Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Chronicle | Tenth Anniversary Special Edition | July 1992 | Ten Years of the Record
Ten years ago, in July 1982, this Chronicle published its first edition. In those ten years — forty quarterly editions — we have attempted to record the Caribbean community’s life in Britain and its connections to Jamaica without the benefit or distortion of hindsight, from the vantage point of each moment as it was lived. The first decade of the Chronicle has been a decade of loss and survival, of political change and community persistence, of Thatcher and after, of riots and reports and reforms that came too slowly. Looking back at the forty editions, the dominant quality is the community’s refusal to accept the terms that have been offered to it.
The decade began with the Scarman Report and ended with the election of John Major’s Conservative government for a fourth consecutive term. In between: the Falklands War; the miners’ strike; Broadwater Farm; the election of four Black MPs; the collapse of the poll tax revolt; the fall of Margaret Thatcher; the Gulf War; the beginning of the recession. And in April 1992, the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers whose beating of Rodney King had been filmed and shown around the world, producing the most widespread urban unrest in the United States since the Watts riots of 1965. The Black British community watched the Los Angeles events with the specific attention of people who understand, from their own experience, what it means when the state treats the killing or brutalisation of Black people as routine and then declines to hold itself to account.
The Fall of Thatcher and What Followed
Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister in November 1990, defeated not by the electorate but by her own Cabinet over the poll tax and her increasingly hostile relationship with the European Community. The community’s response to her departure was complex: she had been the prime minister of Broadwater Farm and of the Nationality Act, of Enoch Powell’s rehabilitation and of the ‘swamping’ speech of 1978 that had made explicit the racial subtext of Conservative immigration policy. She had also been the prime minister of the miners’ defeat and of the economic restructuring that had hollowed out the industrial communities where many Caribbean workers had settled. Her departure was received with relief rather than regret. John Major, her successor, is a different political personality — quieter, less ideological, more conciliatory in style — but his government continues many of the same policies. The community is watchful.
The April 1992 general election, in which John Major’s Conservatives won an unexpected fourth successive majority despite predictions of a Labour victory, has produced dismay in a community that votes overwhelmingly Labour. The community’s political interests — investment in public services, anti-racist legislation, reform of police accountability, action on housing — are consistently more closely aligned with the Labour programme than with any Conservative offering. The Conservatives’ fourth term means a minimum of five more years before the political environment might become more favourable.
Forty-Four Years: Approaching the Half-Century
The Windrush docked at Tilbury in June 1948. The community is now forty-four years into its post-war presence in Britain — approaching, in six years’ time, the fiftieth anniversary of that arrival. The founding generation is ageing. The Chronicle has, over its forty editions, noted the passing of community elders with increasing frequency: people who came as young workers and have spent their lives in Britain, some of whom never returned to the islands they left behind, some of whom returned in retirement to find themselves strangers in a country they had idealised in absence. Their children — the first British-born generation — are now in their twenties and thirties, British in identity and experience even when the law has been ambivalent about confirming that identity. Their grandchildren are being born into a Britain that has never known them as anything other than British.
The documentation situation that the Chronicle has tracked since the British Nationality Act 1981 came into force is becoming more complex with each passing year. Community members who arrived as children on their parents’ passports, who have worked and paid taxes and raised families without ever formalising their immigration status because their status was always assumed, are encountering a state that is increasingly requiring documentation that many of them do not possess. The Chronicle notes this with concern. The implications of a system that assumes the right of the state to require documentary proof of belonging, applied to a community whose belonging has always been a political question rather than a legal certainty, have not yet been fully worked through. We will continue to track them.
Jamaica at Ten Years
Michael Manley won the February 1989 general election, returning to power after nine years in opposition and governing, in his second administration, as a dramatically different politician from the democratic socialist of the 1970s. Manley’s conversion to market economics — his continuation of the IMF structural adjustment programme that his predecessor Seaga had implemented — has been the most discussed political development in the Jamaican diaspora over the past three years. PJ Patterson became Prime Minister when Manley resigned due to ill health in March 1992 and has won a general election in his own right. Jamaica is being governed by its third prime minister in the Chronicle’s ten-year history, in economic conditions that continue to constrain the island’s social development and continue to fuel the emigration that brings young Jamaicans to Britain, adding to the community whose record this Chronicle maintains.
Sources: Electoral Commission; House of Commons records; Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; New Nation; The Voice; Caribbean Times; BBC News; Home Office; US Department of Justice.
Visit our YouTube Community ↗