Catford to Kingston

Catford, in the London Borough of Lewisham, had a Caribbean community whose roots in south-east London ran deep. In the second half of 1999, as Britain counted down to the millennium and the Macpherson reforms moved slowly into police practice, the community in Catford was processing a year that had brought, in rapid succession, a landmark public inquiry report, a series of racially motivated bombings, and the preparations for a new century

Briefing

• Copeland arrested May 1999; charged with murder for Soho, Brixton, Brick Lane bombings.
• Macpherson Report: Metropolitan Police reform programme formally launched.
• Queen’s Speech November 1999 announces Race Relations (Amendment) Bill.
• Hurricane Floyd causes significant damage across Jamaica and Caribbean, September.
• Millennium celebrations planned nationwide; Caribbean community shapes its own.

David Copeland had been arrested in May 1999, two weeks after the bomb at the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho had killed three people and injured more than seventy. The Brixton bombing on 17 April had been the first of the three: a nail bomb placed in Brixton Market, the heart of the south London Caribbean community, that had injured dozens and caused destruction across a community whose relationship with the state’s capacity for protection was already shaped by decades of contested experience. The Brick Lane bombing, a week later, targeted the Bengali community in east London. The Soho bomb had targeted the gay community. Copeland was, investigators concluded, a fascist who had intended to spark a race war. He had been caught, and he would be convicted.

The arrest brought relief but not closure. The Caribbean community in Catford and across south London had spent the spring of 1999 in an atmosphere of heightened fear: fear of further bombs, fear of copycat attacks, fear of a political climate in which such an attack could be incubated and planned. That Copeland had acted largely alone had not entirely resolved the question of the environment in which he had radicalised. The far-right networks in Britain that had provided ideological fuel for his particular trajectory were still operating, still producing material, still recruiting. The community was not disposed to conclude, from one arrest, that the threat had passed.

Macpherson and the Police Reform Programme

The Macpherson Report, published in February 1999, had prompted the Metropolitan Police to undertake the most significant reform programme in its history. Commissioner Sir Paul Condon, who had initially resisted the characterisation of the force as institutionally racist, had been replaced by Sir John Stevens, who took up the post in January 2000. In the second half of 1999, the Metropolitan Police was in transition: undertaking new training programmes on race and diversity, revising its procedures for handling racist incidents, establishing new consultative structures with communities that had long-standing grievances against the force.

The Caribbean community’s engagement with the police reform process was cautious. The community had seen reform programmes before: after the Scarman Report in 1981, after the various inquiries into deaths in custody in the intervening years, after successive commitments to community liaison and consultation that had not reliably translated into changed practice on the streets. The Macpherson Report was, in formal terms, a stronger document than Scarman had been — more direct in its findings, more comprehensive in its recommendations — and the government’s commitment to its implementation was, at least in the early stages, more sustained than the response to Scarman had been. But the community’s hope was tempered by experience, and its monitoring of the reform programme was attentive to the gap between announcement and delivery that it had learned to expect.

The Queen’s Speech and the Legislative Agenda

The Queen’s Speech in November 1999 announced the Race Relations (Amendment) Bill, which would implement the legislative recommendations that flowed from the Macpherson Report and extend the coverage of the Race Relations Act 1976. The announcement was welcomed by the community’s organisations. The National Assembly Against Racism, the 1990 Trust, the Commission for Racial Equality and the networks of community groups that had been working on race equality issues had all contributed to the advocacy that produced the bill’s announcement. The detail would matter, and the community would engage with the parliamentary process, but the announcement was a signal that the government intended to follow through on at least some of what the Macpherson Report had demanded.

The bill’s most significant innovation was the positive duty: the requirement that public authorities not merely refrain from discriminating but actively promote race equality. This was a shift from a reactive to a proactive model of equality law, and it was understood by the community’s legal and advocacy organisations as a potential structural change rather than merely a technical amendment. The question of how the duty would be monitored and enforced — what the sanctions for non-compliance would be and whether they would be applied — was one that the community intended to press as the bill moved through Parliament in the coming year.

Hurricane Floyd and the Caribbean

In September 1999, Hurricane Floyd had swept through the Atlantic basin, causing widespread damage across the Bahamas and the Caribbean before tracking northward along the United States eastern seaboard. Jamaica, though spared the direct hit that the Bahamas absorbed, had experienced flooding and wind damage, and the broader hurricane season of 1999 had been one of the most active in years. For the Caribbean community in Catford and across Britain, the hurricane season was always a period of heightened attention: watching weather reports, seeking news from family, monitoring the communications that told them whether the homes, the plots of land, the savings invested in houses and properties in Jamaica were safe.

The vulnerability of Caribbean islands to extreme weather was a feature of life that the diaspora in Britain navigated across the years and the decades. The community understood, in a way that was experiential rather than merely theoretical, that climate and geography created conditions of risk for the island populations that remittances from Britain helped mitigate but could not protect against. The house built with savings from working in Lewisham could be damaged by a hurricane in a morning. The land purchased with a lifetime’s careful accumulation could flood. These vulnerabilities shaped the community’s relationship to Jamaica, adding urgency to the connections maintained across the water and providing the context for a concern about the island’s development and resilience that was personal as well as political.

The Millennium and What It Meant

The millennium was approaching. The Caribbean community in Catford, like communities across Britain, was preparing for the new year in ways that reflected its particular cultural inheritance. Churches were planning services that would carry the congregation from one century into the next with prayer, music and testimony. Community halls were booking bands and sound systems. Families were planning gatherings that would bring together the generations — the grandparents who had come on the Windrush, the parents who had grown up in Britain, the children who had never known any other home — in the recognition that the crossing of a century was worth marking.

For the Windrush generation in particular, the millennium carried a particular resonance. They had come to Britain in 1948, in the early 1950s, in the years of post-war reconstruction. They had lived through the years of the Notting Hill riots of 1958, through the passage of the Race Relations Acts, through the Brixton uprisings of 1981, through the Macpherson Report and the nail bombings of 1999. They had seen more of Britain’s recent history, from the inside of its contested racial politics, than most. To cross from one century to the next was to carry that history with them: to be, in the millennium year, witnesses to what had changed and custodians of what had not yet changed enough.