Macpherson’s Year One: Reform Promised, Reality Tested

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

Key Developments at a Glance

• Macpherson Report one year on: Caribbean community publishes first audit of Metropolitan Police reform progress.
• Stop-and-search statistics for 1999 show Black people stopped at rates four times higher than White people.
• Jack Straw launches public consultation on race equality legislation; Caribbean groups make detailed submissions.
• Jamaica celebrates 38th Independence anniversary in August; London diaspora events draw thousands.
• PJ Patterson PM Jamaica presses IMF for debt relief; structural adjustment continues to constrain public spending.
• Kosovo aftermath: Caribbean community notes parallels between Western humanitarian intervention and post-colonial history.

The year 2000 opens with the Macpherson Report thirteen months old and the Caribbean community in Britain in the position of creditor — holding a debt of reform that the Metropolitan Police Service and the Home Office owe on the strength of Sir William Macpherson’s seventy recommendations. The report’s finding that the Metropolitan Police was ‘institutionally racist’ — the first time that phrase had been applied to a British public institution by an official inquiry — represented an acknowledgement that the Caribbean community had been demanding for decades. The question now is whether the acknowledgement will be followed by the substance of change, or whether — as has happened in previous cycles of racial crisis, official inquiry, and promised reform — the energy of the moment will dissipate before the structural changes have been made.

Measuring Macpherson: The First Year

The seventy recommendations of the Macpherson Report span a range from the operational — how the police respond to racist incidents, how they record such incidents, how they liaise with victims’ families — to the cultural and constitutional, including the recommendation that the definition of a racist incident be extended to cover any incident which the victim or anyone else perceives to be racist. This last recommendation, implemented in the aftermath of the Report, has transformed the way racist incidents are recorded and has had a direct impact on the Caribbean community’s experience of reporting to the police.

But the deeper recommendations — on recruitment, on training, on the culture of the force, on accountability mechanisms — are harder to measure and slower to implement. Community organisations including the 1990 Trust, the Black Equity Organisation, and the monitoring groups attached to Caribbean community churches and cultural organisations have been compiling evidence. The picture they present is of partial progress at the margins and continuity at the core: more recording of racist incidents, more diverse recruitment at junior levels, but the same disproportionate use of stop-and-search powers, the same under-representation of Black officers in senior ranks, and the same culture of institutional defensiveness when individual officers are accused of racism.

Towards the Race Relations Amendment

The Home Secretary Jack Straw has launched a public consultation on proposed amendments to the Race Relations Act 1976, designed to extend its protections to public authorities including the police. The consultation has drawn substantial submissions from Caribbean community organisations, from the Commission for Racial Equality, and from the families of victims of racially motivated violence who have direct experience of the consequences of the existing exemptions. The community’s submissions are consistent: they want comprehensive coverage of public authorities, a strong positive duty to promote race equality rather than a weak duty merely to have regard to it, and enforcement mechanisms with real teeth.

The proposed legislation — the Race Relations (Amendment) Bill — has been introduced into Parliament and is making its way through the legislative process. Community organisations are engaged at every stage, pressing for amendments that strengthen the positive duty and close potential loopholes. The Bill is expected to receive Royal Assent before the end of the year, and its passage will represent a significant legislative achievement that the Caribbean community can claim as a consequence of its decades of advocacy and its response to the Lawrence murder and the Macpherson inquiry.

Jamaica and the Diaspora: Remittances and Returns

The relationship between the Jamaican diaspora in Britain and the island it came from is evolving in ways that are visible in the first year of the new millennium. A generation of Jamaicans who came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s is now in its sixties and seventies, approaching retirement and beginning to consider return. The pattern of ‘return migration’ — of Jamaicans who spent their working lives in Britain, built savings and property in both countries, and plan to spend their later years on the island — is well established, and the number of returnees increases each year. Community organisations that work with older Caribbean residents in Britain are engaging with the needs of people navigating the emotional, financial, and practical dimensions of this transition.

For Jamaica, the return of diaspora members with skills, savings, and experience acquired in Britain is a resource of significant value. The government of PJ Patterson has been working to facilitate return through reduced customs duties on household goods and through incentive schemes for returning residents. The engagement between returning diaspora members and Jamaican institutions — in health, in education, in business — is a dimension of the Jamaica-Britain relationship that operates largely beneath the radar of formal bilateral diplomacy but that has real consequences for Jamaica’s development.

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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