Chapeltown to Kingston

When a government report declared Britain was not institutionally racist, a community that had built the National Health Service knew exactly what it was being told

Briefing

• Sewell Race Report denies institutional racism; Caribbean community responds with fury.
• COVID vaccines reach Black households significantly later than white ones.
• Windrush compensation scheme still failing; calls for independent oversight intensify.
• BLM one-year anniversary: community takes stock of what changed.
• Jamaica begins vaccine rollout amid supply shortages and hesitancy.

On 31 March 2021, the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities — appointed by the Prime Minister and chaired by Dr Tony Sewell — published a report that would become one of the most contested documents in recent British public life. Its central conclusion, that the United Kingdom could not be described as an institutionally racist country, landed in Caribbean community centres, Windrush support groups and church halls across Britain with the force of a deliberate insult. In Chapeltown, the historic Jamaican and Caribbean neighbourhood of Leeds that had survived both the 1981 riots and decades of neglect, the reaction was immediate and unambiguous. The report, many felt, had not merely got the facts wrong. It had worked to obscure them.

The Sewell Report — named for its chair — ran to 264 pages and drew on a broad range of statistics and testimonies. It acknowledged that racial disparities existed in Britain. It argued, however, that these disparities were more often the product of class, geography and family structure than of racism in institutional form. It recommended against the use of the term “institutional racism,” which had entered official British language through the 1999 Macpherson Report into the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the Stephen Lawrence murder inquiry. For those who had relied on Macpherson as a framework for accountability — community advocates, civil rights lawyers, organisations that had spent two decades arguing for its implementation — the Sewell Report felt like an attempt to undo what Macpherson had established.

The timing made it worse. The report was published in the week of the first anniversary of the national COVID-19 lockdown. During that year, data had consistently shown that Black and Asian people in Britain were dying from COVID-19 at disproportionately high rates, were more likely to work in exposed frontline roles, and were less likely to have received a vaccination by the point at which their age cohort became eligible. Public Health England had documented the disparity. NHS England had noted it. The government’s own advisers had flagged it. To publish a report concluding that Britain did not have a problem with institutional racism in the same week that Black communities were burying disproportionate numbers of COVID dead was, for many, a cruelty compounded by its apparent indifference to the evidence.

The Vaccine Rollout and Racial Disparity

The vaccine rollout, which had begun in December 2020 and accelerated through the first months of 2021, was widely and correctly hailed as one of the most effective logistical achievements in modern British public administration. But the data on uptake told a complicated story. By the spring of 2021, surveys and NHS records consistently showed that Black Caribbean and Black African communities in Britain had among the lowest vaccination rates of any ethnic group. The reasons were multiple: historic mistrust of medical institutions rooted in documented experiences of unequal treatment, misinformation spreading through community WhatsApp groups, practical barriers to accessing vaccination sites, and a specific scepticism, in older Caribbean communities, born of lifetimes of being told that British institutions were working for them when the evidence suggested otherwise.

Community organisations, churches and Caribbean-led health advocacy groups responded with significant energy. In Chapeltown, in Handsworth, in Brixton and in Peckham, Caribbean community centres became vaccination information hubs. Pastors spoke from pulpits about the importance of taking the vaccine. Community nurses recorded short videos in patois and standard English explaining how the vaccines worked and why the data supported their safety. The result was a gradual increase in uptake among Caribbean communities through the spring, though the gap with white British communities remained. The effort demonstrated something that policymakers had been slow to grasp: that trusted community infrastructure was not a nice-to-have but a public health necessity.

Windrush: The Compensation Failure Continues

The Windrush Compensation Scheme, which had been operating since April 2019, continued in the first half of 2021 to deliver justice at a pace that those waiting for it could only describe as indifferent to their circumstances. By the spring of 2021, parliamentary questions and freedom of information requests had established that the vast majority of the estimated 15,000 people believed to be eligible for compensation had not received a payment. The scheme’s processes remained complex, its demands for documentation burdensome to the older, often unwell, individuals it was designed to serve, and its administration slow.

Community legal clinics that had been helping Windrush victims compile their claims reported a pattern of partial offers, of awards that did not cover the full losses documented in the evidence submitted, and of appeals processes that were exhausting and opaque. Wendy Williams, whose Windrush Lessons Learned Review had been published in March 2020, had recommended that the Home Office undergo a fundamental change of culture. In the first half of 2021, that culture change was not yet visible to those most directly affected. The call for the compensation scheme to be transferred to an independent body, away from the institution that had caused the harm, was growing louder.

Black Lives Matter: A Year On

The first anniversary of George Floyd’s murder on 25 May 2020 was marked across Britain with a mixture of reflection and assessment. What had the previous year of protest, public debate and institutional statement-making actually changed? The Black Lives Matter movement in Britain had produced visible results: the Colston statue in Bristol had been toppled, several institutions had commissioned reviews of their collections and histories, the BBC and major corporations had made public commitments to diversity. But community organisations and advocacy groups were cautious about the depth of these changes. Statements, they noted, were not policy. Reviews were not reform. And the Sewell Report, published just weeks before the anniversary, had used the language of evidence to argue, in effect, that the changes being demanded were based on a misdiagnosis.

In the diaspora beyond Britain, the question was equally live. In Jamaica, the government of Andrew Holness had been watching the reparations and anti-racism debates in the UK and North America closely. Jamaican academics and civil society organisations had argued that the international reckoning with anti-Black racism and colonial history created an opening for Jamaica’s own constitutional and reparations agenda. The republic question, the reparations question and the broader question of what Jamaica’s relationship with Britain should look like in the twenty-first century were all, in the first half of 2021, in active circulation.

Jamaica: Vaccine Challenges and Community Connections

Jamaica’s COVID-19 vaccination programme began in March 2021, dependent initially on deliveries through the COVAX facility and bilateral donations. The rollout was slower than in wealthier countries, constrained by supply shortages that affected much of the developing world during this period. For the Jamaican diaspora in Britain, Canada and the United States, the contrast between the pace of vaccination in their countries of residence and in Jamaica was uncomfortable. Many diaspora Jamaicans had elderly family members on the island who remained unvaccinated through the spring of 2021 while they themselves had already received both doses.

The diaspora response took practical forms. Diaspora health professionals in the UK and North America used their networks to advocate for Jamaica’s vaccine access. Community fundraising for COVID relief in Jamaica continued. And the conversations that had been happening online — on Zoom calls and WhatsApp groups and community radio programmes — about Jamaica’s economic vulnerabilities and the diaspora’s role in supporting the island through the crisis, deepened and became more organised. The Jamaican diaspora had always been part of Jamaica’s economic infrastructure through remittances and investment. The pandemic had made that role more explicit and, for those on both sides of the relationship, more urgent.

The first half of 2021 closed with the Caribbean community in Britain in an unusual position: more politically organised and articulate about systemic racism than at any point since the 1980s, and simultaneously more frustrated by the gap between that articulacy and the pace of institutional change. Chapeltown, like Brixton and Handsworth and Moss Side, had been having this conversation for decades. The country, it sometimes felt, was only just beginning to listen.