Blair’s Third Term: Caribbean Britain Weighs a Decade of Labour

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 July 2005 | Period covered: January–June 2005

Key Developments at a Glance

• Labour wins UK general election on 5 May 2005 with reduced majority; Caribbean vote holds but enthusiasm is waning.
• Michael Howard’s Conservative manifesto widely condemned as racially coded; Caribbean community notes the language.
• Charles Clarke replaces David Blunkett as Home Secretary; immigration enforcement priorities remain unchanged.
• Jamaica records more than 1,600 murders in 2004; diaspora presses Kingston for urgent security action.
• CARICOM Single Market takes effect January 2006; Caribbean diaspora in UK explores implications for Jamaican trade.
• London’s 2012 Olympic bid is live; Caribbean community anticipates a potential cultural moment for Black Britain.

The United Kingdom general election of 5 May 2005 returns Tony Blair to Downing Street for a third consecutive term — an achievement without precedent in Labour Party history, and one that would have seemed impossible when the party last left office in 1979 with the Callaghan government’s defeat. The result, however, is significantly different from the landslide victories of 1997 and 2001: Labour’s majority in the House of Commons falls from 167 to 66 seats, on a swing that reflects the damage done by the Iraq War to Blair’s personal credibility and to the government’s trust ratings. For the Caribbean community in Britain — a community that voted Labour in overwhelming numbers in 1997 and again in 2001 — the 2005 election is a more ambivalent affair.

Eight Years of New Labour: The Caribbean Community’s Assessment

The Blair governments’ record on race equality and diversity since 1997 is substantial in some respects and deeply disappointing in others. On the positive side, the Human Rights Act 1998 has provided a legal framework for challenging governmental overreach, including in immigration and asylum cases. The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, passed in the wake of the Macpherson Inquiry into the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the Stephen Lawrence murder, extended the duty not to discriminate to public bodies and introduced a positive duty to promote race equality. The Macpherson Inquiry itself — and the concept of institutional racism that it introduced into mainstream British public discourse — represents a significant acknowledgement of what Caribbean and other Black communities had been saying for decades.

Against these gains must be set a series of developments that Caribbean community organisations view with concern. The progressive tightening of immigration controls since 2001 has made family reunification more difficult for established Caribbean communities and has signalled a shift in the government’s relationship with its Commonwealth partners that sits uneasily with Labour’s rhetoric of diversity and inclusion. The Iraq War, opposed by the overwhelming majority of Black British voters, has strained the community’s relationship with Blair personally in ways that voting Labour did not fully resolve. And the persistent gaps in educational attainment, employment rates, and health outcomes that separate Caribbean-heritage people from the national average have not narrowed during eight years of sustained public investment.

The Conservative Campaign: Coded Messages and Community Concern

The Conservative Party’s general election campaign under Michael Howard was notable for an immigration platform that many in the Caribbean community and in the broader Black British population interpreted as racial coding rather than neutral policy prescription. The campaign’s imagery, language, and framing — around asylum seekers, immigration numbers, and the “strain” on public services — was widely discussed in community media as a return to the politics of Powellism in updated form. The Conservatives lost the election comprehensively in urban Britain, and particularly in the constituencies with substantial Black and minority ethnic populations. But the willingness of a major party to campaign on those terms was noted and will not be forgotten.

The Runnymede Trust published analysis during the campaign period documenting the gap between the two major parties’ approaches to race and migration, and warning that the normalisation of restrictive immigration rhetoric in mainstream political discourse has consequences for the security and dignity of established minority communities regardless of which party wins. Caribbean community leaders have consistently argued that the framing of immigration as a problem to be solved rather than a contribution to be welcomed does harm to communities whose presence in Britain predates the current political debate by generations.

Jamaica: Violence, Remittances and Regional Integration

In Jamaica, the figures for 2004 document a murder rate that placed the island among the most violent countries in the world per capita — more than 1,600 killings in a population of 2.6 million. The PJ Patterson government has pursued a series of security initiatives, but the structural conditions that drive violence — poverty, unemployment, the garrison system, and the drug trade that funds it — remain largely unaddressed. The diaspora in Britain engages with this crisis through the remittances that sustain families in communities where the state has failed, through the political advocacy that presses Kingston to take structural reform seriously, and through the grief of people who have lost relatives to violence in a country they left but never stopped loving.

On the regional front, the CARICOM Single Market and Economy — the framework for deeper economic integration among Caribbean Community member states — is approaching its implementation date, with the single market component expected to come into effect in January 2006. The free movement of skilled labour, goods, and services within CARICOM is a development that the Jamaican diaspora in Britain tracks with interest, given its implications for how Jamaicans move within the region and how regional integration affects the island’s economic options. The diaspora’s own mobility — between Jamaica, Britain, North America, and the wider Caribbean — makes regional integration directly relevant to their lives and choices.

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

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