How Britain Can Prove That Black Lives Matter by Putting the West Indies at the Heart of its Foreign Policy
Today Boris Johnson has announced that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is to be merged with the Department for International Development. He has argued that the UK’s commitment to contributing 0.7% of GDP, a total of £15bn per year, towards international development should be coupled with the foreign policy goals of the UK. In straightforward terms, Johnson is saying that the giving of charitable assistance to underdeveloped nations should be tied to the interests of Britain. He is saying that it should be used as part of a diplomatic package to further British interests overseas and there should be some shifts in the way that the financial assistance is framed.
In some way it may appear that Johnson is seeking to use the 0.7% of GDP as a diplomatic bully pulpit to force some British values onto the nations whom are given assistance but anyone who has worked in the voluntary sector will know that in most cases grants from charitable trusts are tied to conditions and the grantee often outlines the types of projects they want to fund based on the interests of the Trust. In all cases projects that are funded are monitored for impact. Johnson may simply want to run Britain’s giving as a charitable trust, that like most charitable trusts may refuse to fund you more than once if you have little impact and may not fund your charitable endeavour at all if you are not able to create applications for assistance that the trust has an interest in. For example, it is impossible to go to a charitable trust dedicated to football and be funded to play cricket.
In restructuring how international aid and overseas assistance works in Britain, Johnson is also taking this moment to rethink the recipients of international aid. To rethink which nations should receive assistance and how it can be tied to furthering Britain’s diplomatic and foreign policy missions.
As Boris Johnson has decided to make this move in the midst of the Black Lives Matter I believe that it is time for Black Britain to make an argument for a change in foreign policy towards the descendants of African slaves whose states are part of the Commonwealth Realms and occupy what were once referred to as the British West Indies and who also share the same names, language, legal system and Head of State as the UK.
It is time for those of the former British West Indies nations of the Commonwealth Realms, in both the Caribbean and Britain, to make the case that at the heart of the UK’s Global Britain foreign policy should be a move towards greater integration and political ties between Britain and those nations of the Commonwealth Realms that once made up the British West Indies, including Jamaica, Grenada, & Barbados. I believe that now is the appropriate time to bring the discourse that is at the heart of the Black Lives Matter Movement in Britain and across the world to another level of clarity. This is the right moment for us to make the argument that we deserve a greater share of the now £15bn per annum that is given to international aid because we have been the victims of slavery, cultural genocide, colonialism and racism, and although we live largely overseas are thoroughly Anglicised as societies. Our politicians and police swear allegiance to the Crown and the Crown is represented by an appointed Governor-General from the islands, who is black.
On the basis that the people once known as West Indian are the definition of what it is to be Black and British. The overseas nature of our Britishness should not make us an other to those that occupy our cultural mother country. It is time for us to demand that the Anglicised Black Britain’s that have been formed out of the British slave trade on Britain’s overseas plantations, who swear allegiance to the Crown and share a cultural framework with white Britain’s, including a love of cricket and tea, should be treated as an extension of British society. The Anglicised blacks of the Caribbean may once have been African but 400 years and more of engagement with British society, creolisation and forced Anglicisation via the whip and the chain have altered our ethnicities and cultures forever.
In the light of the protesting in the US and the UK, it is time for the conversation about the relationship between Anglicised blacks and their cultural mother country to become louder than ever before. In Britain and across the islands of the Caribbean we have to have the discussion about the historical oppression of our fore-parents and how it has shaped us politically, culturally, socially and economically in both the Caribbean and Britain. It is time to discuss the hurt and betrayal that we experienced in the 70’s when Britain joined the EU and gave preferential treatment to some of whom the soldiers of the West Indies Regiment had recently been called upon to wage war against. It is time to speak of that betrayal. It is time for Britain to acknowledge that through no fault of our own, we were bought and sold and transported to a foreign land, enslaved and turned into a new ethnicity over a period of 100’s of years and are now unable to find ourselves in better conditions without the financial assistance of our cultural forebears that instigated our transformational process.
The argument for a turn in Britain’s foreign policy towards Black Britain, located in the Caribbean, is not simply a moral argument or an argument about justice, it is an argument that appeals to the self-interests of the governments Global Britain mission. If there was ever a case for a global Britain it is in the Commonwealth Realms. The islands of the British West Indies represent Britain’s cultural interests abroad and can be considered at the heart of the debate about historical racism and racial justice that fires up BLM protestors in London. In acknowledging the past there is not only a chance of remedying it but a chance for Britain to build closer political ties with millions of individuals that have the linguistic, physical, cognitive, spatial and cultural ability to strengthen Britain’s workforce and its global mission.
In making the case to the Prime Minister and the newly formed body we should bring to recollection a little known document titled the West India Royal Commission Report, a report often referred to as the Moyne Report after the leader of the commission, Lord Moyne. The report, published in 1945, was written in 1938, as part of an investigation by the British colonial government into a series of labour uprisings in Jamaica between 1934 and 38, where Jamaican workers protested for financial investment, increased wages, land redistribution and political independence. It is said that the significant gap between publication and writing was due to the controversial nature of the reports findings that depicted dreadful living and working conditions. The report was rather controversial on its publication but many of those in the British West Indies believed that the report did not go far enough in its righteous indignation at the squalor of those that it had forcefully inculcated into its culture, values and tongue.
In the report Lord Moyne made a series of observations on the conditions of those of the British West Indies, he stated,
“The bulk of the population of the West Indies have lost their original cultures and constructive efforts to provide a satisfactory alternative are long overdue”,
“The labouring population have never had more than the slightest opportunity to save or establish themselves as economically independent”,
“The problem of the West Indies is essentially Agrarian. Their populations came, or were brought to establish and carry on the cultivation of tropical produce that for long periods (though, not without interruption) brought great wealth to the proprietors”,
“The institution of marriage was for historical reasons never the rule in the West Indies and the illegitimate birth rate was always very high, standing today between 60 and 70 per cent”,
“Contact with white people and the example of the United States of America and neighbouring territories, set for the West Indian a social standard to which he naturally aspires”,
“The extreme specialisation in the production of tropical crops for export exposed the West Indies to full force of long continued depression and the consequent deterioration of the standard of living”.
Lord Moyne’s report gave an insight into the living conditions of the West Indies and its people to the wider British public. In his recommendations, Lord Moyne, writing in 1938, recommended that Britain should be responsible for improving the social services and economy of the West Indies and its people. Although, he was apt to mention that it was important for the West Indians to want to do something for themselves.
In his final comments Lord Moyne outlined the central recommendation of his report, that a West Indian Welfare Fund be set up that would constantly review the social problems of the West Indies. He recommended that the fund be established and financed by an annual grant of £1,000,000 from the Imperial Exchequer for a period of no less than 20 years.
In 1945, the recommendations of the West India Royal Commission, headed by Lord Moyne, went unheeded. In 1948, perhaps as an unofficial response to the report, the Windrush Generation arrived on the British Isles which marked what you may have believed at the time to be the coming integration of Black Britain’s overseas into British society but which turned out to be a false alarm.
The lack of political will of the British state to respond to Lord Moyne’s recommendations in 1945, has fared badly for the West Indies. Jamaica, the largest of the British West Indies with a population of 2.9 million has experienced the skyrocketing of violent crime and murder, crime waves that have found themselves on British shores as the inhabitants of what is technically a former British Imperial concentration camp- where we experienced hundreds of years of brutality- seek for economic salvation from the hell of a defunct planation economy founded by their cultural motherland.
As the Prime Minister seeks to restructure Britain’s distribution of international aid towards the direction of Britain’s foreign policy. It is time to put the millions of Black Britain’s of the West Indies, that share so much with Britain, into the picture as a central part of Britain’s diplomatic and foreign policy ambitions.
There is no reason why at least one or two years worth of the £15bn international aid budget cannot go to those that have given so much but been given so little to our nation.
ALT
