Macpherson’s Mandate: The Caribbean Community’s Challenge to Britain

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 2000 | Period covered: July–December 1999

Key Developments at a Glance

• Home Secretary Jack Straw announces government response to Macpherson; accepts 60 of 70 recommendations in full.
• Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Condon retires; Sir John Stevens appointed as successor.
• Caribbean community organisations begin systematic monitoring of Macpherson implementation across police services.
• Y2K preparations dominate national life; Caribbean community businesses and households prepare for millennium transition.
• PJ Patterson PM Jamaica marks island’s 37th independence; diaspora events across Britain celebrate Caribbean identity.
• Kosovo conflict ends; Caribbean community leaders press for consistent application of humanitarian principles.

The second half of 1999 is, for the Caribbean community in Britain, a period of political engagement of unusual intensity. The Macpherson Report, published in February of this year, has set a standard against which British policing and the British state must now be held. Jack Straw’s acceptance in July 1999 of the bulk of Macpherson’s seventy recommendations — with qualifications and timetables that community organisations are examining closely — represents the government’s formal commitment to a programme of change. The Caribbean community receives that commitment with the historically informed caution of a group that has watched official responses to racial injustice resolve themselves, in previous cycles, into symbolic gestures rather than structural transformation. This time, community organisations have decided, will be different — because they will not allow it to be the same.

Straw’s Response: Acceptance with Reservations

In his statement to the House of Commons following the publication of the Macpherson Report, Home Secretary Jack Straw accepted sixty of the seventy recommendations in full, accepted others in principle, and declined to implement a small number on grounds that the government argued related to operational police independence or to competing legal requirements. Among the recommendations that proved most contentious was the proposal to make racist language by police officers a disciplinary offence, which raised questions about the relationship between professional conduct and freedom of expression that the government addressed cautiously. The Caribbean community, through its representatives in Parliament and through its advocacy organisations, pressed for full implementation rather than the partial acceptance that politically inconvenient recommendations had received.

The appointment of Sir John Stevens as Metropolitan Police Commissioner, replacing Sir Paul Condon who retired at the end of September 1999, was watched closely by the Caribbean community. Condon had led a force that was found institutionally racist; his departure gave the new Commissioner the opportunity to signal a different approach. Stevens publicly committed to implementing the Macpherson reforms and to tackling the cultural dimensions of institutional racism within the force. Community organisations received the commitment as a baseline against which performance would be measured, not as assurance that the work was done.

The Millennium: Community Life at the Turn

The approach of the year 2000 — with all its attendant anxieties about the Y2K computer bug, its celebrations of millennium cultural events, and its ceremonies of national stock-taking — provides an occasion for the Caribbean community to assess where it stands in Britain fifty-two years after the Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury. The picture is one of profound achievement and persistent structural disadvantage. The community has produced generations of children who are British in every meaningful sense — born here, schooled here, working here, contributing here — and who are making careers in every profession and sector of British public and private life. The barriers that confronted the Windrush generation in housing, employment, and public facilities have been legislated away, though not always removed in practice.

And yet the data on racial inequality that the Office for National Statistics, the Commission for Racial Equality, and community research organisations compile consistently show that Caribbean-heritage people in Britain face disadvantages that are not explained by class or geography alone. In employment, Black Caribbean workers are more likely to be unemployed than White workers with similar qualifications. In education, Black Caribbean boys underperform relative to their academic potential in ways that have been documented across three decades without producing the systemic change that would address them. In criminal justice, Black people are over-represented at every stage from stop-and-search through to imprisonment. The Macpherson Report has given these inequalities a new political salience. Whether that salience translates into change is the question with which the community enters the new millennium.

Jamaica: The Century’s End

In Jamaica, the turn of the millennium is marked with celebrations that reflect both the resilience and the aspirations of a society that has navigated considerable difficulty in the decades since independence. PJ Patterson’s government has maintained political stability through economic adjustment, and the island’s cultural presence in the world — through music, sport, and the influence of its diaspora — continues to give Jamaica a global significance disproportionate to its size. The diaspora in Britain reflects that significance: the Jamaican community’s cultural contributions to British life, from the Notting Hill Carnival to the influence on British popular music, are not incidental decorations on the landscape of British culture. They are part of its substance.

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; New Nation; The Voice; BBC News; Reuters; AP; The Guardian; Runnymede Trust; Commission for Racial Equality; 1990 Trust; Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK); House of Commons Hansard; Metropolitan Police Service.

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