Stonebridge to Kingston

She had been Prime Minister when Brixton burned and when the Nationality Act stripped Caribbean-born children of their birthright citizenship. The Caribbean community’s response to her death was more complex than either celebration or mourning

Briefing

• Margaret Thatcher dies on 8 April 2013 aged 87; state funeral held on 17 April.
• Caribbean community reactions divided; Nationality Act 1981 and Brixton riots revisited.
• Theresa May as Home Secretary continues hostile environment development.
• Jamaica diaspora conference preparations underway for June 2013 biennial.
• Operation Trident restructured; concerns about knife crime in young Black men persist.

Margaret Thatcher died on 8 April 2013. The state funeral, held at St Paul’s Cathedral on 17 April, was attended by representatives from across the world. In the mainstream British media, the coverage was extensive, the tributes numerous, and the debate about her legacy — which had never really stopped since her removal from office in 1990 — was renewed with considerable vigour. In the Caribbean communities of Stonebridge, of Brixton, of Handsworth and of Chapeltown, the reaction to Thatcher’s death was something that resisted the binary that the mainstream debate tended to impose: either you celebrated her legacy or you condemned it. The Caribbean community’s experience of Thatcher’s government was too specific, too layered and too contradictory for either position to capture it fully.

Thatcher had been Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. In 1981, the Brixton riots had exposed the depth of alienation between the Caribbean community in south London and the Metropolitan Police. The Scarman Report that followed had recommended reforms, some of which were implemented, some of which were not. In the same year, the British Nationality Act 1981 had ended the right of birth on British soil to automatically confer British citizenship, a change that would have significant consequences for Caribbean-heritage children born in Britain who did not have a British parent. In 1985, the Handsworth riots had added Birmingham to the catalogue of British cities where the relationship between the police and the Caribbean community had collapsed into violence. Thatcher’s government had not created the conditions that produced these events; it had inherited them and, its critics argued, intensified them through policies of austerity and social retrenchment that fell hardest on the communities most in need of public support.

The Complexity of Caribbean Response

And yet the Caribbean community’s response to Thatcher was not, as some expected, uniformly hostile. Some members of the Caribbean community — particularly those who had established businesses, who had bought homes, who had built economic lives in Britain that owed something to the property-owning, aspirational political culture that Thatcher had promoted — found in her legacy something that resonated with their own histories of self-reliance and ambition. The Caribbean community had not come to Britain to be supported by the state. It had come to work, and had worked, often in conditions of discrimination and disadvantage that Thatcher’s government had neither created nor resolved. Its relationship with the state was complicated by that history in ways that did not map straightforwardly onto left or right.

The Nationality Act of 1981 remained the sharpest point of Caribbean grievance with Thatcher’s legacy. The act had ended the ius soli principle — the right of anyone born on British soil to claim British citizenship — and had replaced it with a citizenship law based primarily on descent. Children born in Britain to parents who were themselves not British citizens could no longer automatically claim British citizenship at birth. The practical consequences for Caribbean-heritage families, where parents had arrived in Britain as colonial subjects rather than as citizens and whose documentation was often incomplete, were significant. The 1981 act was one of the legal building blocks of the Windrush problem that would not become visible for another three decades.

The Hostile Environment: Thatcher’s Legacy Continued

In 2013, Theresa May was Home Secretary in a Conservative government led by David Cameron. The hostile environment policy — the phrase itself not yet widely used in public discourse — was being built, measure by measure, through administrative changes, ministerial guidance and preparatory legislation. The 2014 Immigration Act was in preparation. The checks on tenants, on bank account holders, on NHS patients, were being designed. The community organisations that had been working on immigration cases were seeing the cumulative effects of years of tightening: more complex processes, more documentation requirements, more cases of long-settled Caribbean residents struggling to prove their right to be in Britain.

The connection between Thatcher’s legacy and May’s present was not merely ideological. The Nationality Act 1981, the management of immigration through a culture of enforcement and suspicion, the prioritisation of headline migration numbers over the welfare of the individuals affected — these were continuities in British Conservative governance that the Caribbean community could trace across the decades. Thatcher’s death was an occasion for remembering her government. It was also an occasion for noting how much of what she had built was still in operation.

Jamaica and the Diaspora in 2013

In Jamaica, the first half of 2013 brought a change of government: Portia Simpson Miller’s People’s National Party had won the February 2012 election and was managing the IMF programme that the previous government had initiated. The diaspora’s engagement with Jamaican politics was, as always, active and opinionated: community radio programmes in London and New York debated Jamaican economic policy with the same energy they brought to debates about British immigration law. The Jamaican diaspora had opinions about both governments — the one in Kingston and the one in Westminster — and was not shy about expressing them.

The biennial diaspora conference, due in June 2013, was in preparation. Its agenda would include the republic question, which had been on the diaspora conference agenda for years without producing a definitive political commitment. It would include investment and remittances. It would include the reparations debate, which was gaining momentum through the CARICOM process. And it would include, as always, the more immediate concerns of the diaspora communities in Britain and North America: housing, employment, education, policing, and the ongoing management of a relationship with their countries of residence that required, in every period, the same combination of engagement and resistance that the Jamaican and Caribbean community had always brought to its life in Britain.