Ladbroke Grove to Kingston

The architect of the hostile environment became Prime Minister in July 2016, and the Brexit vote had released something in the political atmosphere that community organisations were documenting in rising reports of racial harassment

Briefing

• Theresa May becomes Prime Minister on 13 July 2016.
• Racist incidents reported to police increase sharply in weeks after Brexit vote.
• Caribbean community anxiety about post-Brexit immigration environment grows.
• Amber Rudd replaces May at Home Office; hostile environment continues.
• Jamaica-UK trade relationship uncertain in post-Brexit landscape.

On 13 July 2016, Theresa May entered Downing Street as Prime Minister. In her first speech outside Number Ten, she spoke of a country that worked for everyone, not just the privileged few, and of her intention to govern for those who were just about managing. The Caribbean community in Ladbroke Grove and across Britain heard the words and weighed them against the record. May had been Home Secretary from 2010 to 2016. She had commissioned the net migration target of fewer than 100,000 people a year. She had introduced the hostile environment. She had overseen the building of the administrative apparatus that was, at that moment, quietly stripping Caribbean-born British residents of their rights. She was now Prime Minister.

The political context in which May took office was defined by the Brexit referendum result of 23 June, which had produced a leave vote of 52 per cent on a turnout of 72 per cent. The result had produced an immediate and visible spike in reports of racial harassment and abuse. Community organisations, hate crime charities and police forces documented significant increases in racist incidents in the weeks following the vote. The particular character of the Brexit campaign — its emphasis on immigration, on the movement of foreign people into Britain, on the need to take back control of borders — had, many in the Caribbean community felt, created an atmosphere in which the expression of hostility toward non-white people in public felt more permissible than it had before.

The Brexit Status Anxiety

For the Caribbean community in Britain, the formal legal position after the Brexit vote was clear: Caribbean-British citizens were British citizens, not EU nationals, and their right to remain in the UK was not contingent on EU membership. But the clarity of the legal position did not translate into a corresponding clarity of feeling. The Windrush generation’s children and grandchildren — British people who had grown up in Britain, who had been educated in Britain, who had worked in Britain — were aware, from family histories, from community memory, from the cases that community legal clinics had been handling for years, that formal legal status was not always the same as practical security.

Community organisations reported an increase in enquiries from Caribbean-heritage British citizens seeking advice on their immigration status in the months after the Brexit vote. The enquiries were not, in most cases, legally necessary — those asking the questions were, in law, unambiguously British. But the atmosphere of the Brexit debate, and the escalation in hostile incidents that had followed the result, had reactivated an anxiety that ran deep in the community’s experience. The hostile environment was operating, though not yet publicly identified by that name. The damage was being done, case by case, to people whose citizenship was being treated as less secure than it was.

Jamaica-UK Trade: New Uncertainty

The Brexit vote also created uncertainty about Jamaica’s trade relationship with the United Kingdom. Jamaica had been trading with the UK under the terms of the EU-Caribbean Economic Partnership Agreement (CARIFORUM EPA), which governed trade between the EU and Caribbean states. Post-Brexit, Jamaica would need either to replicate those terms in a bilateral agreement with the UK or to negotiate new ones. The Jamaican government’s initial response was measured: it would engage constructively with whatever process emerged, but it expected that its existing access to the British market would be maintained.

The diaspora’s interest in the trade question was both practical and symbolic. Jamaica exported goods to the UK — rum, coffee, agricultural products — and imported British goods. Diaspora Jamaicans who had established businesses importing Jamaican products were watching the trade negotiation landscape carefully. More broadly, the question of Jamaica’s relationship with a post-Brexit Britain — one that was explicitly seeking to redefine its global relationships on its own terms — was being discussed in community organisations and academic institutions on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ladbroke Grove: Community in the Brexit Storm

In Ladbroke Grove, in Brixton, in Handsworth and in Chapeltown, the Caribbean community navigated the second half of 2016 with a combination of watchfulness and determined normality. The organisations that sustained community life — the churches, the youth clubs, the carnival committees, the community radio stations — continued their work. The political environment was hostile in new ways. But the community had been living in hostile political environments, with varying degrees of hostility, for the entirety of its existence in Britain. It had built its institutions in those conditions and had sustained them through worse.

The Jamaican diaspora, from Ladbroke Grove to Kingston, entered 2017 watching a Prime Minister who had designed the hostile environment, leading a government committed to the hardest possible Brexit, in an atmosphere that had been made more hostile by a referendum campaign that had traded on fear of foreigners. The community’s response was not despair. It was the particular, enduring determination of people who had always known that Britain’s welcome was conditional, and who had built their lives here anyway. The Home Office was implementing policies whose consequences would not become public for another year and a half. The community would be ready when they did.