Reading to Kingston

Reading’s Jamaican community, concentrated in the Whitley and Caversham areas, had been watching Portia Simpson Miller’s political career for years. Caribbean women in the community had followed her rise with a particular investment. She was, in many ways, a figure who reflected the political character of Caribbean womanhood that the community had been practising, in less visible forms, throughout its time in Britain

Briefing

• Portia Simpson Miller sworn in as Jamaica’s first female Prime Minister, 30 March 2006.
• P.J. Patterson retires after fourteen years as Jamaica’s longest-serving Prime Minister.
• UK Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 receives Royal Assent in March.
• Caribbean communities prepare for Jamaica’s biennial diaspora conference in June 2006.
• Reading’s Caribbean community marks 44th Jamaican independence with renewed sense of pride.

P.J. Patterson had been Jamaica’s Prime Minister since 1992, the longest continuous tenure since independence. His retirement in early 2006 and the succession of Portia Simpson Miller were events that the Jamaican diaspora in Britain had anticipated for some time. The internal succession process within the People’s National Party had been watched from Britain with the same attention that the diaspora brought to everything concerning Jamaican governance, and Simpson Miller’s emergence as party leader and then as Prime Minister was, for many in the diaspora, the confirmation of something that had long seemed likely but had not yet been formalised.

What made the moment significant in the diaspora was not only that Simpson Miller was a woman — though that was, clearly, historically important — but the particular character of the woman she was and what she represented. She had come from working-class origins in a country where class and colour interacted in ways that made her origin remarkable for someone who had reached the highest political office. She was identified with the PNP’s social democratic traditions, with public investment, with the communities that had been least served by the economic orthodoxies of structural adjustment and austerity. She spoke a language that Caribbean women in the diaspora — women who had done the work of community organisation and church leadership and family maintenance without the recognition that such work deserved — recognised.

Caribbean Women and Political Leadership

The Caribbean community in Reading, as in communities across Britain, had always been organised significantly around the leadership of women. The churches that had sustained Caribbean community life since the 1950s had been run, in many cases, by women: as deaconesses, as choir leaders, as organisers of the practical and spiritual infrastructure that made the churches work. The community associations that had advocated for the community’s interests had been staffed and led, in many cases, by women. The supplementary schools that had provided educational support for Caribbean children had been founded and run, in many cases, by women. This was not a novelty in 2006; it was a continuation of a pattern that had been the foundation of Caribbean community life in Britain for more than fifty years.

Portia Simpson Miller’s Prime Ministership put a formal, national-level seal on something that the community had been practising informally for decades. It was, in that sense, a recognition rather than a revelation. But recognitions matter: they change the public record, they affect what is possible in the imagination of young women watching the news from Reading to Kingston, and they shift, however slowly, the expectations that define what political leadership can look like.

The Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006

In March 2006 — the same month that Portia Simpson Miller took office in Jamaica — the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 received Royal Assent in Britain. The act extended the obligations on employers to check the immigration status of their employees, created new offences related to document fraud, and expanded the government’s powers to remove people from Britain. It was part of the continuing project of immigration system reform that the Blair government had been engaged in since the early 2000s, and its practical effect on the Caribbean community — particularly those members of the community whose documentation was not straightforwardly in order — was an intensification of the verification burdens that they faced in their interactions with employers, landlords and public services.

The community organisations that were dealing with immigration cases were, in the first half of 2006, already seeing the cumulative effect of successive pieces of legislation. Cases that had been relatively manageable ten years earlier were now more complex, more document-intensive and more likely to result in outcomes that the community found arbitrary and unjust. The Jamaican diaspora in Britain had, in the half-century since the first post-war arrivals, developed a sophisticated understanding of British immigration law from the inside: it had been their law, applied to their families, in conditions that had often been hostile, and they had learned it the hard way.

Reading and the Diaspora’s Quiet Permanence

Reading’s Caribbean community was, in 2006, neither as large nor as publicly visible as the Caribbean communities of south London or Birmingham. But it had its own history and its own institutions: its churches, its community associations, its network of families who had come from Jamaica and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 1970s and who had built lives in the town’s housing estates and streets with the thoroughness that characterised Caribbean settlement across Britain. The Whitley estate, south of Reading town centre, had a significant Caribbean-heritage population; the community had been there long enough for its third generation to be grown and in the labour market.

The Jamaica independence celebration in August 2006 would mark forty-four years. The preparations, in the first half of the year, gave the community an occasion to reflect on what those decades had produced. Reading was not Kingston; its Caribbean community was not large enough to have the critical mass that produced the scale of cultural life visible in south London or Birmingham. But it had what every Caribbean community in Britain had: the connection to Jamaica, the memory of migration, the continuing transnational relationships that made it part of the same global migration story that connected the Jamaican diaspora from Reading to New York to Toronto, and from all of those places, across the water, back to Kingston.

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