Forty Years of the Chronicle: A Special Anniversary Edition

Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Chronicle | Fortieth Anniversary Special Edition | July 2022 | Forty Years of the Record

Forty years ago, in July 1982, this Chronicle published its first edition. One hundred and sixty quarterly editions later, in July 2022, the record it has accumulated covers four decades of British Caribbean life. The series has outlasted seven Prime Ministers — Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, and now Johnson, who resigned yesterday as Conservative Party leader in circumstances of personal and political disgrace that were not primarily about race but whose implications for the community are present nonetheless: a government that presided over the Windrush scandal, whose hostile environment policy created the conditions for that scandal, and whose handling of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed once again the structural disparities in health outcomes between Black and white British citizens, is leaving office having provided compensation that the community regards as inadequate and accountability that the community regards as absent.

The Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II was celebrated across Britain in June 2022 — seventy years since her accession, a reign that began two years after the Windrush docked and that has thus encompassed the entire post-war Caribbean presence in Britain. The community’s relationship to the monarchy at the Platinum Jubilee is different from what it was at the Golden Jubilee of 2002 or the Silver Jubilee of 1977: more complex, more conscious of the Crown’s historical relationship to the empire and to the slave trade, more attentive to the debate opened by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s departure from royal life and their account of racism within the institution. The community did not boycott the Jubilee. It participated with the layered attention that four decades of this Chronicle have documented as the community’s characteristic relationship to the institutions of British national life.

The Windrush Scandal: Compensation Without Full Accountability

The Windrush scandal broke publicly in April 2018. Four years later, the Windrush Compensation Scheme — established in April 2019 to provide financial redress to those wrongfully detained, deported, denied healthcare, or otherwise harmed by the hostile environment — has paid out approximately £40 million in compensation to approximately 1,400 claimants. The figures represent a fraction of what campaigners regard as the true scale of harm: estimates of the eligible community range into the tens of thousands. The scheme’s application process is complex and burdensome; its definition of eligible harm is contested; its compensation levels are disputed as inadequate relative to the loss of careers, homes, health, and dignity that affected individuals have documented. Several community members who should have received compensation have died before their claims were resolved. The Chronicle records this with the anger it warrants.

The Wendy Williams Lessons Learned Review, published in March 2020 and updated in 2022, found that the Home Office had demonstrated ‘institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race’ and made thirty recommendations. The Home Office has accepted all thirty in principle. The community’s assessment of implementation — which is the test that matters — is sceptical. The pattern of acknowledgement without transformation is one that forty years of this Chronicle has documented as a recurring feature of the British state’s relationship with the Caribbean community.

Seventy-Four Years: The Community at the Third Generation

The Windrush docked in June 1948. The community is seventy-four years into its post-war presence. The founding generation has largely died. The second generation — those who came as children or were born in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s — is now in its sixties and seventies. The third generation is middle-aged. The fourth generation is raising children. This is a community of four generations’ depth, whose roots in British society are as deep as any comparable community in British history. It is also a community whose belonging has been, consistently and across all four decades of this Chronicle’s record, made contingent on political and administrative decisions that would not be applied to any comparable community of white British heritage.

Jamaica at Forty Years

Andrew Holness’s JLP government was re-elected in September 2020 with an enlarged majority of 49 of 63 seats. Jamaica has navigated COVID-19 with the particular difficulty of an economy dependent on tourism — which collapsed in 2020 — and is now in recovery, with approximately 1.7 million stopover visitors in 2021. The murder rate remains at approximately 49 per 100,000 — one of the highest in the world. The diaspora’s remittances, which held up during COVID, have been a critical source of household income for Jamaican families through the pandemic. Forty years of the Chronicle has covered Jamaica through Seaga, Manley, Patterson, Simpson Miller, Golding, and Holness — through Cold War and post-Cold War, through IMF adjustment and partial recovery, through hurricane seasons and music revolutions. The island and its diaspora remain, as this Chronicle has always understood them, one story told from two places.

Sources: Windrush Compensation Scheme data; Wendy Williams Lessons Learned Review (2020, 2022); Home Office; Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; New Nation; The Voice; BBC News; House of Commons Hansard; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica Tourist Board.