Highbury to Kingston

Highbury, in the London Borough of Islington, had a Caribbean community shaped by four decades of settlement. By the second half of 1998, as the public inquiry into the Metropolitan Police’s investigation of Stephen Lawrence’s murder heard its most significant testimony, the community across north London was engaged with a process that felt — in a way few official processes ever had — as though it might actually lead somewhere

Briefing

• Stephen Lawrence Inquiry opens July 1998; Doreen and Neville Lawrence give evidence.
• Crime and Disorder Act 1998 creates racially aggravated offences in England and Wales.
• Good Friday Agreement signed April 1998; peace in Northern Ireland reshapes political landscape.
• Commission for Racial Equality publishes findings on police race equality record.
• Jamaica: Percival Patterson’s PNP wins third consecutive election term.

The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry had opened in July 1998, with Sir William Macpherson chairing the panel that would investigate the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the murder investigation. The inquiry had two parts: the first examining the original investigation and what had gone wrong; the second examining the lessons for policing and race relations in Britain more broadly. The Lawrences had fought for this inquiry since 1993. The government under John Major had refused it. The Blair government, in one of its earliest decisions on race, had agreed to it. In July 1998, five years after Stephen Lawrence’s murder in Eltham, the inquiry that his parents had demanded was finally under way.

The Caribbean community across north London — in Highbury, in Islington, in Stoke Newington, in Finsbury Park — followed the inquiry’s proceedings with sustained attention. The hearings were reported in the Black community’s newspapers and magazines, discussed in the community’s churches and meeting halls, analysed in the organisations that had been campaigning on race and policing issues for years. What the inquiry was examining was not merely the failure of one investigation into one murder. It was an examination of the police service’s relationship to the Black community, a relationship whose history stretched from the first years of Caribbean settlement to the present, and whose accumulated injuries were part of the living memory of the community that was watching.

The Inquiry Hearings

Doreen Lawrence gave evidence to the inquiry with a dignity and precision that the country observed. She described her son: the architecture student, the young man who had been killed at a bus stop in April 1993 while walking with his friend Duwayne Brooks. She described the investigation that had followed: the failures of the initial response, the slowness of the arrests, the treatment she and Neville had received when they sought information about what was being done. She described the years since the murder: the private prosecution, the inquest, the campaign, the long fight to make the state take seriously what had been done to her son and what had then been done, or not done, by the state itself.

The police officers who gave evidence offered a range of accounts. Some acknowledged failures. Some defended the investigation. The key suspects had been granted immunity from self-incrimination and were required to appear, though they exercised their right to silence on the core questions. The commission of racial equality, the Caribbean community’s organisations, police monitoring groups and legal advocates all made submissions to the inquiry. The breadth of the process — its willingness to examine not just the conduct of individual officers but the institutional culture of the Metropolitan Police — was what distinguished it from the inquiries that had preceded it and made the community, for once, cautiously hopeful about what it might produce.

The Crime and Disorder Act

The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 had been one of the Blair government’s early legislative achievements. Among its provisions was the creation of racially aggravated offences: a legal framework that allowed courts to impose higher sentences where crimes were motivated by racial hostility. This was a direct response to long-standing campaigning by Black community organisations that had argued the existing law did not adequately reflect the particular harm done by racially motivated offending.

The community’s response to the new provisions was cautious rather than celebratory. The creation of racially aggravated offences was welcome in principle, but the principle had to be tested in practice. Would the Crown Prosecution Service charge racially aggravated offences where the evidence supported them? Would courts accept the evidence of racial motivation that would be required? Would the higher sentences actually be applied? The community had seen provisions of the Race Relations Act 1976 remain largely unenforced in important areas. It would wait to see whether the new criminal law provisions would be different. The Crime and Disorder Act was on the statute book. What happened next would depend on the institutions that were supposed to apply it.

The Good Friday Agreement

The Good Friday Agreement, signed in Belfast in April 1998, had brought a historic settlement to the conflict in Northern Ireland. For the Caribbean community in Britain, the agreement was significant in ways that were both immediate and reflective. Immediate, because the years of IRA bombing campaigns in mainland Britain had been a feature of the security environment in which the Caribbean community lived: the bomb alerts, the evacuations, the disruptions, the fear. Reflective, because the agreement was, in important ways, a recognition that the British state’s relationship to a minority community could be changed through negotiation, through political process, through the application of sufficient political will.

The comparison between the Good Friday Agreement and the Caribbean community’s own demands was not a simple one. The situations were different in history, in geography, in the nature of the conflict. But the principle that the state’s relationship to a community it had treated unjustly could be renegotiated on different terms was one that the Caribbean community in Highbury and across Britain found relevant. If the political will to reach agreement in Northern Ireland existed, then political will was a variable. The question was how to generate the equivalent will in relation to the race equality agenda that the community had been pressing for decades.

Jamaica and the Diaspora in 1998

In Jamaica, Percival Patterson had led the People’s National Party to a third consecutive election victory. Jamaica’s democratic continuity was a source of stability that the diaspora valued: whatever its economic difficulties, Jamaica maintained the electoral institutions that gave its citizens a mechanism for peaceful political change. The diaspora community in Highbury and across Britain followed Jamaican elections with the interest of people who had family on the island and who maintained, through those family connections, a stake in the country’s political direction.

The economic picture in Jamaica in 1998 was one of managed difficulty. The financial sector crisis of the mid-1990s, which had required a massive government bailout through the Financial Sector Adjustment Company, had left a legacy of debt and constrained public services. Remittances from the diaspora — from London, from New York, from Toronto, from Miami — were providing an economic lifeline for families across the island. The diaspora’s contribution to Jamaica’s household economy was substantial, running into hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The question that was being asked more persistently was how that flow of resources could be leveraged for broader economic development rather than flowing primarily into consumption and housing construction.