When Portia Simpson Miller was sworn in as Jamaica’s Prime Minister on 30 March 2006, the reaction in the diaspora went deeper than the ordinary satisfaction of a political milestone. For the Jamaican community in Reading, as across Britain, her arrival at the head of government was received as something that had been earned through a long history of Caribbean women’s leadership — in politics, in churches, in community organisations — that had rarely been formally recognised at this scale.

In March 2006, Portia Simpson Miller became Jamaica’s first female Prime Minister, succeeding P.J. Patterson after his retirement. The response across the Jamaican diaspora was immediate and proud. In Luton’s Caribbean community, as in Caribbean communities across Britain, her elevation to the highest office in Jamaica felt like a statement about what was possible — not only in Jamaica but in the imagination of Caribbean women everywhere.

The second half of 2005 is defined by two devastating events. On 7 July, four suicide bombers strike London’s transport network, killing 52 people and injuring hundreds more. The Caribbean community, whose members travel on those buses and tubes every day, is directly among those affected. In August, Hurricane Katrina exposes the racial contours of poverty and government failure in the United States in ways that Caribbean communities in Britain find painfully familiar.