Brooklyn to Kingston

When Barbados became a republic and a parliamentary report exposed Windrush’s unfinished justice, the Caribbean diaspora entered 2022 with the sharpest sense of purpose in years

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Briefing

• Barbados becomes Caribbean’s newest republic on 30 November 2021.
• Only five per cent of Windrush victims compensated, parliamentary report finds.
• 23 people died awaiting Windrush payments; Home Office faces fierce criticism.
• Three parliamentary committees condemn Home Office delay in 2021 alone.
• Jamaica’s republic debate intensifies; diaspora voices demand faster action.

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Shortly after midnight on November 30, 2021, Barbados removed the British monarch as its head of state and became a republic. Dame Sandra Mason was sworn in as the country’s first president. Prime Minister Mia Mottley gave a speech that was precise, dignified and historically aware. Rihanna was declared a National Hero. And across the Caribbean diaspora in Brooklyn, in Brixton, in Brampton and in Birmingham, people watched and felt, many of them, that something had shifted.

The week before, a report had been published in Britain that put the Caribbean diaspora’s experience of the United Kingdom into an equally stark light. The finding was simple and damning: by November 2021, despite a Windrush Compensation Scheme that had been running for more than two years, only an estimated five per cent of victims had received any payment. Twenty-three of those eligible had died before receiving a penny. Three separate parliamentary committees had issued critical reports during the year. Together they described a process that was demanding, opaque and insufficiently resourced.

Barbados and the Republic Moment

Barbados’ transition to a republic — announced in September 2020 and prepared over fourteen months with remarkable political consensus — was met with widespread celebration in diaspora communities across the English-speaking world. The significance was not only constitutional. It was psychological. For Jamaica, the effect was immediate and catalytic. Academics, politicians and community advocates became more vocal than before about the republic question. The diaspora’s view — that republican status was both overdue and straightforward if the political will existed — found new confidence after Barbados demonstrated what was possible. If Barbados could complete the transition within fourteen months of announcing it, what was Jamaica waiting for?

The Windrush Report: Five Per Cent

The parliamentary reporting that accumulated through 2021 painted a picture of institutional failure compounded by institutional slowness. The detail that attracted the most attention was that 23 people had died before receiving any compensation. These were individuals who had been wrongly classified as undocumented migrants, who had lost jobs, homes and access to healthcare, who had waited through years of scandal and parliamentary inquiry — and who had not survived long enough to receive the acknowledgement they were owed. Community organisations had been warning, in evidence sessions and public statements, that the scheme’s design — which required claimants to prove losses that had often gone undocumented, through an institution that had caused those losses — was producing exactly this kind of underperformance. The conflict of interest was built in.

Three parliamentary committees issued critical reports in 2021 alone, calling for the scheme to be transferred to an independent body, for processing to be accelerated and for the compensation criteria to be broadened. The government accepted some recommendations and rejected others. Changes were made. The pace remained, by any independent assessment, inadequate.

The Conversation Changes

The second half of 2021 unfolded against the continuing backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had disrupted the Jamaica-diaspora relationship in particular ways. Diaspora visits to family had been curtailed for two years; remittances, in many cases, had increased as family members in Jamaica faced economic contraction and healthcare uncertainty. The Windrush Compensation Scheme’s five per cent figure gave advocates a stark datum around which to organise continued pressure. Barbados’ republic transition had made the constitutional question in the Caribbean concrete rather than aspirational.

From Brooklyn to Kingston, from Brixton to Bridgetown, the Jamaican and Caribbean diaspora entered 2022 with a sharpened sense of what it was asking for and what it would not accept: compensation that reaches the people who are owed it; a republic that removes a symbolic link to an era the Caribbean did not choose; a conversation about reparations that is honest about what was taken and what is still being felt. What November 2021 offered — in the Barbados republic and the Windrush report both — was clarity about what the relationship between yard and foreign means, about what justice looks like, and about what change, when it finally comes, can do.

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