Southall to Portmore

Southall is known as a Punjabi heartland, but the communities of west London have never been so easily categorised. The Jamaican and Caribbean presence in the Ealing area is smaller than in south or north London, but it is real, and in 2007 it was watching, like Caribbean communities across Britain, two elections in two countries that both mattered — one at home, one at the place that had been home for fifty years

Briefing

• Gordon Brown succeeds Tony Blair as UK Prime Minister on 27 June 2007.
• Jamaica Labour Party wins general election November 2007; Bruce Golding becomes PM.
• UK summer floods disrupt communities across England and Wales.
• Jamaican diaspora observes 45th independence anniversary in August 2007.
• Multicultural communities across London develop shared cultural spaces and practices.

Gordon Brown entered Downing Street on 27 June 2007 with a different political style from the man he succeeded. Where Tony Blair had been a communicator of exceptional facility, Blair’s successor was a more cautious figure, a man of policy rather than performance, who brought to the office of Prime Minister a sense that substance would be allowed to prevail over presentation in ways that the Blair years had not always permitted. The Caribbean community’s relationship with the Blair government had been complicated: Blair’s commitments to public service investment and to social inclusion had produced real improvements in some areas of Caribbean community life, but the invasion of Iraq had divided the community as it had divided much of the country, and the beginnings of the immigration tightening that would become the hostile environment under May had already been visible in the Blair years.

Brown’s arrival was greeted in the Caribbean community with cautious curiosity. He had a track record on international development that some in the community respected. His instincts on poverty and economic inequality were regarded by many community members as more aligned with their interests than the political priorities of the Conservative opposition. But the questions about immigration policy — about how the new government would manage the relationship between immigration enforcement and the settled Caribbean community — were not yet answered. They would be answered, in the years to come, in ways that the community had not hoped for.

Jamaica’s Election: One Seat

In November 2007, Jamaica held a general election that produced a result so close as to be historic. The Jamaica Labour Party, led by Bruce Golding, defeated the People’s National Party by one seat in the sixty-seat parliament. It was the end of eighteen years of PNP government under P.J. Patterson and then Portia Simpson Miller, and the beginning of a JLP administration that would face, from its first weeks in office, the legacy of economic difficulties and, within its first years, the explosive crisis of the Dudus extradition request.

The diaspora’s engagement with Jamaican elections had always been real, if indirect. Jamaican voters in Britain could not vote in Jamaican elections: the island’s electoral system did not yet have provision for overseas voting, a point that the diaspora had raised consistently and that remained an unresolved point of democratic exclusion. But the community’s interest in the result was intense. Community radio programmes in London and Birmingham discussed the election with the same energy and partisanship that were displayed in the parishes of Kingston and St Elizabeth. The result — JLP by one seat — was followed with the kind of attention that the community brought to events that it felt belonged to it, even though it had no formal role in producing them.

West London’s Multicultural Fabric

Southall, in the London Borough of Ealing, is known internationally as a centre of British Punjabi and South Asian community life. Its high street, its gurdwaras, its fabric shops and sweet centres represent one of the most visible expressions of the South Asian presence in Britain that has been built over the same post-war decades as the Caribbean settlement in Brixton and Handsworth. What is less often noted is that multicultural communities in west London have never been simply the sum of their largest parts. The Caribbean community in the Ealing area, smaller in number than in some other parts of London but with deep roots in particular streets and churches and community organisations, has its own history in this part of the city.

The relationship between Caribbean and South Asian communities in areas of shared settlement had been complex across the decades. There had been tensions and there had been solidarities. The shared experience of immigration, of racism, of institutional discrimination and of the project of building community life in a country that had not always welcomed them had created points of connection that did not erase difference but sometimes transcended it. In 2007, in west London as in other parts of the city, the communities whose grandparents had arrived on different ships from different shores were engaged in the ongoing project of living together in a Britain that was still working out, slowly and imperfectly, what it meant to be genuinely plural.

Portmore and the Jamaican Reality

Portmore, in St Catherine, is one of Jamaica’s largest urban areas, a planned community developed from the 1960s that has become, over subsequent decades, a sprawling and densely populated town south of Kingston Harbour. Its development has been, in some respects, an expression of the same forces that produced the diaspora: the movement of people from rural areas in search of economic opportunity, the development of communities at the margins of established centres of power, the construction of a way of life in conditions that required resourcefulness and adaptation.

The families in Portmore who had relatives in Southall and in Ealing and in Greenford were, in the second half of 2007, navigating the new political landscape of a Jamaica with a new government. The JLP’s victory was, for its supporters, a moment of genuine hope: a change after eighteen years, a new leadership, a different set of promises. For the diaspora family members watching from west London, the election result was one piece of a larger picture that included the remittances they were sending, the investment they were considering, and the ongoing question of what the relationship between Jamaica and its overseas communities would look like under a government that was starting fresh with an agenda still to be defined.