Thirty-Five Years of the Chronicle: A Special Anniversary Edition

Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Chronicle | Thirty-Fifth Anniversary Special Edition | July 2017 | Thirty-Five Years of the Record

Thirty-five years ago, in July 1982, this Chronicle published its first edition. One hundred and forty quarterly editions later, in July 2017, the record it has accumulated covers more than a third of a century of British Caribbean life. It has covered Thatcher and Blair and Brown and Cameron and May; the Scarman and Macpherson Reports and the report into the 2011 riots and the report still awaited on Grenfell; the Cold War and the War on Terror and the Brexit crisis that is currently redefining Britain’s relationship with itself and with the world. What strikes this thirtieth-anniversary edition, reading back through one hundred and forty editions of contemporaneous record, is the degree to which the dominant themes — a community building itself against structural resistance, a state that is consistently slower to acknowledge the community’s belonging than the community’s contributions warrant — have remained constant across three and a half decades of change in everything else.

Nineteen days ago, in the early hours of 14 June 2017, a fire started in the kitchen of a flat on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The fire spread with catastrophic speed up the exterior cladding that had been fitted during a recent refurbishment, reaching the top of the twenty-four-storey block within minutes. At least seventy-two people died. The majority of the block’s residents were from Black and ethnic minority communities, many of them Caribbean, many of them with the complex relationship to British tenancy rights and housing documentation that the Chronicle has been tracking for three decades. The Chronicle marks this moment with the grief that it requires and the anger that it demands.

Brexit and the Community’s Anxiety

The United Kingdom’s referendum of 23 June 2016 produced a 52–48 majority for leaving the European Union. Article 50 was triggered in March 2017. Brexit negotiations are underway. For the Caribbean community, Brexit’s direct legal implications are less severe than those for EU citizens living in Britain, whose right of residence is genuinely in question. The community’s concern is different and in some ways deeper: Brexit is the product of a political culture in which immigration — from Europe and from outside Europe, and almost all discussion of immigration has conflated the two — has been made the dominant political issue of the decade. That culture, whatever its causes, has produced a social environment in which the Caribbean community’s sense of belonging in Britain is more contested than at any time since the 1970s.

The hostile environment policy, developed under successive Home Secretaries and reaching its current comprehensive form under Theresa May — now Prime Minister, following a snap election that produced a hung parliament and a Conservative minority government dependent on the DUP — is a system of administrative barriers to public services, housing, employment, and banking for those who cannot prove their immigration status. The Chronicle has been tracking the documentation concerns that make this policy dangerous for the Windrush generation for thirty-five years. We have noted, quarter by quarter, the accumulating gap between what the state requires and what the community’s founding generation possesses. That gap is now being operationalised by a comprehensive administrative system. The results — which we are beginning to see in the community’s legal advice centres, in the casework of MPs in Caribbean community constituencies, in the individuals who are being turned away from NHS treatment and from their jobs — will eventually be recognised as a crisis. The Chronicle is recording it now, as it is happening, before the crisis has a name.

Sixty-Nine Years: The Community at the Threshold

The Windrush docked in June 1948. The community is sixty-nine years into its post-war presence — one year from the seventieth anniversary of that arrival. The founding generation is very old; many have died. But many have not: people who arrived as teenagers and young adults in the late 1940s and 1950s are now in their seventies and eighties, and they are the people who are most acutely affected by the hostile environment’s documentation requirements. They are the people who came before passports were routinely required for travel within the Commonwealth; who worked in the NHS and on the railways and in the factories without ever being required to prove a status that was simply their right; who now find that a system that never required their documentation is demanding it and treating its absence as evidence of illegitimacy.

The Chronicle has been tracking this building crisis for thirty-five years. We have recorded every piece of immigration legislation since the British Nationality Act 1981. We have noted, in each edition, the practical implications for community members. We have followed the legal advice centres and the community organisations that have been working through individual cases. We have watched the documentation crisis accumulate. What we are recording now — in the summer of 2017, from the vantage point of thirty-five years of contemporaneous record — is the moment immediately before the accumulation becomes publicly visible. The crisis that the community has been living, privately and individually, for years is about to be named.

Jamaica at Thirty-Five Years

Andrew Holness’s JLP government was re-elected in a landslide in March 2016, winning 32 of 63 parliamentary seats in the closest election in Jamaican history, and is now governing with a majority of one. Jamaica’s murder rate — approximately 1,350 in 2016 — remains at emergency levels. Tourism has grown strongly to 2.18 million stopover visitors. The island is navigating Brexit’s implications for its trade relationship with Britain, its diaspora’s welfare in Britain, and the broader realignment of Britain’s international position that Brexit implies. For Jamaica, as for the Caribbean community in Britain, July 2017 is a moment of deep uncertainty about what comes next.

Sources: Grenfell Tower Inquiry documentation; 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.