Five Years of the Chronicle: A Special Anniversary Edition

Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Chronicle | Fifth Anniversary Special Edition | July 1987 | Five Years of the Record

Five years ago, in the summer of 1982, this Chronicle published its first edition. We said then that we would attempt something unusual: a contemporaneous quarterly record of the Caribbean community’s life in Britain, written without hindsight, as the community actually experiences its life from one quarter to the next. We have kept that commitment through twenty editions. Looking back at those twenty editions now, from the vantage point of July 1987, is to encounter a record of a community under sustained pressure that has, nonetheless, refused to be diminished.

The five years that have elapsed since the Chronicle’s launch have tested the community in ways that would have seemed barely imaginable in the optimistic aftermath of the Scarman Report. The Falklands War of 1982, in which community members served and died in the South Atlantic while the government whose uniform they wore was simultaneously legislating to reduce their citizenship rights. The miners’ strike of 1984–85, in which the community stood in solidarity with a working-class movement that was fighting for its economic survival. The killing of Cynthia Jarrett during a police search at her home in Tottenham on 5 October 1985, and the riot at Broadwater Farm estate that followed, in which PC Keith Blakelock was killed. The acquittals that follow are not yet certain; what is certain, in July 1987, is that the community’s anger at the circumstances that produced Broadwater Farm remains unresolved.

Four Black MPs: A Historic Moment Held in Perspective

The general election of 11 June 1987 has produced, for the first time in British parliamentary history, four Black Members of Parliament. Diane Abbott in Hackney North and Stoke Newington, Paul Boateng in Brent South, Bernie Grant in Tottenham, and Keith Vaz in Leicester East have been elected on the Labour ticket, entering a House of Commons that has not seen a Black member since Shapurji Saklatvala’s defeat in 1929. The Chronicle marks this as the most significant political achievement of the Black British community since independence — a demonstration that the community’s children, born or raised in Britain, are claiming the full rights of British citizenship including the right to represent their fellow citizens in the legislature.

Thatcher has won a third successive majority. The community’s political representation in Westminster is historic but its electoral influence on the national result is limited. The structural conditions that produced Broadwater Farm — police stop-and-search powers, unemployment, inadequate housing in deprived communities, underfunded schools — have not been addressed by the Thatcher government, and there is little in the Conservative manifesto to suggest they will be. The four Black MPs will fight from the opposition benches. The community knows that four MPs in a 650-seat chamber, however significant symbolically, are not yet the political power that the community’s size and contribution warrant.

Thirty-Nine Years: The Windrush Generation Assessed

The Windrush docked at Tilbury in June 1948. The community that it inaugurated is now thirty-nine years old — approaching, next year, its fortieth anniversary, which the Chronicle will mark with its own commemorative edition. In thirty-nine years, the community has been the subject of sustained legislative hostility: the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, the Immigration Act 1971, the British Nationality Act 1981. It has been the target of racist violence on its streets. It has watched politicians use its presence as a rallying point for electoral campaigns built on the politics of exclusion. It has persisted anyway, building in the spaces available to it the cultural and social infrastructure of a community that intends to remain.

Next year, in June 1988, the Chronicle will publish a special edition marking forty years since the Windrush docked. That edition will ask what four decades have produced and what they have cost. This fifth anniversary edition looks back at five years of the Chronicle’s own record and notes that the dominant theme — a community building itself while fighting for its right to exist within the country it has helped to build — has not changed from the first edition to the twentieth. Whether it changes in the twenty editions that follow is the question this community is living.

Jamaica at This Moment

Edward Seaga remains Jamaica’s Prime Minister. His government’s ‘snap’ election of December 1983 — called on outdated electoral rolls before the PNP could prepare, resulting in the JLP winning all 60 seats after the PNP boycotted — has produced a parliament without opposition and a democratic deficit that continues to concern observers. Michael Manley is rebuilding the PNP in opposition, and the general election that must come before 1989 is already the community’s most discussed political question. The bauxite industry’s decline and the IMF structural adjustment’s human costs are tracked in the remittances the diaspora continues to send — those flows are the lifeline that five years of the Chronicle has documented with increasing concern for the economic pressures on island families.

Sources: Electoral Commission; House of Commons records; Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; New Nation; The Voice; Caribbean Times; BBC News; Home Office.