St Pauls to Montego Bay

St Pauls, in Bristol, had its own history of the gap between what law promised and what life produced. The 1980 uprising there had been a direct response to the sus laws and their disproportionate use against the Caribbean community. The Race Relations (Amendment) Act that came into effect in 2001 was the most recent legislative attempt to close a gap that the community had been pointing to for decades

Briefing

• Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 comes into effect; public bodies now carry positive equality duties.
• Macpherson recommendations: two years on, implementation assessed across police forces.
• Labour wins third consecutive term in June 2001; Caribbean community’s political investment continues.
• Jamaica’s tourism sector grows; diaspora investment in island real estate increases.
• Montego Bay’s diaspora connections strengthen; UK-Jamaica property market developing.

The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 was, in legislative terms, a significant piece of equalities law. Building on the Macpherson Report’s analysis of institutional racism and its recommendations for reform, the act placed positive duties on public authorities — police forces, local authorities, NHS trusts, schools, universities — to have due regard for the need to eliminate unlawful racial discrimination, promote equality of opportunity and promote good race relations. It extended the reach of race relations law into areas that previous legislation had not covered and created mechanisms for enforcement that had not previously existed.

For the Caribbean community in St Pauls and across Britain, the act’s coming into full effect was received with the combination of genuine welcome and institutional wariness that was the community’s standard response to legislative progress. The welcome was genuine: the act was better than what had preceded it, and it created legal tools that community organisations and individuals could use. The wariness was also genuine: the community had seen race relations legislation before, had seen the gap between its provisions and its enforcement, and had learned to hold its welcome of new legislation at a temperature that acknowledged the progress without pretending that progress solved the problem.

Macpherson Two Years On

The Macpherson Report had been published in February 1999. By the first half of 2001, two years into its implementation, the picture was, as it had been at one year, mixed. The positive changes were real: the new definition of a racist incident, the establishment of community-police consultative groups, the revised procedures for race crime investigation, the greater diversity in police recruitment that was being pursued, if imperfectly, across forces. These were not trivial. The community’s organisations acknowledged them.

But the deeper change — the change in culture, the transformation of institutional practice, the ending of the patterns of disproportionate stop and search and excessive force that the report had documented — was not, by 2001, complete. Stop and search statistics remained disproportionate. Complaint rates against police by Black communities remained elevated. The deaths in custody that had produced some of the most agonising cases in the community’s relationship with the police had not ceased. The Macpherson Report had changed the vocabulary of the debate and some of its institutional structures; it had not yet changed the underlying reality that the report had described.

The General Election and the Caribbean Community’s Calculation

Labour won the general election of June 2001 with a large majority, though on a reduced turnout that reflected a national disengagement from electoral politics that the community’s organisations had noted and were concerned about. The Caribbean community’s support for Labour remained strong, though not uncritical. The community had specific concerns about the direction of immigration policy, about the pace of Macpherson implementation, about the educational attainment gap that Labour’s reforms had not yet closed. These concerns were expressed in community media, in community meetings, and in the representations that community organisations made to Labour MPs and ministers in the period leading up to the election.

The political calculation that kept the majority of the Caribbean community with Labour in 2001 was the same one it had made in 1997: not enthusiasm for everything Labour had done, but a recognition that the alternatives were worse. The Conservative Party under William Hague had fought the 2001 election on a platform that included a commitment to cutting immigration significantly. For the Jamaican community in Britain, whose members’ relationship with British immigration law was personal and often painful, this was not an abstract commitment: it was a statement about the community’s status that the community heard as it was intended.

Montego Bay and the Diaspora’s Investment

Montego Bay, in the parish of St James, had been growing in the years around the millennium as both a tourist destination and a centre of diaspora investment. The properties that Jamaican-heritage families in Bristol and Birmingham and Brixton were buying or building in Jamaica were not primarily in Kingston; they were in the parishes that the first generation had come from, and in the coastal areas that Jamaica’s tourism-led development was making more valuable. Montego Bay, with its international airport and its tourism infrastructure, was a point of entry for both tourists and returning diaspora members.

The UK-Jamaica property relationship that was developing in the first years of the twenty-first century was partly a reflection of diaspora investment and partly a reflection of the growing market for retirement properties among the older generation of the Caribbean community in Britain. Community members who had worked for thirty or forty years in Britain’s public services and NHS, who had paid into pension funds and bought their council houses under the right to buy, now had capital that they were, in some cases, choosing to invest in Jamaica. The Montego Bay market was one expression of this; the smaller-scale building and renovation of family properties in the interior parishes was another. The diaspora’s material connection to Jamaica was not only in remittances; it was increasingly in property.

St Pauls in Bristol and Montego Bay in Jamaica were, in 2001, connected by the same networks of family, money and aspiration that had been the foundation of the diaspora relationship since the first post-war migrants had made the crossing. Those networks were, fifty years on, more sophisticated, more institutionalised, and more valued by both sides than they had been when they were built. The work of building them had been done by the community itself, in conditions that had not always been favourable. The question, in 2001, was whether the institutional recognition that was arriving — in the Race Relations Act, in the Macpherson Report’s implementation, in the Labour government’s rhetorical commitment to race equality — was arriving at the speed and the scale that the community needed. The answer was, as always, not yet, but also, as always: still working on it.