September 11 and the Bradford Riots: Britain and the World in Crisis

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 2002 | Period covered: July–December 2001

Key Developments at a Glance

• Race riots in Bradford, Burnley, and Oldham, summer 2001: the worst racial disorder in Britain since the early 1980s.
• Cantle Report published December 2001; its finding of ‘parallel lives’ in northern towns prompts community-cohesion debate.
• September 11 attacks, 11 September 2001: Caribbean diaspora members among victims; community mourns and watches political response.
• Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 rushed through Parliament in December; indefinite detention without trial alarms civil liberties groups.
• Tony Blair wins second Labour term in June 2001 election; Caribbean community maintains voting loyalty.
• Afghanistan war begins October 2001; Caribbean community voices concern over civilian casualties and the path ahead.

The second half of 2001 compresses a generation’s worth of events into six months. It begins with riots in Bradford, Burnley, and Oldham that expose the depth of racial and economic grievance in Britain’s post-industrial northern towns, and that produce a national debate about community cohesion and social fracture that will shape policy for years. Then on 11 September 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon kill nearly three thousand people and transform the political landscape of the Western world overnight. For the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, the summer riots carry a particular resonance: the communities involved are not Caribbean, but the underlying dynamics — marginalisation, under-investment, discriminatory policing, and the mobilisation of racial resentment — are recognisable from a long British history. And September 11, while it overwhelmingly affects Muslim communities and not Caribbean ones in its immediate domestic consequences, changes the security environment in which all minority communities in Britain must now navigate their lives.

The Bradford, Burnley and Oldham Riots

The riots that erupted in Bradford, Burnley, and Oldham in the spring and summer of 2001 — involving young British Asian men, White far-right provocateurs, and a police presence that was initially inadequate and later overwhelming — were the most serious incidents of racial disorder in Britain since the 1981 Brixton uprising and the disturbances that followed. The communities involved were primarily British Pakistani and British Bangladeshi, not Caribbean; but the Caribbean community, whose political formation was shaped by the Brixton riots of twenty years earlier, understood the dynamics at work. Poverty, poor housing, chronic unemployment, under-funded schools, a sense of permanent exclusion from the mainstream — these conditions had been identified by Lord Scarman in 1981 and had not been adequately addressed in the two decades since.

The Cantle Report, commissioned by the Home Office and published in December 2001, introduced the concept of ‘parallel lives’ to the debate: the finding that different communities in northern towns lived entirely separate existences, with no meaningful contact across ethnic lines, and that this separation had created conditions in which mutual suspicion and resentment could flourish. The report’s conclusions prompted a national debate about community cohesion that Caribbean community organisations engaged with carefully and critically. The ‘parallel lives’ diagnosis, they argued, needed to be complemented by an honest account of why communities had become separated: of the housing allocation policies, the school catchment systems, the employment discrimination, and the disinvestment that had structured segregation rather than allowing it to develop naturally.

September 11 and Its Consequences for Britain

The attacks of 11 September 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, carried out by nineteen Al-Qaeda operatives and killing 2,977 people, transformed Western politics with a speed and completeness that no single event since the end of the Cold War had matched. In Britain, as in the United States, the immediate response combined grief, solidarity with the American people, and a rapid militarisation of political discourse around the concept of a ‘war on terror’ that Tony Blair adopted with particular energy. The Caribbean community in Britain mourned with the rest of the country, including for community members who were among the dead — people who worked in the financial district of lower Manhattan, who were visiting New York, or who had family members in the towers.

The Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, rushed through Parliament in October, November, and December 2001 in response to the attacks, introduced emergency powers whose most dramatic provision was the indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals whom the Home Secretary certified as suspected international terrorists. The provision, later ruled incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights by the House of Lords, was applied primarily against Muslim men from North Africa and the Middle East. But the Act’s broad provisions — expanded powers of surveillance, new offences, extended stop-and-search powers — were understood by the Caribbean community as establishing a security environment that would affect all minority communities in Britain, and that would require sustained vigilance from civil society organisations.

Labour’s Second Term: The Caribbean Community’s Mandate

Tony Blair’s Labour Party had won its second consecutive general election on 7 June 2001, with a majority of 167 seats — marginally smaller than 1997 but still one of the largest in British parliamentary history. The Caribbean community had voted Labour in its habitual overwhelming proportions, and the Labour government’s second term had begun with the same public service investment programme and the same commitment to racial equality legislation that had characterised the first. The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 was now on the statute book; the Macpherson reforms were being implemented; and David Blunkett, as Home Secretary, was pressing ahead with both a community cohesion agenda and an increasingly restrictive immigration framework.

For the Jamaican diaspora, the second Blair term carries a specific set of concerns that sit alongside the broader political relationship. The programme of deportation charter flights to Jamaica has expanded, removing an increasing number of people whose ties to Britain are deep and whose ties to Jamaica are minimal. The immigration legislation that has passed — and the legislation that is in development — is tightening the conditions under which Jamaican and other Commonwealth nationals can enter and remain. And the reparations question — the argument for Britain’s formal engagement with the legacy of slavery that Caribbean community organisations have been pressing for decades — remains firmly outside the bounds of what the government is willing to discuss. As 2001 ends and 2002 begins, the Caribbean community in Britain carries its history, its ambitions, and its demands into a world that has been unmistakably altered.

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

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