New Cross, in south-east London, occupied a particular place in the history of the Black British community. It was the site of the fire of January 1981 in which thirteen young Black people had died at a party in Deptford Road, a fire that the community believed had been deliberately set and whose investigation it believed had been conducted without adequate urgency or rigour. In February 1999, as Sir William Macpherson published the report that found the Metropolitan Police institutionally racist, New Cross read its own history in his findings
Briefing
- Macpherson Report published 18 February; Metropolitan Police named institutionally racist.
- Seventy recommendations made; government commits to full implementation programme.
- Brixton nail bomb, 17 April: forty-eight injured in attack on Caribbean community.
- Brick Lane and Soho bombs follow; David Copeland arrested 2 May.
- Jamaica: Portia Simpson Miller rises in PNP prominence; remittances reach record levels.
The New Cross Massacre, as it was known in the community, had happened on 18 January 1981. Thirteen young people, all Black, all between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two, had died in a fire at a party in Deptford Road. A fourteenth would die later. The cause of the fire was never definitively established in court, though the Black community in south London had its own understanding of what had happened and of what the police investigation that followed had failed to do. The Black People’s Day of Action on 2 March 1981 — in which more than fifteen thousand people marched through London to demand justice — had been one of the largest demonstrations by the Black community in British history.
Eighteen years later, on 18 February 1999, Sir William Macpherson published his report into the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the Stephen Lawrence murder investigation. The report’s central finding — that the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist, that its collective failure to provide an adequate investigation of Stephen Lawrence’s murder was grounded in professional incompetence, in failures of leadership, and in the racism of particular officers, but also in the institutional culture of the force as a whole — was received in New Cross and across the Caribbean community as a formal acknowledgement of what the community had lived and known for decades.
The Macpherson Report: What It Found
The Macpherson Report was a document of 335 pages and seventy recommendations. Its account of the Metropolitan Police investigation into Stephen Lawrence’s murder was a systematic indictment: the failure to provide adequate first aid at the scene, the failure to pursue the early intelligence that identified the suspects, the failure to arrest them in a timely manner, the failure to conduct adequate surveillance, the failure to prepare adequate cases for prosecution. These were failures of competence. But Macpherson’s finding was that they were also failures of racism: that the investigation had been compromised, at every stage, by the assumption that the victim was less important, his family less credible, his case less urgent, because of his race.
The definition of institutional racism that Macpherson offered — the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin, expressed in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people — was contested in some quarters and embraced in others. For the Caribbean community, the phrase “unwitting prejudice” was important: it described not the individual bigot but the system, the culture, the accumulated weight of assumptions and procedures that produced discriminatory outcomes without requiring that any individual officer consciously intend to discriminate. It described what the community had been experiencing and complaining about for decades.
The Brixton Bombing
On 17 April 1999, less than two months after the Macpherson Report was published, a nail bomb exploded in Brixton Market. Forty-eight people were injured, some seriously. The bomb had been placed among the market stalls on a busy Saturday afternoon, designed to maximise casualties in the heart of the south London Caribbean community. The images of the aftermath — the devastation of a market that had been a centre of Caribbean community life since the 1950s, the injured being carried from the wreckage, the stunned faces of people who had come to shop and had found themselves in the middle of a terrorist attack — were broadcast across the country and across the world.
The bombing was a deliberate attack on a community. It came less than two months after a report had formally acknowledged that the state had failed that community, had treated it as less deserving of protection, of justice, of professional service. The conjunction was painful. The community in New Cross and across south London was experiencing, within a single spring, both the vindication of its long-standing complaint about institutional racism and the demonstration that individuals motivated by explicit racial hatred could attack it with impunity. The nail bombs that followed — in Brick Lane on 24 April and in Soho’s Admiral Duncan pub on 30 April, which killed three people and injured more than seventy — extended the attack across communities: the Bangladeshi community, the gay community, joined the Caribbean community as targets of the same campaign.
David Copeland and What He Represented
David Copeland was arrested on 2 May 1999. He was twenty-two years old, a former member of the British National Party and the National Socialist Movement. His stated intention had been to ignite a race war by attacking communities he associated with immigration and diversity. He had failed in that intention but had succeeded in killing three people and injuring more than 140 others. The BBC‘s coverage of his arrest and subsequent trial explored the far-right networks in Britain that had shaped his ideology and provided a context for his radicalisation.
For the Caribbean community, Copeland’s arrest and the subsequent investigation into his background raised questions that went beyond the individual. The far-right milieu in which he had operated was not small or marginal: there were organisations, publications, websites, networks. The question of what the police and the security services had known about these networks, and what they had done about them, was one the community asked with the same scepticism it brought to all questions about the state’s capacity and willingness to protect Black communities. The comparison with the police’s response to complaints about the gang that had murdered Stephen Lawrence — which had been known to the police before the murder — was one that the community made readily and bitterly.
New Cross, Kingston, and the Long Argument
In Kingston in the first half of 1999, Jamaica was watching the events in Britain with the attention of a country that had millions of people in the diaspora and whose relationship to Britain’s racial politics was therefore not distant or abstract. The murders, the bombings, the reports and the reforms: all of it was news in Jamaica, discussed in the way that the affairs of the mother country are discussed in a country whose relationship to it is both historical and personal.
In New Cross, the community that had marched in 1981, that had maintained the memory of thirteen young people through the intervening decades, that had held anniversaries and campaigns and kept the case in the public record when it would have preferred to forget, was arriving at 1999 with a set of feelings that combined vindication and exhaustion. The Macpherson Report had said what the community had been saying since 1981. The Brixton bombing had demonstrated that the dangers were not historical. The long argument — about what the state owed the community, about what the community was entitled to demand — was not resolved. It was, in 1999, simply at a new stage: one in which the terms of the argument had shifted because one major institution had, for the first time, formally agreed with what the community had been saying all along.
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