Seven Sisters to Kingston

Seven Sisters Road runs from Tottenham through Finsbury Park to Holloway, through some of the most densely settled Caribbean communities in north London. In the first half of 2000, as London prepared for its first mayoral election and the government moved its Race Relations Amendment Bill through Parliament, this stretch of north London was engaged with both the possibilities and the disappointments of the post-Macpherson moment

Briefing

• London holds first mayoral election; Ken Livingstone wins as independent, May 2000.
• Race Relations (Amendment) Bill passes Commons; Lords scrutiny ongoing through summer.
• Macpherson Report implementation: first formal review under way by Home Office.
• Stephen Lawrence suspects: police conduct new phase of inquiry.
• Jamaica: economic IMF negotiations continue; diaspora remittances vital to stability.

Ken Livingstone had done the impossible. Running as an independent candidate after the Labour Party had imposed Frank Dobson on the membership as its official nominee, Livingstone had won the first election for Mayor of London in May 2000 with 58 per cent of the vote after second preferences were redistributed. For the Caribbean community in north London — in Tottenham, in Seven Sisters, in Hornsey, in Harringay — it was a significant result. Livingstone had a political history with the Caribbean community that predated his time as leader of the Greater London Council in the 1980s. He had been a consistent voice on race equality, had supported community organisations through the GLC’s funding structures, and had maintained relationships with the community across the long years of his political exile from the Labour mainstream. His election as mayor was welcomed across much of the Caribbean community with a warmth that Frank Dobson’s candidacy had not generated.

The Mayor of London was a new institution. Created by the Blair government’s devolution agenda, it represented the first elected executive government for London since the abolition of the GLC in 1986. The Caribbean community had lost important things when the GLC was abolished: it had lost funding streams for community organisations, it had lost a platform at the strategic level for issues that affected the community across the boroughs, it had lost the formal relationship between the community and London’s government that Livingstone had personally championed. The creation of the mayoralty represented an opportunity to rebuild some of what had been lost. With Livingstone as the first mayor, that opportunity seemed genuine.

The Macpherson Reform Agenda

In February 1999, Sir William Macpherson had delivered his report into the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the Stephen Lawrence murder investigation. The report had found the investigation to have been marred by incompetence, failures of leadership and institutional racism. Its seventy recommendations had set an agenda for reform that the government and the Metropolitan Police had committed to implementing. In the first half of 2000, that commitment was being tested.

The Home Office had established monitoring processes for the implementation of the Macpherson recommendations. Some of the recommendations were straightforward to implement, at least in formal terms: new codes of practice, new training requirements, new definitions of racist incidents. The definition of a racist incident that Macpherson had proposed — that any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person should be recorded as such — had been adopted and was changing how incidents were recorded, though the community was aware that recording and responding were different things. Racist incidents were now being recorded in much larger numbers than before, not because there were more of them, but because more were being reported and more were being formally logged.

The Race Relations (Amendment) Bill

The Race Relations (Amendment) Bill, which would eventually receive Royal Assent in November 2000, was moving through Parliament in the first half of the year. The bill extended the coverage of the Race Relations Act 1976 to public authorities that had previously been exempt, including the police. It imposed a positive duty on public authorities to promote race equality rather than simply prohibiting discrimination. It was, in legislative terms, the most significant change to race equality law since the 1976 act itself.

The Caribbean community’s engagement with the bill’s passage was active and informed. Community organisations had made representations to the parliamentary process, had briefed sympathetic MPs and peers, and had followed the bill’s progress with attention to the detail of its drafting. The concern was that a bill which looked strong in outline could be weakened in its implementation provisions, that the positive duty could be so loosely defined as to be largely unenforceable, or that the monitoring mechanisms could be insufficient to drive real change in institutional cultures that had proved resistant to change in the past. The community’s experience of watching well-intentioned legislation fail to deliver material change was extensive, and it was watching this bill with eyes shaped by that experience.

North London and Kingston: Economic Connections

In Kingston, Jamaica’s economic circumstances in early 2000 were challenging in ways that affected the Caribbean community in Seven Sisters and Tottenham directly. Jamaica’s debt burden — one of the highest per capita in the world — was constraining public spending in ways that were visible to anyone with family on the island. Schools, hospitals, roads: the infrastructure that Jamaica needed to develop its economy was inadequate, and the resources to improve it were consumed by debt servicing. The community in north London was sending remittances that helped individual families manage the constraints that the macroeconomic situation imposed, but the structural problem required structural solutions that individual remittance flows could not provide.

The conversations taking place in the community about Jamaica’s economic situation were sophisticated. People understood that the IMF‘s structural adjustment programmes had contributed to the conditions they were now seeing, that the debt had been accumulated under particular political circumstances, and that the diaspora’s role in Jamaica’s economic development could not be limited to the transfer of money to family members. The question of how diaspora investment in productive capacity could be mobilised — in tourism, in agriculture, in manufacturing, in professional services — was one that community organisations and business networks were beginning to address more formally. In Seven Sisters and Tottenham, as across the Caribbean community in Britain, the ambition was to be more than a remittance pipeline. It was to be an economic constituency with a stake in Jamaica’s future.

The Windrush Generation in 2000

The Windrush generation — those who had come to Britain from the Caribbean between 1948 and the early 1970s — was, in 2000, in its retirement years. The generation that had come as young adults in the 1950s was now in its sixties and seventies. They had worked the decades that Britain needed: in the hospitals, on the buses, in the factories, in the construction sites. They had paid their national insurance, raised their families, built their communities. They were now navigating the later years of their lives in a Britain that was, in some respects, more hospitable than the Britain they had arrived in, and in other respects still shaped by the same structures of racial disadvantage that had constrained their lives.

The question of whether to return to Jamaica — which had been present in the community since the beginning, which had shaped the way many people had lived their lives in Britain as a temporary sojourn that extended into permanence — was, for many in the Windrush generation, becoming more acute as retirement approached. Some were returning: buying or building houses in Jamaica with savings accumulated over decades in Britain, moving back to the island they had left as young people. Some were finding that the return was more complicated than the dream had suggested: that Jamaica had changed, that they had changed, that the connection between the person who had left and the person who was returning was mediated by forty years of a different life. The community in Seven Sisters was navigating these crossings, in both directions, with the complexity that such journeys always involve.