The IRA Almost Kills Thatcher, Band Aid Raises Millions, and the Miners Hold the Line

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 1985 | Period covered: July–December 1984

Key Developments at a Glance

• 12 October 1984: IRA bomb at Grand Hotel Brighton kills five during Conservative Party conference; Thatcher escapes uninjured; Norman Tebbit among the severely injured.
• Miners’ strike continues through all of the second half of 1984; NUM and British Coal deadlocked; police-picket violence at Orgreave in June continues to shadow the dispute.
• 31 October 1984: Indian PM Indira Gandhi assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards; Bhopal chemical disaster December 3 kills thousands; Indian subcontinent in crisis.
• Band Aid recording December 13, 1984: ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ raises millions for Ethiopian famine relief; Caribbean community participates in national charitable response.
• Edward Seaga PM Jamaica; JLP government pursues Reagan-aligned foreign policy; Caribbean Basin Initiative shapes regional economic relationships.
• Race Relations Act 1976 enforcement remains a concern; Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) continues to document patterns of housing and employment discrimination.

The second half of 1984 produces one event that shakes the British political establishment to its foundations and one cultural event that demonstrates how a single person with sufficient determination can mobilise a nation’s charitable instinct. The Brighton bombing of 12 October and the Band Aid recording of 13 December are separated by nine weeks and connected only in that they both reveal something important about Britain in 1984: the first, that the IRA’s capacity for mass political violence extends into the most protected spaces; the second, that popular culture in Britain can be redirected toward humanitarian purpose with remarkable speed when the images on television screens are sufficiently devastating. The Caribbean community, living through a period of sustained economic pressure and watching a miners’ strike that shows no sign of resolving, absorbs both events as part of the texture of national life in which it is simultaneously embedded and marginalised.

The Brighton Bomb: An Attack on the State

At approximately 2.54 in the morning of 12 October 1984, a long-delay time bomb concealed in the bathroom of room 629 of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, detonates. The Conservative Party conference is taking place in the hotel. Margaret Thatcher is awake in her suite, working on her conference speech. The bomb, planted by IRA member Patrick Magee several weeks earlier, brings down the entire chimney stack of the hotel and collapses the floors of several rooms. Five people are killed: Sir Anthony Berry MP, Jeanne Shattock, Muriel Maclean, Eric Taylor, and Roberta Wakeham. Norman Tebbit, the Trade and Industry Secretary, is pulled from the rubble with injuries that will affect him for the rest of his life; his wife Margaret is left permanently paralysed. Thatcher gives her conference speech as scheduled, five hours later.

The Caribbean community’s response to the Brighton bomb is that of British citizens who understand what it means for the state to be attacked inside its own processes. The community has its own reasons for complex feelings about Thatcher’s government; those feelings do not translate into any sympathy for the IRA’s method. The community’s consistent position on political violence — formed through its own experience of violence directed against it and through its commitment to democratic engagement as the route to political change — is that the Brighton bomb, like every IRA bombing, is wrong.

The Miners’ Strike: Month Nine, Month Ten, Month Eleven

The miners’ strike that began in March 1984 continues through every month of the second half of the year. The violence at Orgreave coking works in June, where mounted police charged pickets in scenes that produced competing narratives about who was responsible for the violence, has settled into a bitter legal aftermath. Arthur Scargill continues to lead the NUM without calling the ballot that might have given the strike greater legal and political legitimacy. Thatcher continues to characterise the strike as a challenge to the democratic order rather than as an industrial dispute about jobs. Mining communities across Yorkshire, South Wales, Nottinghamshire, and Scotland are dividing internally as some miners return to work and others maintain the strike. The Caribbean community, watching from outside the specific geography of the coalfields, understands the miners’ strike as a contest about power that will shape the conditions of working-class life in Britain regardless of whether those involved are miners or not.

Band Aid and the Ethiopian Famine

The television coverage of the Ethiopian famine that begins in October 1984, particularly Michael Buerk’s BBC report that reaches an estimated 470 million viewers worldwide, triggers a charitable response on a scale unprecedented in British popular culture. Bob Geldof and Midge Ure organise a recording session on 13 December at which over forty British and Irish pop artists record ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’. The record raises millions for famine relief. The Caribbean community participates in the national charitable response and contributes to the fundraising, while some community members note that the framing of the Ethiopia coverage — Black African suffering presented for the compassion of white Western audiences — reproduces a narrative of African helplessness that the community does not accept as the complete picture of the continent from which it partly comes.

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; New Nation; The Voice; BBC News; Reuters; AP; The Guardian; Commission for Racial Equality; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; National Union of Mineworkers; Home Office (UK).

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