Wolverhampton to Kingston

The British Prime Minister came to Jamaica with a cheque for a prison and a refusal to discuss slavery. The Jamaican government’s dignified response to a degrading offer was itself a statement about the nature of the relationship

Briefing

• David Cameron visits Jamaica in September 2015; refuses reparations for slavery.
• Cameron offers £25 million for a new prison to hold deportees from Britain.
• Jamaican PM Portia Simpson Miller publicly rejects framing; demands reparations dialogue.
• European refugee crisis: Caribbean community notes disparity in sympathy for displaced people.
• UK government deports 39 to Jamaica on charter flight; deportation policy under scrutiny.

David Cameron arrived in Jamaica in late September 2015 as the first British Prime Minister to visit the island in fourteen years. The visit was politically choreographed: Caribbean trade, bilateral cooperation, warm words about shared history and shared values. But the moment that defined the visit — the moment that was quoted across Jamaica, across the Caribbean diaspora in Britain and North America, and across the international news media — was Cameron’s answer when asked about reparations for slavery. He did not think, he said, that his government should say sorry for things that happened two hundred years ago. He wished to move on. He offered £25 million toward a new prison on the island, which would allow British-Jamaican dual nationals and Jamaicans convicted of crimes in Britain to be transferred to serve their sentences in Jamaica.

The Jamaican Prime Minister, Portia Simpson Miller, handled the moment with a composure that was itself a kind of political eloquence. She did not shout. She did not storm out. She said, clearly and on the record, that the question of reparations was not going away, that the £25 million prison offer did not address the depth of what was being asked, and that Jamaica’s position, as part of CARICOM’s collective reparations demand, remained unchanged. The offer of a prison, in the context of a reparations discussion, had a particular quality: it was a response to a moral argument with a logistical proposal, a substitution of practical assistance for historical accountability that many in the Caribbean found insulting in its form as well as inadequate in its substance.

The Diaspora Response

In Wolverhampton, in Handsworth, in Brixton and across the Caribbean communities of Britain, Cameron’s comments on reparations were met with a response that combined anger, bitter amusement and the particular weariness of a community that had been having this conversation for a long time and had grown accustomed to having it dismissed. The argument that the events of slavery were too long ago to be addressed was, to those most directly descended from its victims, not a serious argument. It was a political convenience. The wealth generated by enslaved labour had funded British institutions — banks, insurance companies, universities, country houses — that still existed. The poverty, trauma and structural disadvantage that slavery had produced in Caribbean societies had also not ended two hundred years ago. It was still being lived.

Community organisations and academic advocates who had been building the reparations case for years used the Cameron visit as a moment of public education. The University of the West Indies had published research on the economic case for reparations. The CARICOM Reparations Commission had a ten-point programme that included an apology, a debt-cancellation programme, and a transfer of technology and resources to address the development consequences of slavery and colonialism. These arguments were given new public attention in the weeks following Cameron’s visit, as media organisations and commentators who had paid the reparations debate little attention found themselves suddenly required to engage with it.

The Refugee Crisis and a Question of Sympathy

The second half of 2015 was dominated, in European politics, by the migration and refugee crisis, as hundreds of thousands of people — primarily from Syria, Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa — made dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean and through the Balkans in search of safety and stability. The crisis produced a significant humanitarian and political response across Europe, including in Britain, where debates about refugee admission and the UK’s obligations under international law were conducted with some urgency.

The Caribbean community in Britain followed these debates with a particular kind of attention. The humanitarian arguments being made for Syrian refugees — that they were fleeing war and deserved protection, that Britain had obligations under international law and basic moral duty — were arguments that the Caribbean community had been making about its own members for years: about the Windrush generation, about those facing deportation to countries they had not lived in since childhood, about asylum seekers from Africa and the Caribbean whose claims were being processed with what community organisations described as systemic scepticism. The disparity in the public sympathy available to different categories of displaced and vulnerable people was noted, carefully and without bitterness, in Caribbean community centres and church halls across Britain.

Deportation: A Continuing Controversy

The UK government had continued its programme of charter deportation flights to Jamaica through the second half of 2015. Community organisations and legal advocates had been challenging deportation cases and documenting the consequences of removals for individuals who had spent most or all of their lives in Britain. The Jamaican diaspora in Wolverhampton and beyond maintained a consistent pressure on parliamentarians and on the Home Office over the deportation programme, arguing that the removal of people who had no meaningful connection to Jamaica — whose families, whose social networks, whose entire adult lives were in Britain — was neither just nor, in the long run, practically effective.

In Jamaica, the consequences of deportation were also visible. Returnees — whether voluntary or forced — were arriving in a country they often did not know well, without established support networks, without Jamaican documentation, and sometimes with mental health challenges related to the experience of forced removal. The Jamaican government had established some reintegration support, but it was limited relative to the need. The UK-Jamaica bilateral relationship included cooperation on crime and security, of which deportation was a component. The community on both sides of the water was arguing that cooperation should not come at the cost of justice, and that the justice question was not going away.