After Iraq: Trust Damaged, the Diaspora Demands More

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 2004 | Period covered: July–December 2003

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Key Developments at a Glance

• Hutton Inquiry sits through summer and autumn 2003; Kelly affair deepens the crisis of trust in the Blair government.
• Caribbean community leaders continue to press for Iraq inquiry and accountability for the decision to go to war.
• Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 provisions take effect; new restrictions on rights and services alarm community groups.
• PJ Patterson’s PNP wins Jamaica general election in October 2002; his fourth consecutive victory consolidates PNP dominance.
• CARICOM integration advances with Caribbean Court of Justice formally established in 2003.
• UK deportation programme to Jamaica expands; new charter flights operated regularly from British airports.

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The second half of 2003 is a period in which the British political landscape is still being shaped by the aftermath of the Iraq War — a conflict whose legality was contested before it began, whose prosecution was swift, and whose consequences are only beginning to become apparent. The Hutton Inquiry, established to examine the circumstances surrounding the death of weapons expert Dr David Kelly following a BBC report that claimed the government had “sexed up” its intelligence dossier, sits through the summer and into the autumn in hearings that reveal the innermost workings of Downing Street with an intimacy that is deeply damaging to the government’s standing. For the Caribbean community — which opposed the war and which has a well-developed capacity for institutional scepticism rooted in its own political history — the Hutton process is followed closely and assessed critically.

The Crisis of Trust and the Caribbean Community’s Political Response

The revelation that a senior government scientist had been placed under intense pressure following his conversation with a BBC journalist, and that he had subsequently taken his own life, produced a political crisis in Downing Street that the Hutton Inquiry only partially resolved. For much of the Caribbean community in Britain, the Iraq War had already established a significant breach of trust with the Blair government. The Kelly affair and the Hutton process deepened that breach. Community organisations that had consistently engaged with the government on the basis of shared commitments to public service, racial equality, and Commonwealth partnership found themselves asking whether the political relationship they had invested in since 1997 was delivering what they had hoped for.

Caribbean community newspapers including the Voice and the New Nation, which have documented the community’s political engagement over decades, ran sustained commentary on the gap between the government’s progressive rhetoric and its conduct in office on the issues that matter most to Caribbean-heritage people: immigration enforcement, racial disparities in the criminal justice system, under-investment in communities, and the continued absence of any engagement with the reparations question. The Macpherson Report of 1999, which had given Black communities hope that the Metropolitan Police’s institutional racism would be genuinely addressed, had not been followed by the wholesale reform it promised.

The Nationality Act’s New Restrictions

The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 — the fourth major piece of immigration legislation passed by the Blair government — contains provisions that are coming into full effect during 2003 and are creating significant problems for Caribbean community members. Among the Act’s provisions are restrictions on the support available to asylum seekers whose claims have been rejected, requirements for English language and civic knowledge tests as conditions of naturalisation, and expanded powers for the removal of those without leave to remain. The Act also makes it easier to deprive a person of British citizenship where that citizenship was acquired fraudulently.

Community legal centres are reporting a sharp increase in queries from Caribbean-heritage people who are uncertain about their immigration status or who are being caught up in enforcement operations that they did not anticipate. Some of these cases involve individuals who have lived in Britain since childhood but who never formalised their immigration status, having assumed that their presence was lawful. Others involve people who acquired citizenship through routes that the Home Office is now scrutinising more closely. The pattern is one that community organisations are tracking with growing alarm: a group of people who understand themselves to be British finding themselves engaged in legal processes that treat them as foreigners.

Jamaica: Patterson’s Fourth Victory and Caribbean Integration

In Jamaica, the year following PJ Patterson’s fourth consecutive general election victory in October 2002 — the most recent edition covered this milestone — has seen the government consolidate its position while managing the familiar pressures of high crime, debt service, and structural economic adjustment. Patterson’s longevity in office is a reflection both of the PNP’s organisational strength and of the JLP’s inability, under successive leaders, to present itself as a credible alternative government. The diaspora in Britain, many of whom maintain family ties and political loyalties that span generations, watches Jamaican politics with an attentiveness that no other political subject commands.

On the regional front, the formal establishment of the Caribbean Court of Justice in 2003 — with its headquarters in Port of Spain, Trinidad — represents a milestone in Caribbean legal integration. The CCJ is designed to serve both as the final court of appeal for those CARICOM countries that choose to accede to its appellate jurisdiction, replacing the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, and as the court with original jurisdiction for the interpretation of the revised treaty establishing the Caribbean Community. Jamaica has not yet acceded to the appellate jurisdiction of the CCJ — a decision that continues to be debated in Jamaican politics — but the court’s establishment is a step towards the completion of Caribbean constitutional independence that the diaspora broadly supports.

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

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