Riots, Resignations and Resilience: The Caribbean Diaspora’s Turbulent 2011

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 2012 | Period covered: July–December 2011

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Key Developments at a Glance

• England riots of 6–11 August 2011 erupt in Tottenham after the killing of Mark Duggan by police on 4 August.
• Riots spread to Hackney, Brixton, Croydon, Birmingham and beyond — Caribbean-heritage communities at the centre of the debate.
• Government response focuses on criminality; community leaders call for deeper engagement with structural inequality.
• Jamaica PM Bruce Golding announces resignation in July 2011; Andrew Holness, 39, becomes PM in October.
• Jamaica general election announced for January 2012; Portia Simpson Miller leads PNP into campaign.
• Deportation flights and immigration rights remain live concerns for diaspora as year ends.

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The second half of 2011 has been one of the most turbulent and emotionally complex periods in recent memory for the Jamaican and Caribbean diaspora in the United Kingdom. Five days of riots in August — beginning in Tottenham and spreading to Hackney, Brixton, Croydon, Birmingham, Manchester and beyond — reopened debates about race, policing, deprivation, and the place of Black communities in British life that the relative stability of the preceding decade had allowed to recede from the front pages. The riots were not, in their immediate cause or their full complexity, a Caribbean community event: they involved a far wider cross-section of participants than any such category could contain. But they began in a neighbourhood with a deep and painful history of Caribbean-police tension, and they have prompted reflections about the structural conditions that the Caribbean diaspora in Britain has long sought to make visible.

Mark Duggan and the Tottenham Uprising

The trigger was the killing of Mark Duggan, a Black British man of Caribbean heritage, by a Metropolitan Police firearms officer in Tottenham, north London, on the evening of 4 August 2011. Duggan, 29, was shot dead during a police operation. An initial briefing suggested that Duggan had fired at officers; it later emerged that this was not supported by the evidence, and that the gun found at the scene had not been fired. The IPCC, which was already investigating the shooting, confirmed that the circumstances were under formal inquiry.

On the evening of 6 August, a peaceful demonstration by family members and community representatives outside Tottenham police station, demanding information about Duggan’s death, descended into disorder. In the hours and days that followed, disorder spread across north London and then to Hackney, Brixton, Croydon, Peckham, Ealing and further afield — to Birmingham, Manchester, Salford, Leicester, Nottingham and Liverpool. More than 3,000 crimes were recorded in connection with the disturbances. Five people died. Thousands were arrested. The images of burning buildings and looted shops, broadcast around the world, provoked an intense national and international debate about the state of Britain’s cities and their communities.

For the Caribbean diaspora community, the riots landed in a context laden with history. Tottenham was the site of the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985, one of the most traumatic episodes in the history of Caribbean-police relations in Britain — riots that were themselves triggered by the death of Cynthia Jarrett, a Black woman of Caribbean heritage, during a police search of her home. Brixton, where disorder also occurred in 2011, was the site of the 1981 and 1985 Brixton uprisings. The geography of the 2011 riots was not accidental: it tracked the communities where poverty, over-policing, and the persistent sense of exclusion from mainstream British life had been accumulating, largely invisibly to the national press, for decades.

The Political Response: Condemnation and Complexity

Prime Minister David Cameron, recalled from holiday, returned to London and addressed parliament in a recall session. His analysis was unsparing: the riots were “criminality, pure and simple,” the product not of social deprivation or racial injustice but of “moral collapse.” His government moved quickly to prosecute those arrested in large numbers, and courts sat through the night to process cases. Over a thousand people were imprisoned. The speed and severity of the response — and in particular the discussion of water cannon, plastic bullets, and potential army deployment — alarmed community organisations who had spent decades arguing for a more engaged, less confrontational approach to policing in urban communities.

The government’s framing was contested by many community leaders, academics, and commentators — among them David Lammy, MP for Tottenham and the member closest to the events of the first night, who called for both condemnation of the violence and honest engagement with its underlying causes. Research commissioned in the aftermath of the riots, including the independent report “Reading the Riots” produced by the Guardian and the London School of Economics, gathered testimony from hundreds of participants. The evidence it gathered was more complex than the “pure criminality” account: participants cited anger at police, a sense of being invisible and without prospects, and, in many cases, the riots as an opportunity to obtain consumer goods rather than any political motivation. The picture that emerged was one of communities that felt, genuinely and consistently, that the country’s institutions neither saw them nor cared about them.

Caribbean community organisations across the country organised meetings, community assemblies, and open discussions in the weeks following the riots. The Windrush generation — those who had come to Britain to build a new life and who had watched their grandchildren grow up in a country that seemed, in certain moments, to still not fully accept them — responded with a mixture of grief, anger, and a determination to make the arguments that the riot coverage had, once again, placed centre stage. Black community leaders were emphatic: the riots were not what the Caribbean community wanted, were not a reflection of its values, and yet were not entirely disconnected from conditions that the community had been trying to make visible for years.

Jamaica: Golding Out, Holness In

The second half of 2011 also brought significant political change in Jamaica. Prime Minister Bruce Golding of the Jamaica Labour Party announced his resignation in July 2011, following a period of severe political pressure stemming from the Christopher “Dudus” Coke extradition affair — in which Golding’s government had initially resisted a US extradition request for a powerful garrison don, before eventually acquiescing and presiding over a violent security operation in West Kingston that left more than seventy people dead.

Golding was succeeded as JLP leader and Prime Minister by Andrew Holness, who was sworn in on 23 October 2011 at the age of 39 — becoming the youngest person ever to hold the office of Prime Minister of Jamaica. Holness, a former Education Minister, brought a different style and political emphasis to the office, and moved quickly to call a general election for 29 January 2012. The election will see the JLP under Holness face the People’s National Party under Portia Simpson Miller, who leads into the campaign with a consistent polling advantage.

For the Jamaican diaspora in Britain, the political transition in Kingston has been followed with close interest. The Holness administration’s focus on economic reform, crime reduction, and education resonates with diaspora concerns. The question of reparations — which has been building across the Caribbean region as an academic and political project — has not yet been positioned as central to the JLP’s platform, though diaspora organisations are pressing for stronger engagement from all political parties in Jamaica on the issue of how Britain’s historical debt to Jamaica might be pressed.

Immigration and Deportation: Year’s End

The Home Office has continued through the second half of 2011 to pursue deportation charter flights to Jamaica. The deaths in custody of several individuals held in immigration detention centres have prompted renewed scrutiny of the immigration detention system, and campaign groups including Detention Action and the Medical Justice Network have been pressing for reform. The legal and political campaign against the mandatory deportation of individuals who have spent the majority of their lives in Britain continues, with limited success against a framework that the current government has shown no inclination to revisit.

Community organisations working with Caribbean-born residents who are encountering difficulties proving their right to work or to access public services have been building the casework evidence that will, in time, support the advocacy needed to challenge the emerging hostile environment framework. The problems are not yet widely understood outside the community — but the community knows they are there, and the work of documentation and advocacy is underway.

As 2011 ends and 2012 begins — a year that will bring the London Olympics, Jamaica’s 50th independence anniversary, and a Jamaican general election — the Caribbean diaspora in Britain enters the new year carrying the weight of a difficult few months and the knowledge that the fundamental questions of belonging, justice, and recognition remain unresolved. But it enters the year too with the pride of a community that has survived far harder moments than this — and with a clearer sense, forged in the fire of 2011, of what still needs to be said.

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Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; BBC News; Reuters; The Guardian; Reading the Riots (Guardian/LSE); IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission); UK Parliament Hansard; Detention Action; Medical Justice Network; Runnymede Trust; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK).

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