Atlanta to Kingston

Grenfell Tower burned in one of Britain’s wealthiest boroughs, and the Caribbean community in its shadow understood immediately that this was not an accident but a consequence — of inequality, neglect and a state that had stopped paying attention

Briefing

• Grenfell Tower fire kills 72 on 14 June 2017; Caribbean residents among victims.
• UK snap general election on 8 June returns hung parliament; May loses majority.
• Trump’s immigration executive orders create anxiety for Caribbean Americans.
• 8th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference held; republic and investment discussed.
• Hostile environment in operation; community organisations document harm.

The fire began shortly after midnight on 14 June 2017 and was visible from across London for hours. Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey social housing block in North Kensington, had been recently refurbished. The cladding installed during the refurbishment burned. Seventy-two people died. Among them were Caribbean-born and Caribbean-heritage residents who had been living in Grenfell and in the wider North Kensington area — one of the last affordable corners of one of the wealthiest boroughs in Britain — for years, in some cases for decades. The fire was not a natural disaster. It was the consequence of decisions: about building materials, about safety regulations, about the value placed on the lives of social housing tenants in a borough where a flat across the road might sell for several million pounds.

The Caribbean community’s response to Grenfell was immediate and visceral. The North Kensington area, encompassing Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill and Portobello Road, has been a centre of Caribbean life in London since the 1950s. Carnival itself was born in this neighbourhood. The community knew Grenfell Tower and knew the people who lived in it. In the days after the fire, as the full extent of the death toll became clear and as the government’s initial response — an inadequate supply of housing for survivors, a delayed inquiry, a sense of official discomfiture at the scale of the failure being exposed — became apparent, the community’s grief turned into something sharper and more political.

Class, Race and the State

The debate about what Grenfell represented — about what its causes were, about what kind of political and economic system produced the conditions for 72 people to die in a tower block in the sixth richest city in the world — became central to British public life in the summer of 2017. For the Caribbean community, the analysis was not complicated. Grenfell was social housing in a rich borough. Its residents were predominantly working class and included a high proportion of people from ethnic minority backgrounds. The refurbishment had used cheaper, more flammable cladding than was available. The Tenant Management Organisation that had been responsible for the building had not responded adequately to residents’ safety concerns. The fire was the product of a system that had consistently treated the people who lived in Grenfell as less important than the people who owned property around them.

The inquiry process, which would produce its final reports years later, was welcomed as a necessary accounting. But community organisations in North Kensington noted, from the outset, that inquiries were not the same as justice, and that justice — for those who had died, for those who had survived, for those who had lost homes and possessions and neighbours and family members — would require something more than a very long document concluding that things had gone wrong.

The Snap Election and Its Aftermath

Six days before Grenfell, the United Kingdom held a general election that Theresa May had called in April, confident that she could increase her parliamentary majority ahead of the Brexit negotiations. The result was a hung parliament. The Conservatives remained the largest party but lost their majority. May formed a government with the support of the Democratic Unionist Party. The election result was widely read as a rejection of May’s approach, a failure of political calculation, and — in the communities that had felt most directly the consequences of seven years of Conservative government — a belated but significant reckoning.

For the Caribbean community, the election result was a complex signal. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party had increased its vote substantially and had secured strong support in diverse urban constituencies. The community’s political preferences were not uniform, but its relationship with the Conservative Party — the party of the hostile environment, of austerity, of the immigration caps that had affected community organisations — was, in most cases, not warm. The hung parliament did not produce a Labour government. It produced another term of May, weakened, and Brexit talks that would now proceed without the strong mandate she had sought.

Trump, Atlanta and the American Diaspora

Across the Atlantic, the first half of 2017 had begun with the inauguration of Donald Trump and his administration’s early executive orders on immigration. The travel bans, though focused on Muslim-majority countries, created anxiety across diaspora communities in the United States about the direction of American immigration enforcement more broadly. In Atlanta, home to a significant Jamaican and Caribbean community, the early months of 2017 brought a heightened awareness of immigration status and of the political climate in which diaspora communities were operating. The parallels with the hostile environment in Britain — an immigration system used as an instrument of deterrence and enforcement rather than as a fair and humane process — were not lost on diaspora organisations that had members and contacts on both sides of the Atlantic.

Jamaica’s 8th Biennial Diaspora Conference, held in June 2017, brought together Jamaica’s government and diaspora communities from across North America, Britain and the Caribbean. The discussions covered investment, remittances, the republic question, and the constitutional agenda. Against the backdrop of Grenfell and Trump, the conference had an unusual urgency: the diaspora communities represented were navigating political environments in their countries of residence that had become more hostile, more uncertain, more explicitly focused on the question of who belonged and who did not. The Jamaican diaspora from Atlanta to Kingston had understood for generations that belonging was contested. In the first half of 2017, that contestation had a new and sharper edge.