7/7 and Katrina: A Caribbean Community Absorbs Two Shocks

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 2006 | Period covered: July–December 2005

Key Developments at a Glance

• 7 July 2005 London bombings kill 52 people; Caribbean community members are among victims and first responders.
• Second attempted attack on 21 July fails; one of the suspects is British-Somali, prompting community tensions.
• Hurricane Katrina August 2005 devastates New Orleans and US Gulf Coast; Caribbean diaspora notes racial dimension.
• Blair government’s anti-terrorism legislation triggers civil liberties debate affecting minority communities.
• PJ Patterson announces intention to retire; Portia Simpson Miller emerges as likely successor.
• UK Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 raises concerns about stop-and-search powers and Black Britons.

The second half of 2005 opens with the worst terrorist attack on British soil since the Lockerbie bombing of 1988. At 08:50 on Thursday 7 July 2005, coordinated suicide bombings struck three Underground trains and a double-decker bus in central London, killing fifty-two people and injuring more than seven hundred. Among the dead were people of many nationalities and communities; among those who responded in the immediate aftermath were NHS workers, police officers, and emergency services personnel — drawn from the full diversity of London’s population. The Caribbean community, embedded in London’s transport network as workers and travellers for more than half a century, is part of the fabric of the city that was attacked. It responds as one of London’s communities, not as an observer.

The 7 July Bombings and Their Aftermath

The London bombings of 7 July 2005, carried out by four British Muslim men including three of Pakistani heritage and one born in Jamaica — Germaine Lindsay, who was twenty years old and had converted to Islam — killed 52 innocent people on the Circle, Hammersmith & City, and Piccadilly lines and on a number 30 bus in Tavistock Square. The bombings were the deadliest terrorist attack in the United Kingdom since Lockerbie, and they fell on the day after London had learned that it would host the 2012 Olympic Games — a juxtaposition of celebration and horror that made the shock more acute.

For the Caribbean community in Britain, the involvement of a Jamaican-born man among the bombers added a layer of particular anguish and complexity to an event that was in any case deeply distressing. Community leaders across Britain were unanimous in their condemnation of the attacks, and in their rejection of any suggestion that Germaine Lindsay’s Jamaican birth was relevant to the ideological radicalisation that led him to mass murder. The Jamaican High Commission issued a statement expressing grief for the victims, condemnation of the attackers, and solidarity with London and with Britain. PJ Patterson, Jamaica’s Prime Minister, expressed Jamaica’s condolences to the UK government.

The political aftermath of 7 July placed significant pressure on the Blair government to legislate rapidly on terrorism. The Terrorism Act 2006, which would follow, and the debates around detention without charge, glorification of terrorism, and control orders, all raised concerns in the Caribbean community about the potential for anti-terrorism powers to be used disproportionately against Black and minority ethnic communities. The experience of the previous decades — in which stop-and-search powers had been consistently applied at higher rates against Black people — provided a historical context for these concerns that the community was not prepared to ignore.

Hurricane Katrina: Race, Poverty and the American Mirror

When Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the United States Gulf Coast on 29 August 2005, and when the subsequent failure of the New Orleans levee system submerged the city and left tens of thousands of predominantly Black and poor residents stranded without food, water, or rescue, the Caribbean diaspora in Britain watched with horror and recognition. The images broadcast from the Superdome and the Convention Centre — of Black Americans abandoned by their government, described in the media by language that would not have been applied to White evacuees, trapped in conditions that recalled nothing so much as the holds of slave ships in the imaginations of those drawing the comparison — resonated powerfully with communities that understood structural racism from the inside.

For the Caribbean community in Britain, Katrina was not a distant American spectacle. It was a parable about what happens when the racial geography of poverty and investment is laid bare by catastrophe. It prompted conversations in community organisations, churches, and homes about the persistence of racial inequality in Western societies that present themselves as post-racial, about the gap between the rhetoric of inclusion and the reality of whose lives are treated as expendable, and about the work that remains to be done. Caribbean community fundraising efforts raised money for Katrina relief; the political lessons were felt more deeply and more personally.

Jamaica: Patterson’s Final Chapter

In Kingston, PJ Patterson — who will have been Prime Minister for thirteen years when the period covered by this edition ends — has signalled that he intends to retire from the leadership of the People’s National Party. The announcement of his departure has opened a succession contest within the PNP that is centred on Portia Simpson Miller, the Deputy Leader and senior government minister who has built a substantial following among working-class Jamaicans and within the party’s grassroots. The prospect of Jamaica’s first female Prime Minister is being discussed across the Caribbean and in the diaspora with a mix of excitement and careful assessment of what her leadership would mean in practice.

Patterson’s final months have been overshadowed by the violence that continues to claim lives in Kingston and its environs at rates that shock international observers, and by the economic constraints that limited his government’s capacity to invest in the social interventions that might address the conditions from which violence grows. The diaspora in Britain engages with this reality through remittances — which continue to fund family members’ basic needs in communities that the formal economy has failed — and through the organisations that advocate for investment in Jamaica’s human development alongside the debt repayment and structural reform that the international financial institutions require.

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

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