Done” messaging was designed to break the parliamentary impasse by force of electoral mandate. The December 2019 general election, in which Johnson’s Conservatives won an eighty-seat majority — the largest Conservative majority since 1987 — delivered precisely that mandate. The outcome was decisive and for British-Jamaican communities watching it, it was a moment of mixed calculation: the certainty of Brexit’s implementation resolved one dimension of uncertainty while opening others about the shape of the post-Brexit immigration framework and the future of Commonwealth migration routes.

The Wendy Williams review of the Windrush scandal — the independent Lessons Learned Review commissioned by the Home Office — was established in 2019 to examine how the hostile environment policy had been designed, implemented, and maintained despite the harm it was causing to established Caribbean community members. Caribbean diaspora communities in the UK engaged actively with the review process, submitting evidence and testimony that went well beyond the immediate cases to the structural and cultural conditions within the Home Office that had enabled the scandal. Andrew Holness’s JLP victory in Jamaica’s September election, with a strengthened majority of forty-nine seats to the PNP’s thirty-two, gave his administration the mandate to continue economic reform, crime reduction, and the diaspora engagement programme. Global climate strikes — mobilised under Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement in September and attracting an estimated seven million participants worldwide — raised the Caribbean’s climate vulnerability to new levels of international visibility. Annual remittances to Jamaica reached a new record of approximately US$2.6 billion.

Jamaica Diaspora Annual Roundup 2019 | Jamaica Homes News. Compiled from four quarterly editions published April, July, October 2019, and January 2020.

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