Nottingham to Kingston

Nottingham had its own history with knife crime. The city had seen serious violence in its Meadows and St Ann’s areas in the early 2000s, and the community had worked hard to address it. In 2008, as London’s knife crime emergency dominated the national headlines, Nottingham’s Caribbean community found itself in familiar and unwelcome territory: being asked to account for violence that it had not created and that it was working to prevent

Briefing

• London knife crime crisis: multiple young Black men killed in first half of 2008.
• Northern Rock nationalised February 2008; financial crisis begins to take shape.
• Government convenes knife crime summit; Caribbean community leaders demand structural response.
• Jamaica’s 46th independence; diaspora investment in island’s development discussed.
• UK Borders Agency increases enforcement activity; Caribbean communities express concern.

By the spring of 2008, the number of young people killed by knives in London had reached a level that could not be managed as a series of isolated incidents. The deaths were concentrated in particular areas — south London, east London, parts of north London — and disproportionately involved young Black men as both victims and perpetrators. The media coverage was extensive and, in significant respects, unreflective: it addressed the violence as a phenomenon in need of explanation without consistently interrogating the structural conditions that had produced it, and it placed the Caribbean community at the centre of the story in ways that elided the community’s own grief and the community’s own response.

In Nottingham, the Caribbean community in St Ann’s and Hyson Green had been dealing with a version of this problem since the early 2000s. The city had experienced serious gang violence in those years, and the community response had been substantial: church-based outreach programmes, youth projects run by community organisations, mentoring schemes for young men at risk. These programmes had been built, largely, by community members who were motivated by the damage they saw the violence doing and who were not willing to wait for statutory agencies to respond at the pace those agencies typically managed. By 2008, Nottingham’s work was being cited by some as a model. In the context of the London knife crime emergency, that model was not being adopted at the scale the evidence suggested was needed.

The Politics of the Knife Crime Debate

The political response to the knife crime crisis in 2008 was dominated by a debate between those who emphasised punitive measures — longer sentences, tougher enforcement, stop and search — and those who argued for investment in the communities and young people most at risk. The Caribbean community’s organisations were, overwhelmingly, in the second camp. Community leaders argued that the violence was a symptom of conditions that enforcement could not address: unemployment, educational failure, family breakdown, the absence of opportunity and the presence of criminal networks that offered a version of identity and belonging that mainstream institutions had failed to provide.

This argument was not new. It had been made after Brixton 1981, after Handsworth 1985, after every period in which the relationship between Black young men and violence had become a public issue in Britain. It was made again in 2008, and again it was partially heard and partially dismissed. The government convened a knife crime summit. Some additional funding for youth provision was announced. The structural conditions — the inequality, the under-investment, the educational disadvantage — were acknowledged but not resolved. The violence continued, at a reduced level as the summer progressed and outreach efforts intensified, but it did not stop.

Northern Rock and the First Signs of Financial Crisis

On 22 February 2008, Northern Rock was nationalised by the British government following a bank run the previous autumn that had produced the first visible sign of the financial instability that would become, in the autumn of 2008, a full-scale global crisis. Northern Rock was not a major lender to the Caribbean community, but its nationalisation was a signal that the financial environment was changing in ways that would eventually affect everyone.

For the Jamaican community in Nottingham, the economic situation was already a concern. The housing market, which had been rising throughout the 2000s and which had enabled many Caribbean-heritage families to accumulate some wealth for the first time, was beginning to show signs of strain. The construction and service sector jobs that employed significant numbers of Caribbean-heritage workers were becoming less secure. The financial crisis that would arrive fully in October was, in the first half of 2008, still approaching from a distance — visible to those who were paying attention, but not yet the daily emergency it would become.

Deportation and the Community’s Ongoing Vulnerability

The UK Borders Agency, established in 2008 to consolidate immigration enforcement functions, was in its first months of operation during the first half of the year. Its creation was part of a broader project of immigration system reform that had been underway for several years, and it brought with it an intensification of enforcement activity that was felt in Caribbean communities across Britain. Cases of long-settled Caribbean residents being threatened with deportation — residents who had come to Britain as children, who had built lives and raised families, but whose immigration status was uncertain because of documentation failures or the complexity of the immigration rules — were being handled by community organisations at a rate that was increasing.

The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants had been publishing research on the impact of immigration enforcement on Black and minority ethnic communities for years. In 2008, that research was describing conditions that would not become a public scandal for another decade but that were already, in the community organisations of Nottingham and Brixton and Handsworth, an ongoing emergency. The people who would later be called the Windrush Generation were already, in 2008, being processed by a system that did not recognise their right to be in Britain with the clarity that their histories deserved.

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