Major Wins Again, Manley Retires, Los Angeles Burns: A Community Endures

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Key Developments at a Glance

• 9 April 1992: John Major wins surprise UK election majority; Caribbean community faces a fourth consecutive Conservative term.
• Michael Manley retires as Jamaica PM on health grounds in February 1992; PJ Patterson elected PNP leader and becomes PM.
• 29 April–4 May 1992: Los Angeles riots follow Rodney King verdict; Caribbean community in Britain follows events with recognition and grief.
• Earth Summit June 1992 in Rio de Janeiro; Caribbean SIDS nations press for climate action as existential threat to the region.
• Maastricht Treaty signed February 7, 1992; Caribbean community considers implications of deeper European integration for UK-Caribbean ties.
• Race Relations and immigration enforcement continue without reform; community organisations press for law changes the new government shows no intention of making.

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The first half of 1992 is, for the Caribbean community in Britain, a season of disappointed expectation and renewed determination. The general election of 9 April produces a result that no opinion poll predicted: John Major’s Conservative Party wins a majority of 21 seats — the smallest working majority in decades, but a majority nonetheless — despite months of polling that consistently put Labour ahead. Neil Kinnock, whose leadership of the Labour Party has transformed it from the unelectable shambles of 1983 into a credible governing party, concedes with a graciousness that cannot conceal the depth of the defeat. For the Caribbean community, which voted Labour in proportions that have been consistent since the 1950s and which has spent the Thatcher years enduring policies — on immigration, on policing, on public spending — that have disproportionately damaged it, the result is four more years of a government that has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to treat the community’s interests as secondary to those of its own electoral coalition.

The Election Result: Four More Years

The Caribbean community’s post-election analysis is clear-eyed and unsentimental. The result is a defeat not only for Labour but for the communities that Labour’s programme was designed to serve: the programmes on race equality, on immigration reform, on community policing, and on public investment in the cities where Black British communities are concentrated will not happen under a Conservative government that has no political incentive to implement them. The three Black MPs who had been elected in 1987 — Paul Boateng, Diane Abbott, and Bernie Grant — are all re-elected, and Keith Vaz and Piara Khabra also hold their seats. But the parliamentary Black presence, however significant symbolically, cannot change what a government with a majority and an agenda that excludes the Caribbean community’s interests will choose to do.

Manley’s Retirement and Patterson’s Succession

In February 1992, Michael Manley — who has served as Jamaica’s Prime Minister since 1989 and before that from 1972 to 1980, and who has been one of the defining figures of Caribbean politics for two decades — announces his retirement on health grounds. Manley, whose democratic socialist politics shaped Jamaica’s relationship with the Caribbean diaspora in Britain and whose political vision influenced a generation of Caribbean political thought on both sides of the Atlantic, retires with his reputation intact and his legacy debated but substantial. The Caribbean community in Britain, many of whose members have been politically formed by their engagement with Manley’s ideas — his positions on CARICOM, on reparations, on the non-aligned movement, on the primacy of Caribbean cultural identity — marks his retirement as the end of a political era.

His successor, Percival James Patterson — PJ Patterson — has served as a senior minister throughout the Manley years and brings to the prime ministership a combination of legal training, diplomatic experience, and a deep understanding of the Caribbean diaspora’s relationship with Jamaica. Patterson’s accession is welcomed by community organisations in Britain, which anticipate a government that will take the diaspora relationship seriously as a matter of economic and foreign policy rather than treating it as a peripheral concern.

Los Angeles and the Mirror on the Wall

On 29 April 1992, a Los Angeles jury acquits four White police officers of all charges in connection with the beating of Rodney King — a beating that was filmed by a bystander and broadcast internationally, and that the community had assumed would be impossible to acquit against the evidence of the video. The acquittal triggers four days of the worst urban disorder in the United States since the 1960s: fifty-five people are killed, more than two thousand are injured, and an estimated one billion dollars of property is destroyed across Los Angeles. The Korean-American community in Los Angeles is among the worst affected.

The Caribbean community in Britain watches the Los Angeles events with a recognition that is painful and familiar. The videotaped beating, the acquittal, and the community’s response all speak to structural dynamics that the Caribbean community in Britain knows from its own experience: over-policing, under-protection, the differential application of force against Black bodies, and the failure of the justice system to hold police officers accountable for violence against Black people. The specific geography of Los Angeles is different from Brixton, Handsworth, or Toxteth; the structural pattern is recognisably the same.

The Earth Summit and Caribbean Vulnerability

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, June 1992 — the Earth Summit — brings together 172 governments and produces Agenda 21, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Convention on Biological Diversity. For the Caribbean Small Island Developing States, whose representatives attend and whose governments have been pressing for recognition of their particular vulnerability to sea-level rise, increased hurricane intensity, and coral reef destruction, the Summit is both an opportunity and a source of frustration: the framework commitments are important, but the binding obligations that Caribbean nations require — specific, enforceable commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — are not yet in place. The Caribbean community in Britain follows the Rio proceedings with the knowledge that the islands from which it came are among the most climate-vulnerable places on earth.

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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); House of Commons Hansard; United Nations Environment Programme.

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