Jonathan Lehoste is 21. He was born in Brixton. His maternal grandmother came from Jamaica. His father died when he was small. He lives with his mother and has one sister. He has spent nearly three years in prison.
'We was them kids going up the West End jumpin' over the counters back in '97. I reckon I got into doing that as a rebellious thing and seeing how bad I could really be compared to someone else that I knew. It was street credibility, back in them days. When I was 15, the badder you were, the more cooler you was. It's the same now but there's different things. It's not about money any more; people out there have guns and things. That's the street credibility. When I was 15 it was just money. If the police were after you there was more of a spark to it. They want to know who you are, it gives you that untouchable feeling.
'Even though there were white people doin' robbin' before us, I'm talkin' about it as a youth culture. The white kids wasn't runnin' into banks and bookies. That determines us. Now I see it's all totally opposite. If you do those things there's no way you can survive - you'll end up in prison or dead. But as a kid, you couldn't see that.'
What would you say to Jonathan at 15 if you met him now? 'Oh, I'd probably just laugh at him 'cause I know where he's goin'.'
Where he's going is a grim place. Figures show, that for every Caribbean-descended black at university here, there are two in prison.1 Blacks are three times more likely to be arrested than whites.2 And blacks get longer sentences: 54% get four years or more as opposed to 43% of whites.3 The black prison population is up 54%4 since new Labour came to power in 1997. In London, youths of Afro-Caribbean appearance account for 77% of all 10- to 17-year-olds accused of murder.5 Half of all Afro-Caribbean families are single-parent units.
Trevor Phillips, a black of Guyanese descent who is the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, points out that every year a black boy is at school, he falls further behind his classmates. A higher proportion of Afro-Caribbeans are excluded from school than any other ethnic group.
Of course, these are bald figures. Many Caribbean blacks do well in this country and, in some areas, things are improving rapidly. But the overall picture is appalling. Why? Some people secretly think these figures show that blacks are genetically inferior. This is because of misinterpreted evidence. True, blacks have always done much worse than whites in IQ tests and whites have done much worse than Chinese, but the differences diminish rapidly with integration. IQ tests are good predictors of achievement later in life, but only because that's what they are designed to do. They do not capture fundamental truths about individuals. Also, IQ tests have been found to measure not absolute intelligence but intelligence relative to time and place. Black failure, then, is a result of where and when blacks find themselves, as is white or yellow failure.
Others are too afraid of appearing racist to admit there is any problem other than white oppression and racism. This, too, is wrong. The Chinese and Indians also suffer racism, but their performance in Britain is much better than the blacks. The Ugandan Asians who fled Idi Amin were initially rejected by Leicester; now they are celebrated as the city's most vibrant entrepreneurial population. Even blacks from Africa do better than blacks from the Caribbean. Racism is, of course, a problem, but it cannot be the distinctive problem of Britain's blacks. As the New York black activist the Rev Al Sharpton says, 'If I knock you down, that's my fault; if you're still lying there a week later, that's your fault.'
Honesty is required here, so I'll start with me. The idea of condemning another human on the basis of a barely detectable genetic variation - a variation that grows less detectable with each succeeding generation - is stupid and wicked. Yet my experience of black crime means I cross the road when I see groups of black boys. I hate this. Where I used to live in London, several of my neighbours' children were attacked by a gang who hung around the end of the street. The police did nothing. I knew charming black kids in that area who, when they reached a certain age, acquired cold faces and automatically took to carrying a knife. Street crime is very much a black thing - 28% of those arrested for street robbery are black, and almost a third of mugging victims identify their attacker as black - and it is horrible, destroying people and places. Protecting myself and my own in London, sadly, means being more wary of blacks than whites. I told this to every black I met on this story. They all nodded sympathetically.
Too many black people are lying down and not getting up. In urban areas, primarily London, they are forming themselves into an underclass, riddled with broken families, crime and drugs and in thrall to the idiocies of the 'bling-bling' and 'respect' culture. They are politically insignificant. They do not have a voice, because their numbers are relatively small and because black political activism in this country is dead. So, don't worry, white folk,there will be no revolution, like the ones threatened in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. There will, however, be something much worse - thousands of empty, wasted lives.
But if it's not racism or genetics, what is it that's causing the defection of Caribbean blacks? The only possible answer is the specific historic and cultural circumstances of the post-war immigrant wave. But it is a story, not a simple formula.
This story began in 1948 with the docking of the Empire Windrush. It was a renamed captured German troopship that had been sailing the world looking for cargoes of displaced people. It arrived in Kingston, Jamaica, carrying 60 Polish women who had travelled all the way around the world hoping to reach Britain. In Kingston it was intending to pick up a few West Indians who worked for the RAF. But there were plenty of empty spaces. A passage to Britain was offered for £28 10s. The Windrush was soon full. It was full of people who, for two reasons, were desperately ill-equipped to come here. First, they came from a rural culture of extended families and would end up in an urban one of nuclear families. Second, they thought Britain was as much their home as Jamaica.
'There was a huge disjunction between their expectations and how people treated them,' says Trevor Phillips. 'It must have been traumatic all round. A lot of them had been in the war; they thought they'd be welcome when they got back to England. I always remember one man who said he was sitting on top of a bus in his uniform. He heard a woman, who hadn't seen him, say, 'There's a lot of them here. I wonder when they're going home.' It was the first time he realised he wasn't at home in London, and it came as a shock.'
