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.

The second half of 2018 sees Britain’s government scrambling to contain the fallout from the Windrush scandal. A Lessons Learned Review is announced, the Task Force works to restore rights, and the first Windrush Day is promised — but for those still waiting, apologies ring hollow without action.

April 2018 will be remembered as the month Britain was confronted with the consequences of its hostile environment. Caribbean leaders arrived for CHOGM to find their peoples’ rights stripped away. Amber Rudd resigned. Theresa May apologised. And 70 years after Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, Britain finally reckoned with what it had done.

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.

In the second half of 2017, investigative reporting begins to expose a quiet humanitarian crisis: long-settled Caribbean Britons stripped of their rights under the hostile environment. The cases are compelling; parliament is stirring; and the Home Office insists nothing is wrong.

Article 50 is triggered in March 2017, plunging the Caribbean diaspora into fresh uncertainty about their future in Britain. Meanwhile, the hostile environment — operating largely out of sight — continues to strip long-settled Commonwealth citizens of their rights, jobs and homes.

Brexit reshapes everything. Theresa May — architect of the hostile environment — moves from the Home Office to 10 Downing Street, and the Caribbean diaspora confronts the most uncertain political climate in a generation. What does leaving the EU mean for those whose right to be in Britain predates the EU entirely?

Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit Jamaica in April 2015. He landed at Norman Manley International Airport, met Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, spoke about diaspora connections, and left. Jamaica decriminalised cannabis the same month. In May, Britain re-elected a Conservative government.

The Immigration Act 2014 is now law, and its hostile environment provisions are reaching into the housing market, the NHS and the workplace. For Caribbean-born Britons without formal documentation, the Act’s requirements to prove immigration status are creating a new and dangerous vulnerability. CARICOM’s reparations commission, adopted in March 2014, offers a parallel fight for justice.