Three years on, the individual tales of Windrush injustice still have the power to catch my breath. Men and women who moved to Britain as children decades ago, who found themselves banished from the UK for the remainder of their life after a holiday abroad, wrongfully arrested, detained and threatened with deportation, and denied life-saving care on the NHS. So many stories of the British state ruining black lives, but one stands out for its exquisite cruelty: that of Jay, the son of a Windrush immigrant.
Jay was born in the UK and taken into care as a baby. When he applied for a passport as a teenager he was told he did not have enough information about the status of his estranged mother. After his third unsuccessful application, the Home Office threatened to deport him to Jamaica and forced him to declare himself stateless. He was only able to secure a passport years later, after the Windrush scandal broke and his case received significant media attention.
It is so extraordinary, I struggle to get my head round it. A baby is so vulnerable that the state assumes parental responsibility for him soon after his birth. That same state refuses him a passport again, and again, and again, then, as a young man, it threatens to forcibly deport him to a country he has never set foot in. There can be no greater symbol of the sick rot that Conservative prime ministers have introduced into our immigration system through the “hostile environment”.
And yet not only have ministers declined to fix this, they are putting thousands more children in care at risk of this fate as a consequence of Brexit.
The deadline for EU citizens living in the UK, including children, to apply to the EU settlement scheme for the right to remain is less than three months away. Local authorities have to do this for children in care. No one knows exactly how many are affected; many local authorities did not keep nationality data for children in their care. But the Children’s Society has established through Freedom of Information requests that, so far, fewer than 40% of the 3,700 or so eligible children in care and care leavers we know about have applications in; the true number could be much higher. It is unclear what will happen to them if they fall through the net, only to discover their unlawful status when they are older and can’t get a job, open a bank account or rent a flat and are at risk of deportation.
By opting for an EU scheme where people have to actively apply for what should be an automatic legal right, the government has created an anomaly that could leave children in care in a similar situation to Jay. It has batted away efforts from MPs and peers to try to fast track all children in care through that process. And it is deeply worrying that the government is encouraging local authorities to register these children for settlement status, putting them on an immigration track that offers nowhere near the same guarantees as a passport, even though most, or even all, could have rights to citizenship, according to Solange Valdez-Symonds, a lawyer who specialises in citizenship.
Children born here to parents settled in the UK, or who have lived the first 10 years of their life here, have the right to register for British citizenship. If a child was born in the UK to parents who settle before they turn 18, they also have that right, but it expires when they turn 18. The home secretary also has a discretionary power to grant any child citizenship if it is clear their future lies here, for example if they are taken into care, but again they must apply before they turn 18.
But knowledge of the full extent of children’s rights to citizenship law is poor. Not only that, local authorities have to pay extortionate fees of more than £1,000 to register a child in their care for citizenship and too often nobody even knows the required information about parents’ immigration status. Some of these children will lose their rights to citizenship forever when they turn 18. All children over 10 are subject to a good character test, which many children in care are at risk of failing; the Home Office has turned down children born in the UK because of a minor police caution or a referral order following a school fight.
All this creates a system where too many children in care are likely to be dumped on a conveyor belt to the hostile environment and possible deportation. It takes young people starting from scratch, who may have no memory of living anywhere else, four applications costing more than £8,000 in fees and charges over 10 years to apply for indefinite leave to remain. The applications are fiendishly complex and require specialist legal advice; the Home Office rejects applications with the tiniest of mistakes, even as its own processes are ridden with errors and there is no right to appeal if you get rejected. If young people miss a deadline for one of the applications, or can’t afford the fees, they become undocumented, vulnerable to exploitation without the legal right to work or rent, and go back to the start of the decade-long process. It is a system designed to catch out people who grew up in the UK, to make it as difficult as possible for them to earn the right to stay here.
Even as the government apologises for Windrush, it is planting the seeds for a future injustice no less profound that will affect some of the most vulnerable children in society. The only way to resolve this is to give all children, including children in care, who grow up in Britain the lifelong right to register for citizenship for free, without a test that fails them if they get into a fight at school. The government was warned again and again about the consequences of its policies for the Windrush generation, to no avail. Will they listen this time?
Indeed. Interesting findings from detailed interviews:
Is a mass-produced jerk chicken burger a symbol of cultural appropriation or a celebration of British multiculturalism? This is an old debate that periodically resurfaces and so it was a couple of weeks ago when McDonald’s launched its latest festive offering.
In this case, a story that got echoed across much of the tabloid press was constructed out of a few random comments criticising McDonald’s on social media; it was journalists who built and amplified this narrative. But occasionally, others who should know better get drawn in, such as the MP who picked a fight with Jamie Oliver over his jerk rice.
I have long thought that reducing debates about racism to flippant questions about fast-food burgers and supermarket curry kits is damaging to the antiracist cause. But new research on public attitudes to racism by the Runnymede Trust and Voice4Change England helps us understand why.
The study is all the better for shunning mass polling as the primary way of understanding how the public thinks about race. Instead, researchers undertook two one-hour conversations with 60 people from a range of backgrounds. What emerges is both good and bad news for those of us who care deeply about ending racism. The good news is that the weight of public thinking is that racism matters, that it is something that is learned and education has an important role to play; also, that racism is part of our national history.
The less good news is that some people buy into the idea that racism is “natural”, that we all have an affinity with people who look more like us. There is a lack of understanding about the nature of structural racism; public thinking gravitates towards the idea that racism is about individual actions and responsibilities. There is a strong sense that there is no going backwards and that things will inevitably get better over time.
Yet in the 20 years since the Macpherson report, black people have gone from being five to nine times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than white people. And there is a strand of zero-sum thinking: the worry that tackling racial discrimination will inevitably mean majority groups giving things up.
Importantly, researchers found people hold beliefs that would be considered both warm and hostile to antiracism campaigns: it is possible for someone to believe both that racism is ingrained in human nature and will never change, but that we are making progress as a society, or that it is important we all do something about racism while at the same time worrying about the consequences for themselves.
The populist right is very good at activating the more hostile strands of thinking by stoking this idea that if a minority benefits, the majority must lose. When Conservative MP Ben Bradley calls the education of white, working-class boys a “taboo” subject, he implies that white, working-class children have been unfairly overlooked by people more interested in promoting the interests of minority children; if it were Asian or black children, “heads would roll”, he says (the lack of accountability for institutional racism in the Met suggests they wouldn’t).
By confecting this into a conflict between white and non-white children, he conveniently obscures the role of class. Far from being taboo, the class attainment gap for poor children, the vast majority of whom are white, was one of the key drivers of Labour education policy, which on any objective measure was far better than what followed, including Conservative chancellors slashing thousands of pounds a year in tax credits from parents in low-paid work and Tory education reforms that have done little to address the fact that working-class children remain far less likely to attend a good quality school.
The intellectual underpinnings of this zero-sum thinking lie in notions of “white identity” from academics such as Eric Kaufmann. Kaufmann argues that the rise of right populism is primarily the product of white communities’ opposition to increasing racial diversity. He attacks the notion that structural racism exists at all and encourages politicians to promote the need to maintain “white culture”.
But this is to take far too simplistic and patronising a view of the way white, working-class communities think about race. It cannot account for all the historical examples where a predominantly white labour movement built solidarity and common cause with campaigns for equality.
The Runnymede research shows that there are strands of public thinking that the right can activate to achieve its ends of sowing division. But there are also positive ways of thinking about race that antiracist campaigners can connect with and build on, sometimes in the same person and certainly within the same community. In particular, antiracism campaigners need to find ways to explain the often counterintuitive idea that racism is not just about individuals but systems. “We need to communicate to people that racism is something that’s designed into our system, which means we can design something better,” says Sanjiv Lingayah, the lead author of the research.
But there are also traps. Certain ideas risk playing into the damaging idea that majority white and minority interests are directly in conflict, which antiracism campaigners need to challenge. Cultural appropriation often fits into that category, as do terms such as “white privilege” and “white fragility”. Yes, there is an overall structural advantage to being white compared with being non-white, but, no, it does not build solidarity to imply that if you are white, you are automatically “privileged”. Yes, men who went to Eton may have to loosen their grip on the levers of power, but that would, frankly, be good for all the rest of us.
This research gets us away from reductivist, static accounts of public attitudes to race. It shows that, while there are aspects of public thinking that antiracists need to challenge, there is also a lot of positive stuff to work with. But to get lured into giving the impression that this is a fight between “them” and “us” is only to serve the agenda of the populist right.
Multicultural Meanderings 