The Golden Jubilee and the Post-September 11 Anxiety

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

Key Developments at a Glance

• Queen Elizabeth II marks her Golden Jubilee in June 2002; Commonwealth celebrations include events in Jamaica.
• Caribbean diaspora in Britain responds to the Jubilee with a mix of celebration, ambivalence, and political reflection.
• Princess Margaret dies February 2002; Queen Mother dies March 2002; a year of royal mourning precedes the jubilee.
• Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 powers continue in force; Muslim communities most affected, but all minorities watchful.
• Manchester Commonwealth Games preparations reach final stage; Caribbean community anticipates the Games with excitement.
• Jamaica general election expected in autumn 2002; PJ Patterson’s PNP faces the JLP’s renewed challenge.

The first half of 2002 brings, for the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, a set of events that sit in characteristic tension. The Golden Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II — who has reigned since 1952 and is head of state not only of the United Kingdom but of Jamaica and several other Caribbean nations — is an occasion for celebration that is genuinely felt by many in the community and simultaneously a prompt for the more complicated reflections that the monarchy always invites in communities whose history is inseparable from Britain’s colonial past. This ambivalence is not a contradiction: it is the signature of a diaspora that has learned to hold complex truths simultaneously and to navigate the full complexity of its relationship with Britain.

The Golden Jubilee: Celebration and Reflection

The Golden Jubilee celebrations of June 2002 took place against a backdrop of double royal bereavement: Princess Margaret had died in February and the Queen Mother in March, giving the year a note of personal loss for the Royal Family that the Jubilee celebrations were meant to transcend. In Jamaica, where the Queen remains head of state and where the institution of the monarchy commands varying degrees of respect and affection, events were held to mark the occasion. The Governor-General, Sir Howard Cooke, represented Jamaica at formal celebrations, and community events were organised by Jamaica’s cultural institutions.

In Britain, the Caribbean diaspora’s response to the Golden Jubilee was characteristically varied. For older members of the community — those who came to Britain in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s as British subjects responding to the invitation to help rebuild the mother country — there is a relationship with the Crown that is personal and emotional: they came in the name of the Crown, their citizenship was grounded in it, and the Queen’s reign has been the backdrop of their entire lives in Britain. For younger members, and for those whose political formation has been shaped by the decolonisation debate and by the argument for reparations, the Crown’s history is inseparable from the history of slavery and colonial extraction that it administered and legitimised.

Caribbean community media engaged with the Jubilee with nuance rather than either simple celebration or simple rejection. The Voice, the New Nation, and Caribbean community radio stations across Britain carried programmes that combined tribute to the Queen’s service with honest discussion of the monarchy’s colonial legacy and with the argument — advanced most consistently from Jamaica and CARICOM — that the Caribbean nations’ relationship with the Crown should now be placed on an explicitly republican footing, or at least made the subject of a genuine democratic conversation about what head of state Jamaica and its Caribbean neighbours want in the twenty-first century.

Post-September 11: Security, Liberty and the Minority Community Experience

The Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, passed by Parliament in the weeks following the September 11 attacks in the United States, introduced the most significant extension of executive power in Britain since the emergency legislation of the Second World War. Its most contested provision — the power to detain indefinitely without trial foreign nationals suspected of terrorism — was used primarily against Muslim men, but the Act’s broad provisions and the enforcement culture it inaugurated affected all minority communities in Britain.

The Caribbean community in Britain watched the post-September 11 security environment with a historically informed wariness. The experience of previous decades — in which broad policing powers were exercised disproportionately against Black communities, in which the Special Branch maintained files on community organisations, and in which the “public order” justification was used to suppress legitimate protest — gave the community a set of reference points for assessing the current situation that the majority population did not always share. Community organisations pressed the Liberty civil liberties organisation and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants to maintain scrutiny of the Act’s application, and to ensure that the erosion of civil liberties in the name of security did not fall disproportionately on communities already subject to discriminatory policing.

Manchester Approaches: The Caribbean in the Commonwealth Games

The XVII Commonwealth Games, due to begin in Manchester on 25 July 2002, are in their final weeks of preparation as this edition goes to press. The Games represent a significant moment for the Caribbean diaspora in Britain: an occasion when the nations of the Caribbean — Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, the Bahamas, Belize, and others — compete on British soil in their own right, and when Caribbean-heritage British athletes who compete for England, Scotland, or Wales share space with the countries of their ancestral heritage. Community organisations across Britain are organising events around the Games, including watch parties, cultural programmes, and community celebrations that place Jamaican and Caribbean achievement in sport within the broader story of Caribbean contribution to British life.

Jamaica’s athletic programme has been building towards the Games throughout the first half of 2002. Jamaican sprinters and field athletes are among the favourites in their disciplines, and the island’s cycling programme is also expected to perform competitively. For the diaspora, the Games are a reminder of what Jamaica produces — of the talent, the discipline, and the national pride that are exported alongside the remittances and the cultural forms that define Jamaica’s presence in the world.

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

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