The new Windrush commissioner has warned of the danger of “unintended consequences” from tougher UK asylum laws.
In a wide-ranging BBC interview about his government-appointed role, the Reverend Clive Foster said he wanted discussions with ministers about how to prevent a repeat of the Windrush scandal.
Mr Foster is concerned about potential mistakes and said lessons needed to be learned from Windrush, when thousands of Commonwealth citizens were wrongly classed as illegal immigrants.
The scandal involved people from the Caribbean who responded to an invitation to rebuild the UK after World War Two, but the commissioner said it also affected Commonwealth citizens from Africa and South Asia, particularly Bangladesh.
Many were later denied jobs, housing and NHS treatment and some were wrongly deported because the Home Office failed to keep records or issue paperwork confirming their indefinite leave to remain.
Mr Foster, a senior pastor at the Pilgrim Church in Nottingham, was appointed in Juneto oversee the government’s response to the Windrush scandal and represent its victims.
He has met more than 700 people on a UK-wide Windrush Listening Event tour, where he said some victims wore military medals to show how proud they were to be British.
“I’m hearing the pain, I’m hearing the trauma, and my responsibility is about looking at how we can build relationships, build back trust,” he said….
Being London-born of Barbadian and Indian parentage, racial difference was part of my upbringing. However, my first experiences of racism would be transmitted subliminally. I was a child of the 1970s, and programming such as The Fosters, Desmond’s and Empire Road, which portrayed the Black experience in Britain, couldn’t counteract the effects of the dominant media messaging coming from The Black and White Minstrel Show, nor overcome the persistent characterisation of Africa as the “dark continent”, and as “backward” and “savage”.
This racism came back into view with the Windrush scandal in 2018. The assertion that the affair was the unintended consequence of the hostile environment immigration policy was best countered by former Guardian columnist Gary Younge who argued that this persecution was “no accident” but rather “cruelty by design”. For Younge, a chronicler of the Black experience in Britain, the Caribbean and US, “this is not a glitch in the system. It is the system … A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect.”
Too often, racism is perceived as bad acts perpetrated by the warped mindsets of unsavoury individuals. However, this oversimplification neglects to recognise the embedded racialised policies, procedures, practices and power relations that undermine the equity of systems and the fairness of institutions. The Home Office is one such institution where racism was embedded in its culture.
The Windrush victims found genuine sympathy among large swathes of British society. But also some resistance. There is undoubtedly a reticence among some Britons to really listen to arguments for racial justice. The reasons are many: an English tradition of avoiding uncomfortable conversations; the highly contested and polarised debates dominated by a small, vociferous group for whom colonialism was an act of benevolence; a zero-sum mindset perceiving benefits to some coming at the expense of others; and a selective memory when it comes to our colonial history – and wilful misunderstanding, too.
These rationalisations serve to place the burden of responsibility for tackling racism on to victims rather than the perpetrators – and have made it difficult for the Windrush victims to receive the justice they deserve.
Black and other minority ethnic groups are held to a different standard compared to the victims of other miscarriages of justice. Windrush victims have been required to prove their case “beyond reasonable doubt” rather than “on the balance of probabilities” in order to access compensation, with some suffering the ignominious request to undergo DNA testing to prove they are related to their immediate family. The government has also rolled back three key recommendations of the Windrush Lessons Learned Review. But I am ecstatic, as I am sure are the wider Windrush generation, that this decision was found to be unlawful in a high court ruling this month.
In 2022, I was appointed the Church of England’s director of racial justice to implement From Lament to Action, the Church’s commitment to overcoming its institutional racism. The report of the Archbishops’ Antiracism Taskforce affirmed the “urgency of now” noting: “A failure to act now will be seen as another indication, potentially a last straw for many, that the Church is not serious about racial sin.”
A journey of healing and repair has already begun. In 2020, the Church of England’s ruling body, the General Synod, issued an apology for the racismdirected at the Windrush generation, whether through direct hostility by some congregations or the absence of welcome by others, since their arrival in the 1940s and 1950s. While 69% of West Indians attended a historic denominational church in the Caribbean (Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational or Baptist), only 4% of those arriving in Britain continued to worship in the same tradition.
This apology was accompanied by a statement from the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, accepting that the church was “still deeply institutionally racist”. Since then, research has concluded into the historic linkages between the church and African chattel enslavement and a £100m Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice established, with aims to increase it to £1bn. Racial justice is not yet embedded in the church’s mission, but I can attest to the fact that we as an institution choose to stand against the evil and pernicious sin of racism. There is much work to do, but I hope we can be a model for genuine reflection on the injustices experienced by Black and ethnic minority communities in the UK – and for how true justice can be achieved.
James Baldwin, once, briefly, a neighbour of my parents in London, wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” At the heart of all racial progress in Britain must lie an acceptance that there are inequities to be challenged – the Windrush scandalproved that to be true. So let us use this day to honour those West Indians whose landing at Tilbury Docks on 22 June 1948 symbolised the birth of modern, multicultural Britain. For they, for I – for we all – belong here.
Guy Hewitt is the inaugural director of racial justice in the Church of England, a priest and former high commissioner to the UK. He was born in London and raised in Barbados
The Home Office’s handling of some Windrush citizenship applications has been irrational and unlawful, the high court has ruled in a judgment that will prevent the department from refusing citizenship to Windrush-generation applicants due to minor, historical convictions.
The court was ruling on the case of Hubert Howard, who was repeatedly denied British citizenship over the course of a decade, despite having lived in the UK since he arrived from Jamaica at the age of three in 1960.
The Home Office sought to deny him citizenship, despite the 59 years he had spent continuously in the UK, because of a number of minor convictions, most of them committed in the 1970s and 1980s – none were serious enough to trigger a jail sentence. He was still fighting for naturalisation from his intensive care bed as he was dying in hospital in October 2019.
Howard was finally granted citizenship on an “exceptional basis” three weeks before his death after the Home Office reversed its position. The judicial review against the department’s initial decision, submitted in early 2019, was continued by his daughter Maresha Howard Rose.
The judgment said it was “irrational” of the Home Office to insist that Windrush claimants should meet the “good character” requirement, which is one element of eligibility criteria for citizenship, and that it was unlawful to continue refusing citizenship to applicants on the basis of minor criminal records.
Lawyers from Deighton Pierce Glynn, acting for Howard’s family, said anyone whose application for citizenship had been refused under the Windrush scheme because of they failed to meet the good character requirement should now consider reapplying.
They argued that the announcement of the Windrush scheme by former home secretary Amber Rudd made it clear that the thousands of Windrush-era immigrants who had arrived in the UK in the 1950s and 60s, but who had not formally naturalised, were “British in all but legal status”. The judgment accepted that Rudd had wanted to waive the good character requirement, but her successor as home secretary, Sajid Javid, had opted to keep it. The high court ruling said this decision was unlawful.
In the 1980s there was a government programme to register Windrush-generation people, allowing them to acquire British citizenship with no need to meet the good character requirement. At the time, officials said there was no need to register, and at least 8,000 people did not. Many of those who never formally naturalised were, like Howard, later wrongly classified as immigration offenders.
Howard first applied for a British passport in 2005 but was refused, and as a result he was unable to travel to Jamaica to visit his critically ill mother or attend her funeral. He was dismissed from his caretaker job in 2012 because he was unable to prove he was not in the country illegally. References from his employer attested to his good character, describing him as “reliable, hardworking and diligent”.
Solicitor Connie Sozi said Howard had been determined to pursue the case, even when he understood that he was not going to live long enough to see it come to court. “Applying barriers in the context of the Windrush scheme, which was set up to correct the historic injustice suffered by the Windrush generation, was an abhorrent abuse of power by the government and I am glad for Hubert that the high court has now recognised it was unlawful. It is too late of course for him, but today’s ruling is at least considerable vindication for his daughter and his family and the many other families affected by the ‘good character requirement’.”
Maresha Howard Rose said her father had been devastated by the repeated refusals of citizenship. “It just felt like he was just giving up; we saw him suffer so badly. I’m sad he isn’t here to see this victory, but I hope it will help others get justice.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “A history of criminality is not an absolute bar to gaining British citizenship and all members of the Windrush generation who apply successfully to the Windrush taskforce will receive the documentation they need to work and access services, free of charge. We will now consider this judgment carefully and we will consult the Windrush Cross-Government Working Group on any future policy development in this area.”
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?
The Home Office unlawfully ignored warnings that changes to immigration rules would create “serious injustices” for the Windrush generation, a report by the equalities watchdog says.
It found the “hostile environment” policy, designed to deter “irregular” migrants from settling, had harmed many people already living in the UK.
The Windrush generation came from the Caribbean to the UK from 1948 to 1971.
The Home Office said it was determined to “right the wrongs suffered” by them.
Labour said ministers should be “deeply ashamed” of the report’s findings.
An estimated 500,000 people living in the UK make up the surviving members of the Windrush generation.
They were granted indefinite leave to remain in 1971, but thousands were children who had travelled on their parents’ passports.
Because of this, many were unable to prove they had the right to live in the country when “hostile environment” immigration policies – demanding the showing of documentation – began in 2012, under Theresa May as home secretary.
This adversely affected their access to housing, banking, work, benefits, healthcare and driving, while many were threatened with deportation.
‘Shameful stain’
The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) report found a “lack of organisation-wide commitment, including by senior leadership, to the importance of equality and the Home Office’s obligations under the equality duty placed on government departments”.
It added: “Any action taken to record and respond to negative equality impacts was perfunctory, and therefore insufficient.”
The report also said: “From 2012, this [hostile environment] agenda accelerated the impact of decades of complex policy and practice based on a history of white and black immigrants being treated differently.”
The EHRC recommended that, to ensure “measurable action”, the Home Office should enter an agreement with it by the end of January 2021, involving “preparing and implementing a plan” of “specific actions” to “avoid a future breach”.
This should apply to its immigration work “in respect of race and colour, and more broadly”, it said.
The Home Office has agreed to enter an agreement with the EHRC.
The commission’s interim chair Caroline Waters said: “The treatment of the Windrush generation as a result of hostile environment policies was a shameful stain on British history.
“It is unacceptable that equality legislation, designed to prevent an unfair or disproportionate impact on people from ethnic minorities and other groups, was effectively ignored in the creation and delivery of policies that had such profound implications for so many people’s lives.”
In a statement, Home Secretary Priti Patel and Home Office permanent secretary Matthew Rycroft said they were “determined to right the wrongs suffered by the Windrush generation and make amends for the institutional failings they faced, spanning successive governments over several decades”.
They added that the department was already applying a “a more rigorous approach to policy making” and would “increase openness to scrutiny, and create a more inclusive workforce”.
It was also launching “comprehensive training” for all staff “to ensure they understand and appreciate the history of migration and race in this country”, they said.
But Satbir Singh, chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, said campaigners had “repeatedly warned the Home Office that their hostile environment policies would inevitably lead to serious discrimination and to the denial of rights, particularly for people of colour”.
He added that “successive home secretaries” had “ignored these warnings” before the situation hit the headlines in 2018.
For Labour, shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds said: “Ministers must work urgently to rectify this, including getting a grip of the Windrush compensation scheme, which has descended into an offensive mess, piling injustice upon injustice.”
And shadow justice secretary David Lammy, who organised the cross-party letter referring the Home Office to the EHRC last year, said: “Black Britons were detained, deported, denied healthcare, housing and employment by their own government because of the colour of their skin.
“Since the scandal broke, the Home Office has only paid lip service to its victims. It must now urgently rectify this gross injustice.”
A planned deportation flight to Jamaica has taken off but with only around half of those due to have been on board after a court last night upheld a legal challenge.
As the government came under fire for proceeding with the flight, it was defended on Tuesday by the Chancellor, Sajid Javid, who said those onboard were not members of the Windrush generation but offenders who posed a risk to the public.
“These are all foreign national offenders – they have all received custodial sentences of 12 months or more. They are responsible for crimes like manslaughter, rape, dealing in class A drugs,” he told BBC Radio 5 live.
Asked how many people were onboard, he said he did not know the exact number but believed it was “around 20 – or above 20.” Around 56 people were originally thought to have been due to be deported.
On Monday night, a court of appeal judge ordered the Home Office not to carry out the scheduled deportation amid concerns mobile phone outages had prevented detainees from having access to legal advice.
Lady Justice Simler said those detainees should not be removed unless the Home Office was satisfied they “had access to a functioning, non-O2 Sim card on or before 3 February”.
The action had been brought because there has been a problem with the O2 phone network in the Heathrow detention centres since last month, meaning many detainees had been unable to exercise their legal right to contact their lawyers.
David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham who called in the House of Commons on Monday for the flight to be halted amid concerns some onboard may have arrived in the UK as children and that more than 40 British children could be separated from their fathers, described the departure of the flight as an “outrage”.
“The government is deporting people who arrived in the UK as young as two, often for one-time drug offences,” he tweeted, linking to an article written by him for the Guardian.
“The lessons from Windrush have not been learned. Lives are being ruined because we don’t remember our history.”
On Sky News’s Kay Burley at Breakfast show, the chancellor had been asked if he was sorry about one of the cases being a 23-year-old who spent 15 months in jail after being convicted age 17 for drug offences. He had come to the UK age five years old.
“We’re not even saying sorry,” the chancellor said.
Bella Sankey of Detention Action said the campaign group believed that some of the people who were due for deportation were not on the flight because they were covered by a court of appeal order.
She said: “We understand that some, possibly all, of these individuals may have been ultimately removed from the flight but we are currently trying to clarify this.
“We are trying to ensure that all of those covered by the protection of the court were not removed and that the government did not breach the court order.
“We think that what is most likely is that people were taken from [immigration removal centre] Brook House and put on the flight and those are the people who have probably gone because that detention centre was not covered by the order.”
The Home Office had argued the flight was “specifically for deporting foreign national offenders”, adding that “those detained for removal include people convicted of manslaughter, rape, violent crime and dealing class A drugs”.
The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) said: “Our thoughts are with the families who have just been forced apart by the government, with the children who have lost their fathers, with the women who’ve become single mothers overnight.
“It’s deeply unjust if people who grew up here, whose lives and families are here, can be exiled to a country which is totally foreign to them. They are British in every meaningful way and if the law allows those people to be exiled, it needs to change.”
Earlier, Sankey said removing those detainees would have meant the Home Office was breaking the law.
She tweeted: “We are speaking to individuals clearly covered by the court of appeal order prohibiting their deportation who have been removed to the airport and told they are being deported. ukhomeoffice are you really going to try and break the law tonight?”
Many moments have contributed to this transformation in net migration. Here are five key turning points.
1948: The Windrush Generation
In the aftermath of the war, the UK saw huge investment in public infrastructure. Bombed cities were rebuilt, transport systems expanded and new institutions, such as the NHS, had to be staffed.
Employment opportunities abounded, and people from all over the Commonwealth came to the UK to help fill the labour shortage.
Some of the first to arrive in 1948 were a group of 500 or so Caribbean migrants, who arrived on former troopship the Empire Windrush. Consequently, they and the 300,000 West Indians who followed them over the next 20 years, were known as the Windrush generation.
Alongside those from the Caribbean came some 300,000 people from India, 140,000 from Pakistan, and more than 170,000 from various parts of Africa.
Windrush in numbers
492passengers docked in Essex on the Empire Windrush in 1948
910,000 peoplefrom the West Indies, India, Pakistan and Africa followed
500,000current UK residents were born in the Commonwealth pre-1971
18were apologised to for being wrongfully deported or detained
Source: ONS, UK census, UK Government, BBC
Immigrants from the Republic of Ireland had the same rights, and also flocked to the UK. Between 1948 and 1971, one-third of 18 to 30-year-olds left the country in search of work, about half a million people. The overwhelming majority of them were bound for the UK.
In the 1940s and 50s, none of these people required visas; as “citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies”, they were automatically given the right to reside in the UK.
However, the Home Office did not keep a record of those granted leave to remain. Despite living and working in the UK for decades, it emerged in 2018 that some Windrush migrants and their families had been threatened with deportation and even removed. The UK government was forced to apologise.
1956: The Hungarian Revolution
The end of World War Two also brought huge political changes in eastern and central Europe.
After liberating the region, the Soviet Union installed Communist regimes here that were deeply unpopular with many people. It also annexed the Baltic States and parts of Poland.
In reaction, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to the West. The first to arrive in the UK were about 120,000 Poles, who arrived in 1945; the substantial Polish communities in Manchester, Bradford and west London date from this time. About 100,000 people from Ukraine and the Baltic States also came to the UK for similar reasons.
At the time, these population movements were considered the final consequences of World War Two. In fact, they were the symptom of a new Cold War.
This was confirmed in 1956, when the people of Hungary rose up against their Communist rulers. After Soviet tanks drove into Budapest to crush the uprising, almost 200,000 Hungarians fled the country.
Britain took in 30,000 of these political refugees, setting a precedent for the years to come. From 1956 onwards, political dissidents from eastern Europe were routinely accepted and integrated into British society.
Some of the data in this article is drawn from BBC Briefing, a mini-series of downloadable in-depth guides to the big issues in the news, with input from academics, researchers and journalists. It is the BBC’s response to audiences demanding better explanation of the facts behind the headlines.
The most important of these was the Immigration Act of 1971, which decreed Commonwealth immigrants did not have any more rights than those from other parts of the world. This effectively marked the end of the Windrush generation.
Prime Minister Edward Heath declared the country had a moral and legal responsibility to take in those who had UK passports. Of the 60,000 people expelled, a little under half came to the UK.
This highlighted a change of emphasis in immigration policy. The UK was now wary of people coming in search of jobs, but it would continue to welcome those coming in search of asylum.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, fewer than 5,000 asylum seekers came to the UK each year, on average. But in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, applications for asylum rose suddenly to more than 16,000 people. In the following two years this figure doubled, and then doubled again.
This trend would continue over the following decade, as instability in countries like Yugoslavia, Somalia and Iraq brought more refugees to the UK’s door.
1992: The EU expansion
In 1992, the UK joined other EU nations in signing the Maastricht Treaty on European integration. This granted all EU citizens equal rights, with freedom to live in any member state they chose.
In the following decade, tens of thousands of EU citizens came to live and work in Britain.
Few people protested, possibly because these newcomers were balanced out by the tens of thousands of British people who moved away to other parts of the EU.
Nevertheless a new principle had been set. Just as the country had once held an open door to the Commonwealth, so it now held an open door to the European Union.
In 2004, the EU was expanded to include seven nations from the Eastern Bloc- Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary – while Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus also joined at the same time.
Unlike Germany or France, the UK put no temporary restrictions on arrivals from these new member states.
Tony Blair’s Labour government had a positive stance on immigration: it argued a growing economy required a larger workforce and, as in the 1950s, people from other countries were considered a good source of new labour.
In any case, the government predicted that EU enlargement would only cause a rise of up to 13,000 people a year in immigration.
In the event, more than a million people from these countries arrived and stayed over the next decade. It was one of the biggest influxes in British history.
In the meantime, however, immigration from other parts of the world has increased to fill the gap. Despite government targets to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands”, the UK’s net migration figures remain historically high in the context of the past century.
Immigration minister Caroline Nokes has issued a “heartfelt apology” to members of the Windrush generation and admitted that she felt “ashamed” of how the Home Office had treated them.
Nokes was addressing dozens of the Windrush generation at a meeting at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, south London, and told them that she had come to listen to their stories and find out about their experiences.
She has come under fire for issuing contradictory statements about whether or not employers would have to make additional checks on EU nationals post-Brexit in the event of no deal.
“The way I always learn best is by talking to people,” she told the members of the Windrush generation who had come to speak to her.
Several people told Nokes and the team of Home Office officials accompanying her about their experiences as a result of Home Office hostile environment policies which the Windrush generation became caught up in. At times the conversation became heated.
Nokes said: “It’s really important, it really matters to me that people have a chance to shout at me. It really is. I just feel really ashamed, that’s the honest truth.
“I feel ashamed the Home Office got it so badly wrong over a long period. I was going to say I have to say sorry but I want to say sorry. I’m really conscious that we have a massive piece of work to do.”
One woman from the Windrush generation told Nokes she had been thrown out of her council accommodation because of a lack of clarity about her immigration status.
“I have kids and grandkids here but the Home Office want to send me back,” she said. “I’m going blind but I’m scared to see a doctor because of my issues with the Home Office.”
The NHS is required to ask about patients’ immigration status and can refuse treatment to those deemed ineligible.
Nokes urged her to speak to the Windrush taskforce but she said she was too scared to do so.
“I don’t want anyone to feel scared,” said Nokes. “It’s stories like this that demonstrate to me that what went wrong went really horribly wrong. I will pick it up and do absolutely everything to help you.”
It emerged during the meeting that not all the applications for redress under the Windrush scheme had reached the government. A Freepost address has been provided for these applications but one person showed Nokes that his application had been sent back to him with a “return to sender” notice. Nokes promised to hand the application over personally to the right person.
Solicitor Jacqueline McKenzie of McKenzie Beute and Pope, who represents some members of the Windrush generation, and is a member of the Windrush Action Group, expressed concern at the low number of people who the Home Office said have been assisted by the Windrush taskforce to regularise their immigration status. There were 2,100 of them, according to the latest published statistics.
“That’s shockingly low,” McKenzie said. Officials declined to respond to her question about how many people the Home Office had brought back from the Caribbean who had been unlawfully removed but said they would be in touch about it.
Nokes apologised several times for treatment of the Windrush generation who had been invited to Britain to help rebuild the country after the second world war.
“We went out and asked for help. Help came. We have treated people shamefully since then. I would like to give everyone a heartfelt apology. We are here to help, we will help,” she said.
Undoing one of the legacies of the previous conservative home secretaries:
The government has halted its “hostile environment” policy for anyone over 30 to prevent more people being “wrongly and erroneously impacted” by the measures, following the Windrushscandal, the home secretary has said.
Sajid Javid said data sharing between the Home Office and other government departments, such as HMRC and the Department for Work and Pensions – as well as banks and building societies – has been suspended for three months for people of all nationalities aged over 30.
In a letter to the Home Affairs Select Committee, Mr Javid said the department was also looking at the best ways of evaluating the effectiveness of the policy – which he has renamed the “compliant” environment – to ensure there is “no adverse impact on individuals who have a right to be here and to access those services”.
The Home Office has so far issued documentation confirming a right to live in the UK to 2,125 people who contacted the Windrush hotline. Of these, 1,014 were born in Jamaica, 207 in Barbados, 93 in India, 88 in Grenada, 85 in Trinidad and Tobago and 638 were from other countries.
Some 584 people have so far been granted citizenship through the Windrush scheme.
The department is only in touch with 14 people who were wrongly deported, and no details have been given about their nationalities or whether any of them had been allowed to return to the UK. Contact has not been made with the majority of those wrongly deported or removed, the Home Office has said.
Labour MP Yvette Cooper, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said she was disappointed there was still no clarity about the number of people wrongly detained, and that the Home Office had “still not managed to make contact with the majority of those who were wrongfully deported or removed”.
“The committee is awaiting more information from the Home Office, which is expected by the end of this week, and will be asking further questions to follow up the information in the Home Secretary’s letter,” she said.
Mr Javid said officials were also reviewing cases where the Home Office has ordered other departments to deny or revoke services, or taken action to penalise a third party for employing or housing an unlawful migrant.
A final figure of those affected will not be available until the review is complete, he said.
The news comes after a damning report by the Home Affairs Select Committee said unless the Home Office was overhauled, the scandal “will happen again, for another group of people”.
The committee expressed concern for the children of EU citizens, saying the government should ensure they are not “locked out of living a lawful life, as we have seen happen to members of the Windrush generation”.
The MPs also said recent attempts by the government to rebrand its “hostile environment” policy the “compliant environment”, were “meaningless”.
There are two big stories right now about black migrants in Britain, but only one is fun to pay attention to.
That would be that Meghan Markle, an American with a black mother and white father, is marrying Prince Harry. A beautiful, biracial commoner starring in a royal wedding is a fairy tale about race and Britishness the Crown can get behind. It’s a much better image than half a million black and brown citizens facing possible deportation.
But that, too, is currently happening: In fact, the Windrush scandal, as it’s known, became public around the same time as the Royal engagement, last November. That’s when The Guardian began publishing stories about people losing their health benefits, being put into immigration detention or being deported even though they had been citizens since birth.
These Britons were born in pre-independence Commonwealth countries, once considered far-flung parts of Britain itself. After the Second World War, when the U.K. was hit with a serious labour shortage, it appealed to the Queen’s global subjects to fill the void. Among the thousands that answered the call were the passengers of the MV Empire Windrush, which landed in June 1948 full of British citizens from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other Caribbean islands.
That ship’s name has become a rallying cry for a generation: West Indians, South Asians and others who were told that arriving before the early 1970s gave them “the right to remain” in their supposed mother country. The problem is that now, decades later, much of the Windrush generation don’t have the paperwork to prove when they got there.
Many were children when they arrived, travelling on their parents’ passports. Few knew that the government was in possession of ship landing cards that could prove their arrival date – or that in 2010, the U.K. Border Agency began destroying them.
Two years after legal proof that thousands of mostly non-white people had a right to be in the U.K. disappeared, then-Home Secretary (or immigration minister) Theresa May introduced “hostile environment” policies meant to deter unwanted migrants. At least 50,000 of the over 500,000 Commonwealth citizens who moved to the U.K. in the Windrush period don’t have British passports: thousands of lives have been disrupted.
Sylvester Marshall, for example, learned he was an “illegal immigrant” when he went to replace a lost driver’s license. Mr. Marshall, who has worked and paid taxes in the U.K. for 44 years, had his cancer treatment delayed when he suddenly became ineligible for health-care.
Most of these people are senior citizens now, and many have lost their jobs or their rental homes or been put into immigration detention. At least 63 people seem to have been wrongfully deported, dark-skinned collateral damage in Ms. May’s anti-immigration offensive.
Meanwhile, Kensington Palace has bravely embraced its first openly non-white family member (rumours swirl about the possible African ancestry of Queen Charlotte, born in 1744). Prince Harry told the tabloids to stop being mean to his girlfriend, Princess Michael of Kent was made to apologize for wearing racist jewellery and the rest of us are supposed to be impressed.
Many are accepting these crumbs from the royal table, such as young Tshego Lengolo, who lives in working-class southeast London. The 11-year-old told the New York Times that she knows what it’s like to move to a new country, and that she’s ready to be Ms. Markle’s friend. My heart hurts for children fooled by such sad scraps of belonging, but I have no time for adult women penning paeans to the first “black princess.”
First of all, Ms. Markle will likely be given the title of duchess, which is a yawn. More importantly, like Kate Middleton and Diana Spencer before her, she’ll be giving up her career to be a wife. None of the bridesmaids in her wedding party will be little black girls like Tshego, and any children she bears will never reach the throne.
As far as updating the monarchy as a symbol for the modern world, these nuptials are fairly surface level − especially in a country coping with a scandal like Windrush.
Ms. Markle isn’t jumping the citizenship queue: becoming officially British will take her about three years. Perhaps that’s enough time for the Windrush generation to achieve fairness. There’s been a flurry of apologies and resignations, and talk of compensation is growing louder.
Will those who lost their jobs be given back pay? Will Mr. Marshall survive his cancer? By 2021, Ms. Markle will officially be a black Briton and, maybe, the Windrushers who were sent away will have made it back home.
Multicultural Meanderings 