By Elliott West
“This isn’t finished for us… Will the dead have to show their passports at the gates of Heaven?”.
Windrush scandal victim.
Introduction
They came to Britain, packing their prized possessions and saying goodbye to family that some would never see again. Crossing turbulent seas in search of the promised land. These brave men and women were the Windrush generation who were promised jobs, housing and British nationality, many of who served in the armed forces during World War II but were greeted not with open arms but by a broken promise instead. Yet these champions of adversity would hold their ground and become a generation that shook up British society, making it diverse, enriching its culture and bringing new skills and creativity to the multitude of jobs they filled. Yet these brave souls would have one final sting in the tail, a sting that sent a cold chill down the spine and rocked British politics.
The Scandal
It wasn’t until April 2018 that the full force of this story broke. Evidence emerged that the UK Home Office had kept no records of those given permission to stay in the UK and no paperwork had been issued to confirm their status. Landing cards had also been destroyed in 2010 and those affected were unable to prove they were in the country legally and were prevented from accessing the basic rights of healthcare, work and housing. As a result, many of these men and women were threatened with deportation to homes they had seen since their early years in life, now foreign and a distant memory.
This crisis had arisen from a gaping crack in the 1971 Immigration Act. Although all Commonwealth citizens already living in the UK were given indefinite leave to remain, the problem was that the right to free movement between Commonwealth nations was ended from that date forwards. Due to no paperwork being kept, it was now extremely difficult for them to prove that they were living in the UK legally. The Migration Observatory at Oxford University estimates that there are 500,000 people in the UK who were born in a Commonwealth country and arrived before 1971 and yet a large number of of the same people were now being threatened and harassed.
This scandal particularly affected those born in Jamaica and other Commonwealth countries as it is thought that many of these travelled to the UK on their parents’ passports without any ID documents. Many had never applied for a passport in their own name or had their immigration formalised, believing that they were already British citizens and regarded themselves as British.
The Windrush Victims
Carl Nwazota
“The Home Office has taken my life from me.”
Carl Nwazota
In any case of this multitude, it is important to look at it through the eyes of those who are experiencing it and there are some harrowing personal accounts. For example, Carl Nwazota was born and grew up in Wembley, born to Jamaican and Nigerian parents. For 26 years, Carl had a British passport. Yet when he tried to renew it in 2000, it was confiscated by the Home Office. For the next 22 years, Nwazota lived in constant fear of being deported and subsequently, his life began to unravel before his very eyes. Carl’s business was closed as a direct result of the Home Office saying that he couldn’t work and he was unable to apply for social housing due to his lack of documentation. Carl was forced to live in temporary accommodation and even had to sleep in a tent under a shop window or in an abandoned caravan in a supermarket car park. He would often have to go to bed hungry when his benefits were cut and had to state at the local job centre that he had no fixed abode.
Despite receiving a call from the Home Office in 2018 that Carl was now a British citizen, he remained homeless for the next four years and struggles to get his new passport. Many of his documents were thrown away when the council binned his tent and when he wrote to the Home Office, he got no response as he had no permanent address. He was forced to live in a van and didn’t receive his passport until 2022. He now works as a refuse collector.
Paulette Wilson
Paulette is a former cook in the House of Commons and came to Britain from Jamaica in 1968. She never applied for a British passport because she assumed that she did not need to as she never travelled abroad. One day she received a letter from the Home Office that she needed to register each month at the Solihull immigration centre. On one visit, she was approached by an immigration officer and told that she was an illegal immigrant and was taken to Yarl’s Wood immigration removal complex. She was then told she would be deported back to Jamaica, a country that she hadn’t lived in for fifty years since she was a child.
It was only when her MP stepped in, Emma Reynolds and the Refugee and the Migrant Centre in Wolverhampton that Paulette was given leave to remain. However, by then she had already lost two years of benefits, and her flat and had to rely on financial support from her daughter. These two cases just give you a flavour of this shocking Windrush scandal. A review of historical cases found that at least 83 people who arrived before 1973 were wrongly deported.
Compensation
It wasn’t until 2018 that a British Prime Minister actually formally apologised for this horrendous scandal. Theresa May apologised to Caribbean leaders and then ordered an inquiry and for a compensation scheme to be set up. This inquiry led by Wendy Williams made thirty recommendations, three of which were setting up a full Home Office review of the UK’s “hostile environment” immigration policy, appointing a migrant’s commissioner and establishing a race advisory board. Williams also warned that there was a grave risk of similar problems happening again without government intervention. The report at the time was accepted in full by the then Home Secretary Priti Patel.
However, in January 2023, the current Home Secretary Suella Braverman dropped three of these commitments, to appoint a migrants’ commissioner responsible for “speaking up for migrants and those affected by the system directly or indirectly”, to give the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration new powers and to hold events with people affected to “listen and reflect on their stories”. It was thought at the time, 15,000 were eligible for compensation but many to this day have not received a penny with only a paltry 10% receiving something. A scandal in itself and one that has just poured oil on the fire.
