Tooting to Kingston

Tooting, in south London, had a Caribbean community alongside a significant South Asian presence that had shaped the high street, the restaurants and the cultural life of the neighbourhood since the 1960s. In the first half of 1997, as Britain prepared for the general election that would end eighteen years of Conservative rule, the community in Tooting was engaged with a political moment that felt, to many of those living through it, like something more than an ordinary change of government

Briefing

• Labour wins 1 May 1997 election with 179-seat majority; Tony Blair becomes Prime Minister.
• Stephen Lawrence inquest returns verdict: unlawful killing in unprovoked racist attack, February.
• John Major calls election; eighteen years of Conservative rule ending in final months.
• Five Black MPs elected; Bernie Grant, Diane Abbott among those returning to Parliament.
• Jamaica: Portia Simpson Miller’s rising profile signals future; diaspora watches with interest.

The Stephen Lawrence inquest had opened in February 1997. The jury, having heard the evidence available to it, returned a verdict that was both legally significant and symbolically important: Stephen Lawrence had died from an unlawful killing in a completely unprovoked racist attack. The verdict did not result in prosecutions — the inquest jury’s role was to determine the circumstances of death, not to assign criminal liability — but it established, as a matter of formal record, what the community had known and asserted since 1993. Stephen Lawrence had been murdered by racists. The killing had been unprovoked. The investigation that followed had not produced justice.

The inquest verdict came at a moment when the political landscape was shifting. John Major had announced the general election for 1 May. The Conservative government was polling badly, damaged by the Black Wednesday currency crisis of 1992, by the long years of internal division over Europe, by the BSE crisis that had shattered confidence in the government’s management of agriculture and public health. Labour, under Tony Blair’s leadership, had been ahead in the polls for years. The question was not whether Labour would win but by how much.

The Caribbean Community and the Election

The Caribbean community in Tooting and across Britain went to the polls on 1 May with a combined sense of determination and guarded hope. Determination, because the community had voted Labour consistently across the eighteen years of Conservative rule: had voted in numbers that demonstrated both its civic engagement and its conviction that the Conservative Party was not the vehicle for the changes it needed. Guarded hope, because the community had been in this position before: Labour governments that had promised change and had delivered it incompletely, that had improved the formal legislative framework for race equality while the material conditions of the community remained constrained.

The result, when it came, was not in doubt but its scale was still striking. Labour won 419 seats, a majority of 179. Eighteen years of Conservative rule ended in a landslide. The Caribbean community celebrated the result with the particular warmth of people who had lived through those eighteen years from the inside: through the Brixton uprisings and the police response to them, through the immigration controls, through the years in which the community’s concerns had been, at best, marginal to the central concerns of government. The night of 1 May 1997 was a night of genuine feeling for the community. What the new government would do with its mandate was a question for the morning.

The New Parliament

The 1997 parliament was the most diverse in British history to that point. Nine Black and Asian MPs had been elected, including five Black MPs: Diane Abbott, Bernie Grant, Paul Boateng, Keith Vaz and David Lammy — though Lammy would not be elected until a by-election in 2000. Bernie Grant, representing Tottenham, had been one of the pioneering Black politicians of the Thatcher era: a former leader of Haringey Council whose fierce and principled advocacy for the Caribbean community had made him a hate figure for the right and a hero for the community. Paul Boateng was appointed to the Home Office, a posting of direct relevance to the community’s concerns about policing and race equality.

The Caribbean community’s political representation in Parliament was still far below its proportion of the population, but it was greater than it had ever been. The community understood the significance: that having people in the legislature who came from the community and who understood its concerns from the inside was different from relying on allies, however sympathetic, who did not share that experience. The question was what the Black MPs could achieve within the constraints of a Labour Party that, while more open than the Conservatives, still operated with its own set of priorities and limits.

The Final Months of Conservative Rule

The final months of John Major’s government had been defined by exhaustion and crisis. The BSE epidemic, which had seen British beef banned across Europe after the link between infected cattle and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans was established, had been a protracted disaster for the government. The community in Tooting and across Britain had lived through the public health anxiety of the BSE crisis alongside its other concerns: the continuing failure of the Stephen Lawrence investigation, the conditions in its local schools and hospitals, the immigration controls that continued to affect families seeking to reunite.

The Conservative Party’s relationship with the Caribbean community had never been comfortable. It was the Conservative government of the 1960s — Harold Macmillan’s, and then Douglas-Home’s — that had passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, the first of the immigration controls that had begun to restrict the entry of the very community that the party had, in effect, invited to come and rebuild post-war Britain. The pattern of invitation followed by exclusion was one the community remembered. Under Thatcher and Major, the relationship had not improved: the Nationality Act 1981, the asylum policies, the rhetoric about Britain being swamped by people of a different culture — these were the markers that the community measured when it thought about what Conservative rule had meant for them.

Kingston Watches the Vote

In Kingston on the morning of 2 May 1997, news of the Labour landslide arrived to a response that was warmer than detached observers might have expected. Jamaica’s relationship with Britain was, by 1997, mediated primarily through the diaspora: the families in Tooting and Brixton and Handsworth and Chapeltown whose calls home on Sunday evenings were the real diplomatic channel between the two countries. What happened in British politics happened, therefore, to people Jamaicans knew and loved. The victory of the Labour Party was understood in Kingston as a change that mattered for those people, and therefore for Jamaica.

There was also a more specific interest. The Caribbean diaspora in Britain was a source of remittances that mattered to Jamaica’s economy, and a source of political advocacy that mattered to Jamaica’s foreign relations. A British government that was more sympathetic to the concerns of the Caribbean community, and more engaged with the Caribbean as a region, was in Jamaica’s interest. Whether the Blair government would be that government was a question that Kingston was watching, through the summer of 1997, with the particular attention of a country that had learned to take nothing for granted.