Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Publication date: 3 July 2020 | Period covered: January–June 2020
Key Developments at a Glance
- Wendy Williams Review: Home Office culture described as "institutional ignorance towards race."
- Williams makes 30 recommendations for fundamental Home Office transformation.
- COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately kills Black and Caribbean-heritage people in Britain.
- George Floyd killed in Minneapolis; Black Lives Matter erupts across UK in June 2020.
- Edward Colston statue toppled in Bristol, reigniting Caribbean reparations debate.
- Windrush compensation scheme processes its first full year with slow and contested progress.
LONDON / KINGSTON — The first half of 2020 compressed events that would normally span a decade into six extraordinary months. A landmark official review described institutional racism at the heart of one of Britain’s most powerful departments of state. A pandemic arrived with catastrophic force — and proceeded to kill Black and Caribbean-heritage people at rates that exposed, in the starkest possible terms, the health inequalities that systemic discrimination had produced over generations. And in the final weeks of the period, the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis ignited a global movement that would define the second half of the year and reshape the terms of the Windrush conversation for years to come.
The Wendy Williams Review: Naming What Was Always There
Published on 19 March 2020 — three days before the United Kingdom entered its first COVID-19 lockdown — the Windrush Lessons Learned Review by Wendy Williams was the most damning official assessment of the Home Office’s institutional culture in the department’s modern history. Williams, a barrister and former Chief Inspector of Constabulary, had been commissioned by Home Secretary Sajid Javid in 2018 following the eruption of the Windrush scandal at CHOGM. Her findings, delayed by the scale of the review and then by the political turbulence of Brexit, delivered with unflinching clarity what community organisations had been saying for years.
Williams described the Home Office’s culture as characterised by "institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race." She found that the department had failed to see the Windrush generation as British, had treated Caribbean-heritage communities as a problem to be managed rather than a community to be served, and had allowed the hostile environment’s operational imperatives to override any human or legal consideration of the rights of individuals. Her 30 recommendations for change included new training across the department, reformed leadership accountability, improved record-keeping, and a fundamentally different relationship between the Home Office and Caribbean-heritage communities.
The review was received with deep emotion by Windrush survivors and their families, who heard in Williams’s measured official language a validation of experiences that had often been dismissed, minimised or denied. For Jamaica’s diaspora in Britain, the review’s publication was a watershed moment: it placed into official record what the community had known and endured for decades. The question was whether the Home Office would implement the 30 recommendations with the urgency and sincerity that the report demanded.
COVID-19: Pandemic as Mirror of Inequality
As the Wendy Williams Review was published, COVID-19 was already spreading through British communities. Within weeks, it became apparent that the pandemic was killing Black, Asian and minority ethnic people at rates dramatically higher than the white British population. For Caribbean-heritage communities, many of whose members worked in the NHS, social care, transport and other sectors that kept essential services running through the pandemic, the disproportionate mortality was both statistically shocking and, for those who understood the underlying inequalities, entirely unsurprising.
The structural factors were multiple and interrelated: higher rates of employment in exposed occupations; overcrowded housing that made isolation difficult; pre-existing health conditions linked to decades of poverty and discrimination; and, critically, well-documented barriers to accessing healthcare — including the NHS charging regime for those without settled status that the hostile environment had introduced and that had directly affected members of the Windrush generation. The pandemic did not create these inequalities. It revealed them, with lethal force.
For Jamaica, which moved quickly to impose travel restrictions and a state of emergency in response to the pandemic, the diaspora connection added a dimension of anxiety: Jamaican families in the UK worried about elderly parents on the island, and vice versa. Remittances, which represent a critical share of Jamaica’s GDP, initially fell as diaspora workers in affected sectors lost income, before recovering as many adapted to changed working conditions.
Black Lives Matter: Britain Confronts Its Colonial Past
On 25 May 2020, George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, and the protests that followed spread to Britain within days. On 7 June 2020, a crowd in Bristol toppled the statue of seventeenth-century slave trader Edward Colston and threw it into the harbour. On the same day, a large Black Lives Matter demonstration took place in London, with further protests in dozens of cities across the UK in the days that followed. The movement brought into the streets a conversation about racial injustice, colonial history and institutional racism that the Wendy Williams Review had placed into official record just three months earlier.
For Jamaica’s diaspora in Britain, the movement resonated at multiple levels: as Caribbean people whose families had experienced the hostile environment, the Windrush scandal and decades of racial discrimination in housing, employment and policing; as members of communities whose connection to the history of enslavement and colonialism was direct and personal; and as citizens of a country whose public spaces still honoured the architects of that history in stone and bronze. The reparations question — which Caribbean governments including Jamaica had been formally pressing through CARICOM for years — entered mainstream British public discourse in a way that it had never quite managed before.
Windrush Day 2020 and Compensation: Marked Under Lockdown
Windrush Day on 22 June 2020 was the second annual commemoration since the day was established by the then government in 2018. It fell during the COVID-19 pandemic, with public gatherings severely restricted across the UK. Many events were held online, with community organisations adapting their commemorative activities to digital platforms. The day was marked across the Caribbean diaspora in Britain with particular poignancy: a generation being honoured while many of its members remained uncompensated, and while the pandemic was claiming Caribbean-heritage lives at disproportionate rates.
The Windrush Compensation Scheme, which had been in operation for just over a year by Windrush Day 2020, continued to draw criticism from advocacy organisations. The scheme’s first year of operation had seen relatively small amounts paid to a fraction of those estimated to be eligible, and the pandemic’s disruption had further slowed casework. Advocacy organisations called for emergency measures to accelerate payments, particularly for elderly and seriously ill claimants who could not wait for normal processing timescales.
Sources for this report include GOV.UK (Wendy Williams Lessons Learned Review, March 2020), Public Health England, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, the Jamaica Information Service, BBC, the Guardian, the Jamaica Gleaner, JCWI, Freedom from Torture, Migrants Organise and Caribbean National Weekly. This report was researched and published on 3 July 2020.
Follow Jamaica Homes on Youtube @jamaicahomes and Instagram @jamaica_homes and on Facebook @jamaicahomesnews Send us a message or email us at onlinefeedback@jamaica-homes.com or editor@jamaica-homes.com
Visit our YouTube Community ↗