Bedford to Kingston

Bedford’s Caribbean community — one of the oldest and most established outside London, rooted in the town’s Italian and Caribbean immigration of the post-war decades — was, in the second half of 2003, engaged in the same reckoning that was happening in Caribbean communities across Britain: an accounting for what the Blair government had promised, what it had delivered, and what the Iraq war said about the kind of government it had turned out to be

Briefing

• Iraq occupation deepens; insurgency intensifies against coalition forces through 2003.
• David Kelly affair; BBC-government clash over Iraq dossier leads to Kelly’s death in July.
• The Macpherson Report’s fifth anniversary; race and policing assessment ongoing.
• Jamaica 41st independence; diaspora reflects on post-independence development challenges.
• Stop and search statistics show persistent disproportionality for Black communities.

In the spring of 2003, the invasion of Iraq had been rapid and its military phase apparently decisive. The statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down in Firdos Square on 9 April 2003. The President was found hiding in a hole in the ground in December. But the occupation that followed the invasion was neither rapid nor decisive: it was a grinding, bloody, expensive and increasingly contested enterprise that was costing lives — Iraqi lives in their many thousands, and the lives of British and American soldiers in numbers that, while smaller, were accumulating in ways that made the initial confidence about the war’s conduct look, in retrospect, dangerously misplaced.

The Caribbean community’s relationship with the Iraq war was shaped by several currents. Many in the community had opposed the war from the beginning: the anti-war march of 15 February 2003 had included Caribbean community members among its million-plus participants. Others had more complex or ambivalent positions. But by the second half of 2003, as the insurgency intensified and the promised weapons of mass destruction failed to materialise, the community’s assessment of the war was, like the country’s as a whole, moving decisively toward scepticism and then opposition. The community had supported Labour in three general elections, and Labour had taken the country to war on grounds that were proving to be unfounded. This was not what the community had voted for.

The David Kelly Affair and the Question of Trust

Dr David Kelly, a government weapons expert and UN weapons inspector, died on 17 July 2003, days after he had been exposed as the source of a BBC report alleging that the government had knowingly exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq’s alleged weapons programme. The subsequent inquiry — the Hutton Inquiry, which reported in January 2004 — produced a sequence of events that focused public attention on the relationship between the government, the intelligence services and the media in the production of the case for war.

For the Caribbean community, the Kelly affair was not primarily a political drama. It was a symptom of something that the community had been experiencing for much longer: the gap between what official sources said and what the evidence showed. The community had its own experience of this gap in the domain of race and policing. The Macpherson Report of 1999, which had found the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally racist in its investigation of the Stephen Lawrence murder, had been followed by commitments to reform that were, five years on, imperfectly fulfilled. The statistical disproportionality of stop and search — Black people stopped at rates far higher than their share of the population would predict — was still, in 2003, a documented reality. The gap between official claims and lived experience was a familiar condition.

The Macpherson Legacy and Its Limits

The Macpherson Report’s fifth anniversary fell in 2004, but the community’s assessment of its legacy was already being formed in 2003. The report had been a landmark: the formal acknowledgement by a public inquiry that the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist was, in 1999, an extraordinary admission that validated what the Caribbean community had been saying for decades. In the years that followed, there had been changes: the introduction of lay advisers to police-community liaison, greater diversity in police recruitment, revised procedures for investigating racially motivated crimes. These were not trivial. But the structural changes that the report implied — a fundamental rethinking of the culture of policing and its relationship to Black communities — had not been produced at the scale that the report’s language had seemed to promise.

Bedford’s Caribbean community had its own relationship with the police and with the question of institutional racism. Bedford was not London; its policing context was different, its community organisations had different histories. But the patterns the Macpherson Report identified were not exclusive to London, and the community in Bedford had its own experience of the disproportionalities and the failures that the report had documented for the capital. In 2003, five years on from Macpherson, the community was assessing not only what had changed but what had not, and asking what would be required to produce the change that had been promised.

Bedford’s Caribbean Community and Jamaica

Bedford’s Caribbean community was one of the most established outside London, with roots in the post-war migration that had brought workers to the town’s brick and engineering industries. By 2003, the community was well-settled and multi-generational, with its own church networks, its own cultural organisations, and its own connections to Jamaica that were maintained through the standard mechanisms of diaspora life: family visits, phone calls, remittances, and the cultural production — music, food, language — that kept the connection alive across generations. The Jamaican diaspora in Bedford was not the most visible Caribbean community in Britain, but it had its own particular story of building a life in a place that had not always been welcoming but had, over fifty years, become home.

Jamaica’s forty-first independence anniversary, marked in August 2003, coincided with a period of national and international uncertainty that gave the celebration an unusually reflective character. The Caribbean community was, in the summer of 2003, thinking about what it meant to be Jamaican in Britain at a moment when Britain itself was under scrutiny — its government’s credibility under pressure over Iraq, its police forces still working through the implications of Macpherson, its economy doing well but distributing the benefits of that growth unequally. The Jamaican community in Bedford, like communities across Britain, was holding all of these questions simultaneously, with the kind of dual attention that is not always legible to those who see only one part of the picture at a time.