Gus John |Britain and Melissa’s violent warning

It is now commonplace for politicians, when challenged to engage with the issue of reparatory justice, to argue that they want to concentrate on the future and move on from the past. A classic example of that was former Prime Minister David Cameron on a visit to Jamaica in 2015.

In his address to Jamaica’s parliament, Cameron pleaded:

“ I do hope that, as friends who have gone through so much together since those darkest of times, we can move on from this painful legacy and continue to build for the future”. He said he wanted “to concentrate on future relations rather than centuries-old issues’”

Politicians and nation states might find it convenient to move on, but the universe has a way of reminding us that it has a long and ineradicable memory and that actions have consequences.

Cameron, in 2015, the first British prime minister to visit Jamaica in 14 years, unashamedly offered Jamaica £25 million in UK foreign aid to help build a new, modern prison, so that Britain could repatriate the 600 or so Jamaican nationals serving sentences in UK prisons. They were not visitors who went on a spree of crime across Britain. The majority of them were people who were brought to Britain as children, or had come as adults and lived and worked for decades, but were considered foreign nationals for not having the right documents.

Jamaican politicians and civil society wanted Cameron to focus on their primary concern, i.e., the relationship between their past as descendants of enslaved Africans who had produced enormous wealth for Britain, and, as former citizens of the United Kingdom and its colonies who had been starved of that wealth and the life chances it could have enhanced.

Cameron was having none of it. He had the decency, however, not to humour them by offering an insincere and totally hubristic apology on behalf of his own slave-owning ancestors and of Britain.

CUMULATIVE DAMAGE

Of course, Britain did not just ‘move on’. The wealth generated through the chattel labour of millions of Africans over some 300 years, funded the industrial revolution and enabled the concentration of wealth in the estates and families of the elite in British society. For centuries, their focus was on wealth recycling and accumulation and the expansion of capitalism. The impact of all that on the planet was the least of their concern. Nevertheless, the cumulative damage to Planet Earth was such that those from whom much was stolen and denied were, and are, the ones most affected by ecological damage and least equipped to withstand its impact.

So, while British prime ministers and politicians might enjoy the luxury of moving on, the Universe is focusing us all on climate change and its impact upon the economies of already poor and dependent countries, especially in coastal regions and small island states such as the Caribbean, where the devastation and unprecedented loss of life caused by Hurricanes Irma, Maria, Beryl and, most recently, Melissa are predicted to be ‘the new normal’.

And, as if to underscore the absurdity of the failure of the British state to acknowledge its barbaric and inglorious past and the enduring legacy of that past, a legacy that constitutes the existential reality of formerly colonised people in those vulnerable regions of the world, the secretary of state at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office announced on October 29, 10 years after Cameron returned from offering a spanking new prison to Jamaica, that the UK Government was “mobilising £2.5m in emergency humanitarian funding to support the Caribbean region’s recovery from the devastation caused by Hurricane Melissa. This funding will support a rapid humanitarian response, including the delivery of emergency supplies such as shelter kits, water filters, and blankets, to help prevent injury, and disease outbreaks”.

So, £25m was on offer to create a prison to enable Britain to repatriate Jamaican prisoners from its jails. But, after Melissa flattens the homes of hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans, destroys vital infrastructure and challenges the physical and mental health of the majority of the population, the current British government ‘mobilises’ £2.5m.

But, what else should one expect?

Sobering news

The Chancellor of the Exchequer is about to give the country sobering news about the state of its finances. Rachel Reeves, MP is no doubt anxiously looking over her shoulder at the Reform party, UKIP, and ‘the British people’ who are waiting with bated breath to see what she will do. Those ‘British people’, by the way, are not ever assumed to include the 800,000 residents of Jamaican origin, the majority of them Britain-born. Imagine if the chancellor were audacious enough to announce that, given Britain’s historical failings, however it does it, it must be seen now to repay some, at least, of that massive debt it owes to the people of Jamaica. There would no doubt be a clamour for her and Keir Starmer’s immediate resignation and for a general election in six weeks.

That’s as may be.There are two things the government has in its gift, however. Mindful of how integral those 800,000 Jamaican/British people are to the nation and its economic and cultural life, and given how distraught most are about the devastation and unprecedented loss of life caused by Melissa, the government could help facilitate Jamaicans and their allies to go and provide physical, moral and financial support by calling on airlines to provide emergency relief fares as their contribution to the disaster relief effort, especially given the revenue they accrue from the Jamaican community and from the tourist trade to Jamaica year on year.

Second, the government could ensure that the ‘maximum two-year absence’ rule is relaxed for people travelling to Jamaica to support relatives, so that they do not forfeit the right to return and resume their life in Britain if, for whatever reason, they are required to stay in Jamaica for more than two years.

Charity begins at home

Professor Augustine John is a human rights campaigner and honourary fellow at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London.