Update: Jamaica Hurricane Melissa – A Community Rising -Thursday 6th November 2025.
Brixton showed the country who we really are.
Over two hundred people crammed into the Karibu Education Centre on Gresham Road, with hundreds more standing outside unable to get in. Online, more than 3,200 viewers joined the livestream, sending messages of solidarity, pain, anger, and love.
It was one of the most powerful community gatherings I have chaired in years – intergenerational, united, determined. A people brought together by grief and outrage, yes, but also by a fierce Jamaican pride and a refusal to accept this government’s insulting response to a national catastrophe.
Hurricane Melissa has left Jamaica facing a humanitarian, economic and climate crisis on a scale we have never seen. Families are homeless. Towns are unrecognisable. Elderly relatives are without power, food, water or medical support. And the British Government has offered the entire Caribbean a paltry £7.5 million – a sum so trivial it barely covers a ministerial stationery budget.
Placed against the billions committed elsewhere, it is not merely inadequate.
It is dehumanising.
It tells us exactly how the British state values Black Caribbean lives.
And that, more than anything, is what powered the room last night: anger sharpened into purpose.
Speakers were exceptional.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP and Florence Eshalomi MP both made it clear: Parliament must hear from us, and they stand ready to fight for humanitarian visa relaxation and increased emergency aid.
Paulette Simpson CBE shared the vital work of the Jamaica National Group, including branches across the UK now serving as donation hubs.
David Weaver Chair of Operation Black Vote announced a historic decision, OBV will coordinate a National Black Lobby of Parliament, mobilising thousands to press MPs, the Prime Minister and ministers directly. This is now a national campaign.
Dr Wanda Wyporska, new CEO of the Black Cultural Archives, spoke with moral clarity about the moral incoherence of Britain finding billions for other crises yet offering pennies to Jamaica – a country that has given Britain far more than it has ever received.
Journalist Nadine White delivered a tour de force on climate justice, historical injustice and the need for reparations, placing this crisis within the long arc of empire, extraction and racial inequality.
Cashh, one of the sharpest young Jamaican voices in the UK, pledged his full support for the civil society coalition emerging from this crisis.
Caren Balfour of Jamaican Valley Ltd gave a heartfelt and expert account of the devastation in Jamaica’s agricultural sector, and how local farmers – the backbone of the island – have lost everything. Her work connecting rural produce to UK markets is a lifeline that now needs national support.
Councillor Donatus Anyanwu, Lambeth Cabinet Member for Stronger Communities, committed the Council’s support and reminded us that Nigerian and Jamaican communities share deep historic ties. He encouraged linking Black-led businesses across Africa and the Caribbean to provide the logistics and scale necessary for a real relief effort.
Every speaker, every contribution, pointed to the same conclusion: this is the beginning, not the end.
I think this is tragedy also offer a historic moment of unity because in response to this catestrophe we've seen:
• elders and youth standing side by side
• faith groups, activists, artists, entrepreneurs
• Jamaicans, Nigerians, Ghanians, Barbadians, St Lucians
• community organisations, housing associations, businesses
• Lambeth councillors, MPs, and national civil society leaders
This night in Brixton one of the most unified gatherings I’ve witnessed in decades.
And it was all powered by love for Jamaica – a country that has given the world sport, music, culture, resistance, poetry, political thought, and a cultural superpower status that far outweighs its size.
We are planning then next steps to push the demands outline in this petition and will update you all. on the next steps, in the next few days.
In the meantime. please assist by relentlessly pushing this petition. Truth is we will need way more signatures Io make a difference.
You can help by sharing and promoting among your friends and wider communities.
You can watch the entire Brixton video here, and don't forget to like and share this far and wide.
The hurricane was a disaster - now we see the nightmare really begins. Help us help Jamaica.