Hostile Environment

When Hurricane Melissa made landfall in western Jamaica as a historic Category 5 storm, a diaspora scattered across three continents became the island’s first line of relief — even as Jamaica’s petition to King Charles III marked a new chapter in the long struggle for reparatory justice.

In March 2022, Prince William arrived in Jamaica to protests and a prime minister who told him Britain was being left behind. Three months later, a bronze family stood in Sunday best atop a pile of suitcases at Waterloo Station — the National Windrush Monument, unveiled by the same prince.

Six months after the Windrush scandal broke, the Caribbean community in Britain was monitoring a government that had promised much and delivered little. The Windrush Lessons Learned Review was underway. Sajid Javid was at the Home Office. And the Carnival, after a break for rain, had returned to Notting Hill.

In April 2018, the Windrush scandal became impossible to ignore. Caribbean leaders confronted Theresa May at a Commonwealth summit in London. Amber Rudd resigned as Home Secretary. And Britain was forced to reckon, publicly and painfully, with what it had done to the generation that had answered its call.

Hurricane Irma struck the Eastern Caribbean in September 2017 with a ferocity that exposed both the climate vulnerability of small island states and the inadequacy of the British government’s response to its overseas territories. For the diaspora in Handsworth and across Britain, fundraising began before the storm had passed.