Landslide, Lockdown and Black Lives: A Year the Diaspora Will Never Forget

Black Lives Matter: The Movement That Changed the Conversation

The killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on 25 May 2020 and the global protests that followed had a profound and immediate impact on British public life and on the Windrush narrative specifically. In the second half of 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement — which had erupted in the UK in June with large demonstrations in London, Manchester, Bristol and other cities — continued to reshape public discourse about racial injustice, colonial history and the responsibilities of British institutions.

The toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol’s city centre on 7 June 2020, and its deposition in the harbour, became one of the most iconic and debated images of the year. For Jamaicans and the wider Caribbean diaspora in Britain, the act carried particular resonance: Colston’s trade in enslaved people had included thousands who were taken through the transatlantic slave trade routes to the Caribbean. The event reignited public discussion about the commemoration of slave traders in British public spaces and about the unresolved question of reparations — a conversation that Caribbean governments had been pursuing through diplomatic and legal channels for decades.

For the Windrush story specifically, Black Lives Matter gave renewed energy to advocates who argued that the hostile environment that had destroyed so many Caribbean lives was not an aberration but an expression of institutionalised racial bias that ran deep in the Home Office and in the immigration system more broadly. The Wendy Williams Lessons Learned Review, published in March 2020, had described the Home Office’s culture as characterised by "institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race." The movement gave that diagnosis a larger and louder platform.

COVID-19 and Caribbean Communities: Inequality Laid Bare

Public Health England’s report on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, published in June 2020, confirmed what community organisations had been observing in practice since the pandemic began: that Caribbean-heritage communities in the United Kingdom were experiencing significantly higher rates of COVID-related mortality than the white British population. The factors driving this disparity — occupational exposure through key worker roles in the NHS, social care and transport; housing conditions; pre-existing health inequalities rooted in deprivation and discrimination; and barriers to accessing healthcare — were precisely the kinds of structural inequalities that the hostile environment had compounded over years.

For the Windrush generation specifically, many of whom were in their seventies and eighties and therefore in the highest-risk age groups, the pandemic posed an acute danger. Community organisations and the Good Law Project raised concerns that the same NHS that members of the Windrush generation had built and in many cases been denied access to because of the hostile environment now represented a vital lifeline for ageing survivors whose compensation claims remained unresolved.

Patel Raises the Compensation Ceiling

In December 2020, Home Secretary Priti Patel announced significant increases in the maximum amounts available through the Windrush Compensation Scheme, raising the ceiling on individual payments from £10,000 to £100,000 for eligible cases. The announcement was accompanied by a commitment to accelerate the processing of claims and to increase caseworker capacity at the Home Office.

Advocacy organisations responded with measured caution. The raised ceiling was welcomed in principle — if individuals had suffered losses that warranted payments of this scale, they should be able to claim them — but critics pointed out that the structural problems that had prevented claimants from reaching even the previous maximums remained unaddressed. Without legal aid, without independent administration and without a simplified evidence regime, raising the theoretical ceiling did not necessarily mean higher payments would reach the people who needed them. The announcement was an improvement on what had existed before, but fell short of the structural reform that advocacy organisations had been demanding since the scheme was created.

Jamaica’s Remittances: The Diaspora’s Economic Lifeline Holds

Despite the economic disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, remittances from the Jamaican diaspora — predominantly from the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada — proved more resilient than many economists had predicted. Jamaica is among the most remittance-dependent economies in the Caribbean, with overseas transfers accounting for a significant share of GDP. The pandemic had initially raised fears that diaspora income, much of it tied to service sector employment, would collapse. In practice, the picture was more complex: job losses in hospitality and retail were partially offset by higher earnings among key workers, and the shift to digital remittance platforms accelerated the speed and reliability of transfers.

The resilience of remittance flows was not merely an economic statistic. It was a demonstration of the depth and durability of the connections between the Jamaican diaspora and the island — connections that had sustained communities, families and the national economy through six decades of migration, through the Windrush generation’s experiences in Britain and through the present crisis. For advocates working on Windrush justice, the remittance story was a reminder of what was at stake: a diaspora whose contributions to Jamaica remained enormous and whose members deserved to be treated with the dignity the British state had so comprehensively failed to provide.

Sources for this report include the Jamaica Information Service, Washington Post, Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, CBC News, Public Health England, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, the Good Law Project, Freedom from Torture, the Windrush Scandal Project, GOV.UK and Caribbean National Weekly. This report was researched and published on 3 January 2021.