A tradition that began as an act of defiance is now being absorbed by authority. Sixty years after the initial Notting Hill Carnival, which burst onto the streets of West London in rebellion, the event takes place under conditions the founders could never have imagined. This year, close to two million people participated, while 7,000 police officers, drones, and facial-recognition cameras monitored the crowds. A security operation costing up to £20 million surrounded the area. Over 330 individuals were banned from attending before the event started, and by the end of the first day, police had made 169 arrests. The difference between Carnival’s origins and its current state is not just stark; it is a matter of history. Carnival was born from a riot; today, it is managed as if it could be another riot.
To understand what has been done to Carnival, one must return to the figure who helped bring it into being: Claudia Jones. Her life, politics, and purpose illuminate precisely what is being erased and why.
Claudia Jones: A Revolutionary Life Against Empire
Claudia Jones wasn’t a “community organiser” in the modern, sanitised sense. She was a communist, a Black internationalist, and a leading anti-imperialist thinker of the mid-20th century. Born in Trinidad and raised in Harlem, she was radicalised by the racism of the Depression era. Jones joined the Communist Party USA and became a prominent writer on issues of race, gender, and class. Her 1949 essay “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman” is still a key text in Black Marxist feminism.
Her political activism led to state repression, with the U.S. repeatedly detaining, imprisoning, and finally deporting her in 1955 amid McCarthyism. Britain only permitted her entry because Trinidad was still a colony; she arrived in London as a political exile. There, Jones found a Black community facing problems eerily similar to those in her homeland: racist policing, housing discrimination, low wages, and rising violence from far-right street gangs. She founded the West Indian Gazette, Britain’s first major Black newspaper, not just as a cultural platform but as a means for political activism. It became a space for agitation, organisation, and awareness-raising.
In response to the 1958 Notting Hill race riots and the 1959 murder of Kelso Cochrane, Jones opted for action rather than appeals to authority. She organised an indoor Caribbean carnival at St Pancras Town Hall in January 1959 to directly address racist violence. The event celebrated Caribbean culture and made a political statement: Black people had the right to occupy public space, be seen, express joy, and remain unafraid. The roots of carnival in Caribbean masquerade traditions—created by enslaved and colonised people to mock the planter class highlighted its political significance. Carnival was never just entertainment; it was a cultural act through which the oppressed found a voice in a context where theirs was otherwise suppressed. Today, this history is hidden beneath barricades, drones, and biometric checkpoints.
The outdoor street Carnival that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s was influenced by the same challenges Jones faced: police harassment, racial violence, and the British state’s refusal to recognise Black Britons in public life fully. Carnival served as a form of resistance, asserting existence against erasure, collective identity against isolation, and joy against repression. It was never meant to be ‘managed’ but to be visible. In its early years, Carnival often confronted police, who viewed it as a threat instead of a cultural celebration. The way police respond to Carnival has always reflected the government’s attitude toward Black communities. What has evolved is not the suspicion itself but the mechanisms behind it.
The increase in policing at Carnival is a systemic issue, not just occasional. Arrests have steadily risen each year—209 in 2022, 308 in 2023, 355 in 2024, and 528 last year. The Met publicly celebrates the success of live facial recognition, which identified 98 individuals in 2023 and resulted in 61 arrests. This year’s operation was the largest so far. The stated reasons are always the same: ensuring public safety, addressing knife crime, sexual assault, and preventing a minority from ruining it for everyone. However, this framing is deeply connected to a historical pattern of viewing Black communities as suspicious. Carnival is uniquely labelled as a security threat among Britain’s major cultural events. The policing tactics resemble counter-insurgency measures more than crowd control.
Even senior police officials acknowledge the double standards involved. Former detective chief inspector Mike Neville has described Carnival as the country’s worst example of a two-tier policing system. The London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee warns that repeatedly diverting officers to police Carnival disrupts neighbourhood policing throughout the capital. The operation expands each year, funded by millions from City Hall. Each year, politicians and media repeat the same pattern: celebrating “vibrant multiculturalism” while using surveillance and coercion tools against the communities being celebrated. Carnival is lauded as a symbol of diversity but also policed as a potential source of unrest.
Commodification Wears a Friendlier Face
If policing serves to neutralise Carnival’s radical roots, then commodification symbolises capitalism’s role. Each year, media coverage reduces Carnival to an economic event focusing on tourism income, transportation issues, and hospitality profits. The “Carnival Economics” project highlights how this reduction neglects the community-based infrastructures—steel bands, mas camps, cultural centres like the Yaa Centre that support Carnival year-round. This form of erasure is subtler; it doesn’t involve drones or facial recognition but instead redefines Carnival as merely a “cultural asset,” a tourist draw, or a contributor to GDP. The political messages the defiance, the assertion of presence, the Caribbean working-class history are erased. Carnival becomes a brand, and its creators fade into the background.
Securitisation and commodification are not opposing forces but are interconnected. They jointly symbolise how a working-class, anti-racist cultural legacy is absorbed into the administrative and economic systems of a state and market that did not originate it and are keen to neutralise its significance. Carnival emerged from Claudia Jones’s revolutionary activism, Caribbean anti-colonial traditions, and Black Britons’ refusal to be invisible. It served as a declaration of presence in defiance of a hostile system.
Today, that tradition has adapted to absorb dissent. It encloses Carnival with police, drones, and biometric tech. It markets Carnival as a tourist destination. It advocates multiculturalism while viewing Black presence as a security threat.
The steel bands continue to play. The crowds keep arriving. Yet, the political significance has been stripped away. An event created because Black Britons faced attacks for claiming public space now relies on thousands of officers and biometric systems to control who can occupy that space. This is not true stewardship. It’s the gradual replacement of a community’s self-organised resistance with the machinery of the very state it once challenged.
Carnival Pays Lip Service to the Memory of Grenfell
Every year, during Notting Hill Carnival, a moment is set aside to remember Grenfell. Green hearts decorate banners and sound systems, a silence is observed, and tributes spread among the crowd. Those who participate do so genuinely. However, on an institutional and political level, Carnival now only superficially acknowledges Grenfell. The act of remembrance has been stylized, losing its deeper significance, and has been absorbed into the official story that has ultimately neutralized the spirit of Carnival.
Grenfell was more than an isolated tragedy; it was the unavoidable outcome of a political system that considers working-class, racialised communities expendable. Policies such as deregulation, outsourcing, cost-cutting, disrespect for tenants, and the dismissal of warnings set the stage for the disaster. The government’s response, characterised by delays, confusion, and a lengthy inquiry that has yet to deliver justice, mirrored this same underlying attitude. Ultimately, Grenfell symbolises a form of social murder.
Carnival’s official remembrance is mainly symbolic, providing a platform to acknowledge grief without addressing responsibility. The green heart signifies acceptable mourning, enabling recognition of loss while avoiding the acknowledgment of the systemic issues behind it. The political statement of Grenfell that the system endangers residents at home and surveils them in public is intentionally left out. Carnival can grieve, but it cannot openly assign blame or accuse.
This is the pattern of managed memory. The entity that uses drones and facial recognition to police Carnival also oversees the unresolved aftermath of Grenfell. It allows commemoration because, when stripped of politics, it is harmless. However, what it cannot accept is the link between the two: that the same communities whose cultural practices are seen as security threats were the ones left to burn in a tower with flammable cladding.
Carnival recalls Grenfell. However, unless remembrance turns into blame—unless sorrow shifts into activism, the memory will stay a tradition rather than a true confrontation. The green heart may continue to beat, as long as it does not reflect on the systems that enabled Grenfell and now encircle Carnival.
The Bands Played On
This year, as the procession arrived at Ladbroke Grove fire station, firefighters in uniform paid their respects to Grenfell. They formed a solemn line, heads bowed and saluting the memory of the 72 victims of the tower fire wrapped in flammable cladding. It was a sincere display of dignity by workers who witnessed the tragedy firsthand, carried bodies from smoke-filled stairwells, and continue to live with the trauma. Meanwhile, around them, the bands played on.
This isn’t disrespect from Carnival’s participants but reflects the choreography imposed on Carnival itself: remembrance is allowed only if it doesn’t disrupt the spectacle. The music keeps playing because Carnival has been redesigned to absorb grief without making it political. Firefighters pause; the crowd pauses; the sound systems lower the volume briefly, then the rhythm continues, as if grief were just another programmed beat in the entertainment. Grenfell turns into a ritual rather than a true reckoning.
The firefighters’ tribute highlights a contradiction. While those who risked their lives see Grenfell as a social murder caused by deregulation, outsourcing, tenants’ contempt, and a political economy that disposes of working-class lives, Carnival’s official memorial remains only symbolic. Green hearts, brief silences, and respectful nods are permitted because they avoid naming the responsible parties.
The issue isn’t the bands performing; they’re merely a symptom. Carnival has become a commercialised event, stripped of its political roots Claudia Jones’s resistance, fighting racist violence, and highlighting Black working-class communities—now seen as mere historical background. Grenfell is recognized, but only as a sad event, not as a critique of the same system that now encircles Carnival with drones and facial recognition technology.
The firefighters attempted to show respect. They genuinely tried. However, the surrounding machinery made their tribute merely symbolic, not confrontational. The music restarted because Carnival can mourn, but it cannot accuse. Until accusations can disrupt the rhythm, Grenfell will stay a tolerated memory for the state—as long as the bands keep playing.
Jones recognized that culture is inherently contentious. It is a site of ongoing conflict. Carnival was never intended merely as a celebration of diversity; it was a political statement affirming that Black working-class life in Britain would not be marginalized, erased, or intimidated. The issue is not that Carnival has always been subject to policing—that was part of its history—but that this policing has become normalized, integrated into the frameworks of “public safety,” “crowd management,” and “economic impact.” This shift has obscured Carnival’s radical roots, which institutions once challenged it.
