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REFLECTIONS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF WINDRUSH DAY IN A POST BREXIT BRITAIN
TREVOR PHILLIPS:
On June 22,it will be exactly 70 summers since an iconic group stepped off the military transport ship,theEmpireWindrush,atTilbury Docks in London,to launch an adventure that would transform their own lives and the future of Britain. They were not to know they were also walking into the pages of history,the first recorded mass migration to this island. Their story would come,in many ways,to define what it means to be British. And,contrary tomuch that hasrecentlybeen said and written about these men and women,the past three score years and ten have not proven that we are a nation of small-minded bigots. Quite the opposite. TheWindrush story shows Britain to be a country which,in its embrace of people who share our values,can claim to be a model to a world roiled by ethnic and racial tensions.
Reflections on the importance of Windrush Day in a post Brexit Britain
Courageous
That is why,along with the historian Patrick Vernon,mybrotherMichaelandIarerenewing the call we first made 20 years ago,for June 22 tobedeclared‘WindrushDay’inperpetuity. Ourbook,writtentomarkthe50thanniversary in1998,wasentitledWindrush:TheIrresistible Rise Of Multi-racial Britain.There were several reasons for this. Yes,we wanted to recognise the group of men and women of our parents’generation who made this epochal journey. Butwealsowantedtocelebratethecharacter of the nation that,time and again,has proven ready to welcome,accommodate and integrate people prepared to play a part in making our country a better place. Indeed,when I had the original idea for the book (and a BBCTV series),I was inspired by theroleof thoseearlyvoyagersindefending Britain’s very existence.For the fact is that scores of the men on theWindrush had volunteered in 1940 to travel thousands of miles to fight in the Battle of Britain;many saw their comrades from the Caribbean die in combat. Of the 250 men who came fromTrinidad to volunteer for the RAF,for example,one in five perished in action.
ThelateUlricCross,aTrinidadianwhowould goontobecomeaHighCourtjudge,flew80 missionsasanRAFnavigator,crash-landing seven times.Hewasoneof theluckyones:of half-a-dozen classmates who joined up,he believeshewastheonlyonetoseeoutthewar. Mostofthe492menandwomenwhoarrived on theWindrush have now run their race. Yet their footsteps stillecho throughour nation’s story,telling us much about ourselves as a people.
Trevor Phillips is Chair of Green Park
We Brits are now often sneered at,not least by our European neighbours,as a nation of small-minded Brexiteers.Yet the fire of indignation that erupted recently at the Government’s woeful treatment of some of the children of theWindrush generation, fanned by campaigns by this and other newspapers,revealed a nation that remains passionatelycommitted to thefair treatment of people who work hard and play by the rules,irrespective of race or colour. It’shard toimagineasimilarpopularreaction inFrance,Germany,ItalyorevenSweden,where each poll sees a remorseless rise in support for anti-immigrant political parties.Here, both the BNP and Ukip are yesterday’s news. Ofcourse,noneof theyoung travellerscould have foreseen that they would become a symbol for that touchstone of the British character -‘fair play’.For the most part,they were lively,courageous spirits,who wanted more out of life for themselves and their families than could be found in a colonial backwater. The choices available to Caribbean men and womenrangedfromthedrudgeryofpeasant farming,through the daily humiliation of domestic service for colonial masters,to dawn-to-dusk days cutting sugar cane in blazing heat. WhatmadetheWindrushvoyagerssospecial was that they went looking for something better.They believed they would find it in England (no one spoke much of Britain in those days). They may have been dazzled by tales of pavements paved in gold;when Aldwin Roberts,the‘king of calypso’better known byhisstagename,LordKitchener,strummed his most famous song,dreamed up in thepassage over from Jamaica,I am sure he half-believed the words:
‘London is the place for me, London, this lovely city, You can go France, or America, India, Asia or Australia, But you must come back to London City’
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I’m Farhan, I’m Sheela,
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It wasn’t easy,of course.TheWindrush voyagers found that the society they had entered was cold in every sense or,in Kitchener’s words,not‘very much sociable’. Nonetheless,they buckled down and worked hard.Theygot onwithanyneighbourswho’d talk to them,mainlyotherrecent immigrants: Jews (who were themselves ostracised) and theIrish.Later,somemarriednatives;andtheir descendantshaveintegratedmorefully than anyothergroupinmodernimmigrationhistory. The first migrants settled in poor areas of big cities,but the impact of theWindrush generation quickly spread well beyond the working-class. I,for one found it intensely irritating to listen to commentary around Prince Harry and Meghan Markel’s wedding,suggesting that this would have been the first time the royals had encountered black British people in numbers. One reason that theWindrush story has gained tractionwith thepublicover theyears isbecauseof theQueen’savowedpassionfor the Commonwealth,its citizens and those of them who choose to make their home here.
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In 1998,she held a reception at Buckingham Palace for theWindrush survivors - attended by virtually every major member of the Royal Family.
Backin theEighties,thePrinceofWalesmade sure his charities worked assiduously to support black teenagers in places such as Brixton and Handsworth and insisted the committees that ran his programmes were representativeof theBritain that wascoming into being. Of course,Britain’s attitude to race is not perfect - but there’s a reason why the camps along the French coast are full of Africans desperate toget toLondon,rather thanParis, Berlin or Rome. Given the choice,any person of colour would prefer to live in the UK than in any of the other EU countries. During the past 70 years,not every migrant community has managed the task of social integration so successfully as theWindrush generation and their descendants. Many South Asian communities still live what have been called‘parallel lives’to the rest of the UK population.
Elsewhere in Europe,racial hostility is so entrenched that our racially mixed football teams routinely encounter the despicable barracking and banana-throwing that, thankfully,vanished from British grounds long ago. There is a high likelihood that,in Putin’s Russia,the country’s deep racial prejudice will show its ugly face at some stage during the footballWorld Cup. My brother and I believe that theWindrush people have been a beacon for anyone in the world who holds out the hope of a world free from racial antagonism and division. And,despite our stumbles,self-doubt and self-criticism,we are global leaders in the business of managing social diversity. Post-Brexit,we will be out in the world, helping to create new relationships and to rekindle old friendships. We have something to be proud of and from which the rest of the world urgently needs to learn. Everywhere we look,cultural,religious and ethnic frictions constantly threaten to flare into full-scale conflict.There are hundreds of millions of people on the move across the globe.Integration is the great challenge of the 21st century. The commemoration of theWindrush won’t, byitself,bringharmony.Butacenturyago,the greatAmericanpreacherWilliamL.Watkinson wrote:‘It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.’ Shouldn’t there be at least one small flame lit for the virtues of old-fashioned tolerance, social harmony and the ability to get along across the lines of ethnic difference? After 70 remarkable years,it’s time to light the flame of hope again. Let’smakeJune22everyyearourWindrushDay.
LornaRoberts/Shutterstock.com
The Windrush scandal far from abated
BY JACQUELINE MCKENZIE
As we mark Black History Month 2018,a defining moment of the Black experience in the UK this yearmust be that of theWindrush Scandal.Therevelationthatmenandwomen who came to the UK from Commonwealth countriesbetween thelate1940sandearly 1980s,clutching a myriad of passports describing them as British subjects,British citizens or citizens of the UK and colonies, hadtheirclaimstocitizenshiporsettlement questioned,was shocking.It illuminated however,asystemwhichimmigrationlawyers had long found woefully inadequate and cruel. Lawyers saw increasing numbers of British people struggling to prove their status due to a lack of documentation but the media expose of the phenomenon in the spring of 2018,with story after story of victims,brought to the fore of the nation’s consciousness,howthehostileenvironment ensnaredinnocentmenandwomen.Todate, no one,least of all the government,knows the full extent of the numbers of victims or of the damage done to them and their families.And as if this story wasn’t bad enough,newsthatpeoplehadbeenwrongly detainedanddeportedand that therehave been deaths linked to the scandal, heightened the outrage. ThebackgroundtotheWindrushScandal is steeped in history and complex law but the catalyst for the current scandal was a declarationofwaronmigrants,albeit termed illegalmigrants,byTheresaMayduringher time as Home Secretary in 2010.But the diminution of citizenship rights of those caught up in the current scandal includes thoseaffectedbythe1971ImmigrationAct, whichcameintoforceonthe1January1973, whenonlyCommonwealthcitizensalready living in the UK were given the right to remain indefinitely,thereby affecting their descendants.Moving on,long-standing residents,including those in the UK before the January 1973,were protected from enforcedremovalbyaspecificexemptionin the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act but this clause was removed by legislation of 2014,surreptitiously.It was from around 2014 that we started to see those caught up in theWindrush scandal lose their right towork,receivebenefits,rentproperties,hold bank accounts or board flights for return journeystotheUK,withoutholdingbiometric residence permits or contemporary British passports. The Joint Committee for Human Rights concluded that“Policy choices and political decisionsin theHomeOfficeled toahostile cultureandcalloussystemsoalarmbellsdidn’t even ring in the department about locking upagrandmotherwhohaslivedherefor decades,or when longstanding lawful residentslost theirNHStreatmentandwere met withawallofbureaucracyinresponse.” That said,it remains unclear whether there was a deliberate attempt to improve immigration statistics by removing safeguards to theWindrush Generation and their descendants.But there’s one thing we do know? Those senior officials in the Home Office and in government clearly assessed the levels of those affected bytheWindrushScandaltorespond.They perceived that the victims,mostly black people,had no meaningful level of organisation,activismorresistanceamongst their ranks by which to seek redress from the government.They underestimated the outrage that would come from across the country but rightly assessed that any communityresponse,political,diplomaticor otherwise,wouldbeshortlived.Emboldened, it’snosurprisethereforethatthegovernment is seeking to deprive citizenship papers to British people with criminal convictions, thoughnot anyoldBritishcitizen,just those of theWindrush Generation.It is almost impossible to imagine any other group in society being treated with such disrespect or declining opprobrium. TheWindrushScandalishorrendousbut there are other significant issues to be addressed.Thereisanincreaseinthenumbers ofnon-visanationalsdeniedentryat British portsforfrivolousreasonscausing them to spenddayssometimesweeksinimmigration detention centres,the pernicious and vile practiceofdeportingpeoplewhohavespent allormostoftheirlivesintheUKtocountries they have never been to or don’t know and anincreasein thenumbersoffamilieskept apart,sometimes for years, because of the onerous income requirements needed to bring a spouse or partner to the UK. It is early days in theWindrush Scandal as there is compensation to come and a government commissioned Lessons Learnt Review to be published. The legacy of the Windrush Scandal must be a movement which makes sure that the contribution of those erstwhile men and women,who left the countries of their birth to help develop post war Britain in almost every industry, be given the respect and protection they deserve and be celebrated in a meaningful and memorable way.
JACQUELINE MCKENZIE is an immigration lawyer and the founder of the Organisation of Migration Advice and Research.
