Chernobyl Burns, Libya Is Bombed, and Thatcher Lends Reagan Her Runways

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 July 1986 | Period covered: January–June 1986

Key Developments at a Glance

• Westland affair: Michael Heseltine resigns January 9; Leon Brittan resigns January 24; Thatcher’s authority temporarily shaken but she survives the crisis.
• 15 April 1986: US bombers strike Libya from UK bases; Thatcher’s decision to grant landing rights divides the country; Caribbean community notes the foreign policy alignment.
• 26 April 1986: Chernobyl nuclear disaster; reactor explosion releases radiation across Europe; Caribbean community follows international response.
• Wapping print dispute from January 1986; 5,500 print workers dismissed by Murdoch; solidarity and trade union politics cut across community lines.
• Edward Seaga PM Jamaica; JLP government continues IMF-backed structural adjustment; diaspora remittances sustain island families through programme hardship.
• Community organisations continue legal challenges against immigration rules; Family reunion cases document the human cost of increasingly restrictive entry requirements.

The first six months of 1986 present the Caribbean community in Britain with a series of national and international events that test its capacity to make sense of a world in which the crises are arriving faster than they can be absorbed. The Westland affair — a political crisis ostensibly about the future of a helicopter manufacturer in Somerset — produces the resignation of two Cabinet ministers in January: Michael Heseltine, the Defence Secretary, who walks out of a Cabinet meeting and holds a press conference on the steps of Downing Street, and Leon Brittan, the Trade and Industry Secretary, who is forced out after it emerges that he leaked a confidential legal letter on government instructions. Thatcher’s survival of the crisis — she later says she thought she might not survive it — leaves her authority diminished but intact. The Caribbean community notes the spectacle with the same mixed attention it brings to all Westminster political crises: they matter to the extent that their outcomes affect the policy environment within which the community lives.

The Libya Bombing and the Special Relationship

On 15 April 1986, United States Air Force F-111 bombers flying from RAF Lakenheath and RAF Upper Heyford, and US Navy aircraft operating from the Mediterranean, strike targets in Tripoli and Benghazi, Libya. The operation — codenamed El Dorado Canyon — is the American response to a series of terrorist attacks attributed to the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi, including the bombing of a West Berlin nightclub frequented by US servicemen on 5 April, which killed three people including two American soldiers. Thatcher is the only European ally to permit the use of her territory for the operation; France refuses overflight rights, forcing the aircraft on a longer route around the Iberian peninsula. Germany and other NATO allies withhold support.

The Caribbean community’s response to the Libya bombing is not uniform. There is unease about the use of British territory for an operation whose legality under international law is disputed; there is concern about the risk of retaliatory terrorist attacks on British targets; and there is an awareness, shared with the broader British public, that Thatcher’s decision was taken without parliamentary authorisation. The ‘special relationship’ with the United States, which Thatcher invokes to explain her decision, is a relationship the community knows primarily from its experience of US immigration policy, which has never extended to the Caribbean community the automatic sympathy it might extend to British subjects of different heritage.

Chernobyl: The Nuclear Question

The explosion at reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine on 26 April 1986 is the largest nuclear accident in history. The immediate deaths are relatively few; the long-term consequences in radiation exposure, cancer rates, and environmental contamination across Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Europe will not be quantifiable for decades. The Soviet response — initial concealment, delayed evacuation, slow international disclosure — is a story about what happens when ideology overrides safety. For the Caribbean community in Britain, which has been through the experience of Brixton and Broadwater Farm and knows something about the concealment of institutional failure, the Soviet government’s handling of Chernobyl has a resonance that goes beyond the specific catastrophe of a nuclear reactor.

Jamaica and the Diaspora

Edward Seaga’s JLP government continues the IMF structural adjustment programme that has reshaped Jamaica’s public finances since 1980. The human cost of adjustment — cuts to public services, devaluation of the Jamaican dollar, removal of subsidies on basic goods — is carried disproportionately by the poorest Jamaicans, and the diaspora in Britain supplements the incomes of family members on the island through remittances that are both a personal obligation and an economic necessity. The political opposition in Jamaica, led by Michael Manley and the PNP, argues that the adjustment programme is unjust and that the social cost is too high; Seaga’s government argues that there was no alternative. The diaspora community in Britain follows this debate with the attention of people who have family on both sides of the argument.

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; Home Office (UK); Hansard.

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