Luton to Kingston

In the Caribbean communities of Luton — in the streets around the Bury Park area, in the churches, in the community centres that had served the Caribbean population since the 1960s — the news from Kingston in March 2006 was received with the mixture of pride and reflection that tends to accompany a historic moment when it actually arrives rather than merely being anticipated

Briefing

• Portia Simpson Miller becomes Jamaica’s first female PM, March 2006, after PJ Patterson retires.
• Jamaica’s 2nd Biennial Diaspora Conference held in Kingston in June 2006.
• UK anti-terror legislation debated; Caribbean community concerns about racial profiling persist.
• Lebanon war summer 2006; Jamaican community in Britain follows geopolitical shifts.
• Luton’s Caribbean community celebrates 44th independence with reflection on progress made.

Portia Simpson Miller had been in Jamaican politics for more than three decades before she became Prime Minister. She had served in P.J. Patterson’s cabinets in multiple portfolios. She had been elected president of the People’s National Party in 2006 as Patterson’s chosen successor. When she was sworn in as Prime Minister on 30 March 2006, she became the first woman to hold the office in Jamaica’s independent history, and the reaction to her elevation, from the diaspora communities of Luton and Birmingham and Brixton, was one of unmistakable pride.

Pride, in this context, required some unpacking. The Caribbean community’s experience of women in leadership was not limited to this moment: Caribbean women had been, throughout the history of the diaspora, the organisational backbone of the community in Britain. They had founded and run the Saturday schools, the advice centres, the church programmes, the community associations. They had, in disproportionate numbers, been the ones who made the transnational connections work: who kept the family networks functioning across the Atlantic, who sent the remittances, who managed the dual lives of diaspora existence. Portia Simpson Miller’s elevation to the Prime Ministership was not a surprise to a community that had been watching Caribbean women exercise effective leadership in less formal and less celebrated ways for decades. But it was still a landmark, because the landmark mattered, because formal political power matters, and because its arrival confirmed something that the community had always known but that the world had been slower to recognise.

The Biennial Diaspora Conference

In June 2006, the second of Jamaica’s biennial diaspora conferences was held in Kingston. The conferences, which brought together diaspora representatives from Britain, North America, the Caribbean and beyond, were part of an effort by successive Jamaican governments to formalise and deepen the relationship between the island and the communities that had formed beyond its shores. The agenda covered investment and remittances, education and training, the cultural dimensions of diaspora identity, and the political questions around diaspora participation in Jamaican governance that had not yet been resolved.

The conference brought to the surface a set of tensions that were real and ongoing. The diaspora’s relationship with Jamaica was not simply one of uncomplicated affection and support. Diaspora communities had their own perspectives on Jamaican governance, on the use of remittances, on the conditions that were driving young Jamaicans to leave the island and that were making return difficult for those who wished to come back. The conferences were a space where those perspectives could be expressed, and where the Jamaican government was required to respond to them with more directness than was sometimes comfortable. The Jamaican diaspora was not an uncritical constituency, and the conferences made that clear.

Anti-Terror Legislation and Racial Profiling

The year 2006 was the first full year after the London bombings of 7 July 2005. The security landscape in Britain had changed significantly in the aftermath: new anti-terror legislation had been passed, the Metropolitan Police had expanded its counter-terrorism operations, and the public debate about the relationship between security policy and the communities that bore a disproportionate share of its attention was ongoing and heated. The Caribbean community was not the primary focus of post-July 7 counter-terrorism activity — that focus fell most heavily on British Muslim communities — but the broader extension of stop-and-search powers and the intensification of enforcement activity were felt in communities whose relationship with the police had never been straightforwardly comfortable.

The concern in Caribbean community organisations in Luton and across Britain was not only about immediate enforcement activity. It was about the direction of travel: the cumulative effect of successive waves of legislation and policy that had expanded the state’s powers to stop, to search, to detain and to deport. The community had been warning, for years, that these powers were used disproportionately against Black communities, and that their expansion would intensify that disproportion. The data, in 2006 as in the years before and after, supported that warning. The political will to act on the warning was not consistently present.

Luton’s Caribbean Community and the Long View

Luton’s Caribbean community had its own particular history. The town had been a centre of manufacturing employment — the Vauxhall car plant, the hat industry, the various engineering and service businesses that had drawn workers from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 1960s. By 2006, the manufacturing base had largely gone: the car plant had contracted, the hat industry had disappeared, the economic landscape of the town had been transformed by the same deindustrialisation that had reshaped communities across Britain from the 1970s onwards. The Caribbean community that had come to Luton to work in its factories was now a community in a post-industrial town, navigating an economy that had changed out of recognition since the generation that had built the community arrived.

The forty-fourth anniversary of Jamaican independence, celebrated in August 2006, was an occasion for the Luton community to reflect on what those decades had meant. The history of Jamaican independence was also, for the diaspora, a history of the communities that independence had both produced and been shaped by: the people who had left Jamaica in the post-independence decades, who had built lives in Luton and in similar towns across Britain, and who had maintained a connection to Jamaica that was still, in 2006, one of the defining features of who they were and how they understood their place in the world.

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