Dalston to Kingston

Dalston, in the London Borough of Hackney, had been a centre of Caribbean community life since the 1950s. Its market, its music venues, its churches and its high street had been shaped by the Caribbean presence over four decades of settlement. In the second half of 2000, as the millennium settled into reality, the community was engaging with the most significant piece of equalities legislation since the 1970s

Briefing

• Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 passes through Parliament; Royal Assent November 2000.
• Macpherson recommendations first anniversary assessment: positive progress noted, gaps remain.
• Stephen Lawrence murder case: police conduct continuing inquiry and new evidence sought.
• Jamaica celebrates 38th independence; economic challenges dominate domestic agenda.
• Millennium Dome in Greenwich draws Caribbean community commentary on national identity.

The millennium had arrived. The Y2K crisis that some had predicted — a global collapse of computer systems unable to process the date change from 1999 to 2000 — had not materialised. Britain’s Millennium Dome in Greenwich, the Blair government’s largest and most contested cultural statement, had opened on 1 January 2000 to mixed reviews. The new century had begun, and the Caribbean community in Dalston and across Britain was engaging with it in the way it engaged with every new period: with attention to both the promises that were being made and the record of what had been delivered on previous promises.

The Millennium Dome was, for some in the Caribbean community, a symbol that concentrated the ambivalence about the Blair project that had been growing since 1997. The dome was expensive, it was politically contested, and its exhibition content — which was supposed to celebrate British identity and achievement at the turn of the millennium — had been criticised for its failure to adequately represent the multicultural reality of the Britain that actually existed. The Caribbean community’s contribution to British culture, to its music, its food, its political life, its public services — was not, in the community’s judgement, adequately reflected in a celebration of what Britain was at 2000. The dome represented, for some, a version of Britain that the Caribbean community had been building alongside for fifty years without receiving credit for its contribution.

The Race Relations (Amendment) Act

The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, which had been moving through Parliament since the Macpherson Report’s recommendations and received Royal Assent in November, was a genuine legislative advance. The act placed a positive duty on all public authorities — not just those explicitly covered by previous legislation — to have due regard for the need to eliminate racial discrimination and promote equality of opportunity. It extended the Race Relations Act 1976’s coverage to the police and other bodies that had previously been exempt or only partially covered.

The act’s passage had been advocated by Caribbean community organisations, by race equality charities and by the legal community that had been working on race discrimination cases for years. The Commission for Racial Equality, which would be replaced in 2007 by the new Equality and Human Rights Commission, had contributed to the development of the act’s provisions. The community’s organisations had made representations to the parliamentary process that resulted in a stronger piece of legislation than the initial draft had proposed in some areas.

Macpherson: One Year On

The first anniversary of the Macpherson Report, in February 2000, had prompted a series of assessments of what had changed in a year. The Metropolitan Police had undertaken significant work on implementing the report’s recommendations: new training programmes, new procedures for recording racist incidents, new structures for community consultation. Other forces across England and Wales had begun similar processes, at varying speeds and with varying levels of commitment.

The Caribbean community’s assessment was, at one year, more positive than it would be at two or three years. The immediate shock of the report’s findings — the formal acknowledgement of institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police — had produced a period of genuine engagement from the police service with the agenda for change. The question, at one year, was whether that engagement would be sustained when the immediate pressure of the report’s publication had passed, and when the operational demands of policing reasserted themselves as the primary driver of how the service’s culture was shaped. The community’s experience of previous reform processes gave it reason to watch closely.

The Stephen Lawrence Case and Its Ongoing Legacy

Stephen Lawrence had been murdered in April 1993 in Eltham, south-east London. In 2000, the case remained legally unresolved: the five suspects who had been named in the Macpherson Report had not been convicted, and the possibility of new prosecutions was constrained by the double jeopardy rule that, at the time, prevented retrial after acquittal. The Metropolitan Police’s investigation, which the Macpherson Report had found to have been deeply flawed, was continuing under new management and with new resources.

The Lawrence case had become, in the years since the murder and especially since the Macpherson Report, a landmark in the history of race relations in Britain. For the Caribbean community, it was a case that carried the weight of all the cases that had come before it: the deaths in custody, the assaults, the failures of investigation, the patterns of impunity that had characterised the relationship between the police and the Caribbean community for decades. The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, established after the murder by his parents, Doreen and Neville Lawrence, had begun the work of channelling the case’s significance into practical support for young people from similar backgrounds. The trust‘s work was, in 2000, in its early years, and the community was watching it with the investment of people who understood what it had been built out of.

Dalston and Kingston: The Continuing Connection

Dalston’s Caribbean community was, in 2000, at a particular generational moment. The first generation — those who had come from Jamaica in the 1950s and 1960s, who had built the community’s institutions and established its presence in Hackney — was now in its retirement years. The second and third generations were running the businesses, staffing the schools and hospitals, serving in the community organisations that their parents and grandparents had founded. The connection to Jamaica was maintained, but it was increasingly a connection of heritage and family rather than of direct personal experience.

Jamaica in 2000 was celebrating its thirty-eighth year of independence with the recognition that the economic challenges it faced were, in important respects, structural: debts accumulated over decades, a tourism-dependent economy vulnerable to external shocks, a diaspora whose remittances were essential but whose investment in the island’s productive capacity was still to be fully mobilised. The conversations being held in Dalston about how the diaspora could engage more productively with Jamaica’s development were the same conversations that would produce, four years later, the first biennial diaspora conference. In 2000, those conversations were informal but serious, conducted in the community spaces that had always been the real parliament of the Caribbean community in Britain.