Thirty Years of the Chronicle: A Special Anniversary Edition

Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Chronicle | Thirtieth Anniversary Special Edition | July 2012 | Thirty Years of the Record

Thirty years ago, in July 1982, this Chronicle published its first edition. One hundred and twenty quarterly editions later, in July 2012, the record it has accumulated spans three decades of British Caribbean life: from the Scarman Report to the Macpherson Report to the report into the 2011 riots that is still being awaited; from Thatcher to Blair to Cameron; from the Cold War to the War on Terror to the global financial crisis. In three weeks the London Olympic Games will open at the Olympic Stadium in Stratford, east London — three miles from where this community has built its British life, in a city that thirty years of this Chronicle has recorded as both the community’s opportunity and its test.

The London Olympics are being welcomed by the community with genuine excitement and some complexity. The Games are being held in a city whose Caribbean community has contributed to it at every level — in the NHS workers and teachers and postal workers and transport workers who have kept London running for six decades, and in the athletes who will represent Britain on the track and in the pool and in the boxing ring in the coming weeks. Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis, the relay teams whose sprinting draws on a Caribbean heritage that Britain simultaneously celebrates and has difficulty acknowledging — the Olympics will produce a moment of national self-congratulation about diversity that the community will observe with the realism of people who live the diversity that the Games are celebrating.

The 2011 Riots: Eleven Months On

On 4 August 2011, Mark Duggan was shot dead by Metropolitan Police officers in Tottenham. Two days later, following a peaceful protest outside Tottenham police station that the police failed to engage with effectively, the community that had gathered was met with police vehicles being set alight, and the disorder spread rapidly — first through Tottenham, then across north and east London, then to cities across England including Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, and Bristol. The 2011 riots were the most widespread civil disorder in England since 1981, and the Chronicle marks that parallel with the awareness that thirty years separates them: thirty years of reports and inquiries and reforms and community organisations and political progress, and the structural conditions that produced Broadwater Farm in 1985 and Brixton in 1981 produced Tottenham in 2011. The Riots Communities and Victims Panel, established by the government, will report in March 2012. The community is waiting to see what it says and, more importantly, what the government does with what it says.

The David Cameron government’s characterisation of the riots as ‘pure criminality’ without structural causes was received by the community with the particular frustration of people who have been making the structural argument since at least 1981. Thirty years of the Chronicle have documented those structures: the stop-and-search statistics, the educational disadvantage, the employment discrimination, the housing conditions, the police accountability deficit. The government’s refusal to accept structural explanations is itself a structural feature of the political system’s response to Black British grievance. The Chronicle notes it without surprise.

Sixty-Four Years: The Windrush Generation in Context

The Windrush docked in June 1948. The community is now sixty-four years into its post-war presence. The founding generation is very elderly; many of its members have died in Britain, buried in British soil, having spent their adult lives in a country that accepted their labour more readily than their presence. Their children are grandparents. The fourth generation of the community — great-grandchildren of the Windrush passengers — is being born. The depth of the community’s roots in British society is, by 2012, literally generational: it is not possible to describe this community as anything other than British without doing violence to the observable facts of British social life.

The documentation crisis that the Chronicle has tracked for thirty years is intensifying. The hostile environment policies being developed by the Home Office — the right to rent checks, the requirements for NHS trusts to verify immigration status, the expansion of employer checks — are creating a system in which documentation of immigration status is required by a widening range of institutions, applied to a generation of community members who arrived before such documentation was required or expected. The gap between what the law now requires and what the community’s founding generation possesses is growing. The Chronicle has been watching this gap for thirty years. It has not yet been named as a crisis. It will be.

Jamaica at Thirty Years

Andrew Holness’s JLP government, elected in December 2011 with a majority of one seat over Portia Simpson Miller’s PNP, is the newest administration in the Chronicle’s thirty-year coverage of Jamaica. The island’s murder rate has declined from the catastrophic 2009 peak of 1,680 murders — a product partly of the Tivoli Gardens incursion of May 2010 that produced the extradition of Christopher Coke to the United States. Tourism is approaching two million stopover arrivals. The structural challenges of debt, unemployment, and the garrison community system that drives violence remain unresolved. The diaspora’s remittances remain the financial lifeline of hundreds of thousands of Jamaican households, binding the community in Britain to the island in a relationship of mutual economic dependence that thirty years of the Chronicle has documented with consistent attention.

Sources: Riots Communities and Victims Panel; Home Office; Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; New Nation; The Voice; Caribbean Times; BBC News; House of Commons Hansard; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica Tourist Board; Jamaica Constabulary Force.