A Million March Against War: Caribbean Britain Speaks Out

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 July 2003 | Period covered: January–June 2003

Key Developments at a Glance

• 15 February 2003: up to two million people march in London against the Iraq War; Caribbean community organisations participate.
• Iraq War begins 20 March 2003; Blair’s decision without UN authorisation alienates much of the Caribbean community.
• Baghdad falls 9 April 2003; occupation begins but no weapons of mass destruction are found.
• Robin Cook resigns from Cabinet in protest; his speech cited by Caribbean community leaders as a statement of principle.
• Jamaica Independence 41st anniversary observed in August; diaspora events in UK reflect muted mood of the year.
• Caribbean community presses government on Macpherson implementation as Metropolitan Police reform stalls.

On 15 February 2003, between one and two million people converged on central London to march against the prospective invasion of Iraq — the largest mass demonstration in British history. They came from every part of British civil society: trade unions and peace organisations, faith communities and student bodies, community organisations and political parties, mothers with children in pushchairs and veterans of earlier anti-war movements. Among them were members of the Caribbean community in substantial numbers, organised through community organisations, churches, and the networks that connect the diaspora across Britain’s cities. The Caribbean presence on that day was not incidental; it reflected a deep and historically-grounded tradition of anti-imperialist politics that is woven into the fabric of Caribbean community life in Britain.

The Caribbean Community and the March Against War

The mobilisation of the Caribbean community against the Iraq War draws on a tradition that reaches back through the anti-apartheid movement, through the campaign against nuclear weapons, through the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and through the Caribbean’s own experience of colonialism and imperial violence. The Caribbean political tradition is one in which the use of military force by powerful Western states against smaller and weaker nations is read with a particular kind of scepticism — not because the Caribbean community is pacifist in any absolute sense, but because it knows from its own history what Western military power has meant for peoples who could not resist it.

The specific case for war against Iraq — centred on the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to Western security — was regarded with deep scepticism in the Caribbean community. The argument that the United Nations weapons inspection process should be allowed to reach its conclusions before any military action was taken found widespread support. When the government announced that it would go to war without a specific UN Security Council resolution authorising the use of force, community leaders across Britain expressed their opposition in terms that were unambiguous: this was not a legal or just war, and the Caribbean community would not be silent about it.

The War and Its Consequences for Political Relationships

The Iraq War began on 20 March 2003, with the United States, United Kingdom, and a coalition of smaller allies launching air strikes on Baghdad and a ground invasion from Kuwait. Baghdad fell to coalition forces on 9 April. Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed. And the weapons of mass destruction that had been cited as the primary justification for the war were not found. The failure to find WMD — which in the weeks following the occupation became clear to independent observers, if not yet acknowledged by the governments concerned — began to corrode public trust in the Blair government at a rate that would take years to fully manifest.

For the Caribbean community, which had voted for Labour in exceptional numbers in 1997 and 2001, the Iraq War represented a significant breach in a political relationship that had been built on the expectation that a Labour government would govern on different values from its Conservative predecessors. The resignation of Robin Cook from the Cabinet on 17 March 2003 — in a speech that argued that the case for war had not been made and that the decision to proceed without UN authorisation was a mistake — was widely quoted in Caribbean community media as an expression of the principle that the government itself had abandoned. Cook became, for many in the community, the marker of what responsible political leadership had required and chosen not to do.

Immigration and Racial Equality: The Domestic Agenda

The political controversy over Iraq has not displaced the domestic concerns that the Caribbean community brings to its engagement with British politics, but it has complicated the community’s capacity to press those concerns on a government that is simultaneously consuming enormous political capital in its defence of the war. The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, which received Royal Assent in November of that year, is coming into force through 2003 with a series of provisions that community organisations have identified as harmful: changes to support entitlements, new offences related to travel documents, and further expansion of detention powers.

On racial equality, the implementation of the Macpherson Report’s recommendations — published in 1999 following the inquiry into the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence — remains incomplete. Community organisations, including the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, have documented the gap between the recommendations and their implementation. The positive duty on public authorities to promote race equality, introduced by the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, has not produced the systemic change that was anticipated. Stop-and-search statistics continue to show Black people being stopped at rates disproportionately higher than White people. The promise of institutional change has not been fulfilled.

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; Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants; Stop the War Coalition; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK); House of Commons Hansard; Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust.

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