Oldham Burns, Blair Wins: A Community Tests Its Loyalties

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 July 2001 | Period covered: January–June 2001

Key Developments at a Glance

• Oldham riots, April–May 2001: racial disorder involving young White and Asian men exposes segregation and deprivation.
• Bradford riots, 7 July 2001 (just outside this period): follow Oldham as northern towns convulse over race and policing.
• UK general election, 7 June 2001: Labour wins second landslide; Caribbean community votes Labour in overwhelming numbers.
• Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 comes into full force; public bodies now under positive duty to promote race equality.
• Macpherson reforms continue to be implemented unevenly; community organisations press Metropolitan Police for real change.
• PJ Patterson’s PNP prepares for Jamaica general election; diaspora watches Golding’s JLP challenge with interest.

The first half of 2001 presents the Caribbean community in Britain with a lesson in contrasts that it has learned to navigate across decades of British public life. On one side, a Labour government returned to power with a majority of 167 seats, a mandate that the Caribbean community endorsed with a consistency that reflects both political loyalty and the absence of a credible alternative. On the other side, riots in Oldham and Burnley that recall the disorders of 1981 and 1985, exposing the depth of racial and economic fracture in Britain’s post-industrial north in ways that no amount of official race relations legislation has yet addressed. The Caribbean community reads both developments from a position of experience: it has been here before, in different forms, and it knows that the gap between political progress and social reality remains stubbornly wide.

Oldham and Burnley: The North’s Racial Fault Lines

The riots in Oldham in late April and early May 2001, and in Burnley in June, involved confrontations between young White and Asian men that were preceded by weeks of tension, far-right agitation, and incidents of racial violence in both directions. The communities involved were not Caribbean — Oldham and Burnley have large British Pakistani and British Bangladeshi populations living alongside a White working-class population that has experienced decades of deindustrialisation and economic decline. But the Caribbean community in Britain understands the dynamics at work with a clarity that comes from its own history of navigating structural racism in British cities.

The Runnymede Trust and community organisations across Britain were quick to place the Oldham and Burnley disorders in a structural context: the riots did not happen because different communities lived near each other, but because they lived near each other in conditions of poverty, in under-funded schools, in areas that public and private investment had largely abandoned, and in a political climate in which far-right organisations were deliberately working to exploit racial resentment. The Cantle Inquiry, commissioned by the Home Office and due to report at the end of the year, would examine whether the concept of ‘community cohesion’ could provide a framework for understanding and addressing these dynamics. The Caribbean community engaged with that inquiry with caution: cohesion frameworks, it argued, needed to be built on structural remedies rather than on cultural prescriptions.

Labour’s Second Landslide: The Caribbean Vote

The general election of 7 June 2001 returned Labour to power with a majority of 167 seats — marginally smaller than the historic 179-seat majority of 1997, but still one of the largest in British parliamentary history. The turnout, at 59.4 per cent, was the lowest since 1918, reflecting widespread disengagement from a contest whose outcome was not seriously in doubt. The Caribbean community voted Labour with the consistency that has characterised its electoral participation since the 1970s. The concentration of Caribbean-heritage voters in urban constituencies that are safe Labour seats means that the community’s electoral influence is primarily expressed through the selection and retention of Black MPs rather than through marginal-seat swing votes.

The 2001 Parliament will include a small but significant number of Black British MPs — including several of Caribbean heritage — whose presence in the Commons represents both the community’s political integration and its continuing underrepresentation relative to its share of the population. For the second Blair term, the Caribbean community’s political agenda centres on: the full implementation of the Macpherson recommendations; the passage of legislation addressing racial disparity in the criminal justice system; a more equitable immigration policy that recognises the specific character of the Caribbean community’s historical relationship with Britain; and engagement with the reparations question. These are the tests by which the second Labour term will be assessed.

The Race Relations Act in Force

The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, which received Royal Assent in November 2000 and is now coming into full force, extends and strengthens the 1976 Race Relations Act in ways that Caribbean community organisations had pressed for across two decades. Most significantly, it extends the duty not to discriminate to public authorities — including the police, the NHS, local authorities, and government departments — that were previously exempt. And it introduces a positive duty on those bodies not merely to avoid discrimination but actively to promote race equality in their functions. This is a significant legislative advance, and the Caribbean community acknowledges it as such.

The test, as community organisations consistently argue, is not the legislation itself but its implementation. The Metropolitan Police Service — found by the Macpherson Report to be institutionally racist — is subject to the new positive duty, but the pace and depth of change within the force continues to be contested. Stop-and-search rates for Black people remain disproportionately high. Representation of Black and minority ethnic officers at senior ranks remains extremely low. The cultural change that Macpherson identified as necessary has not been delivered at the speed or the depth that the report demanded. Community organisations are compiling the evidence, pressing the Independent Police Complaints Authority, and preparing for a sustained campaign in the second term.

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; Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK); House of Commons Hansard.

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