By Elliott West
“My mum was a fighter and she was ready to fight for anyone. She was an inspiration to many people. She was my heart and my soul and I loved her to pieces”.
Natalie Wilson
Introduction
I love to write about inspirational people and one lady that caught my attention is Paulette Wilson. Paulette, for me, is a true heroine, a lady of Jamaican origin whose Great Grandfather fought in the war and whose mother was an NHS nurse. Wilson came to the UK aged 10 in 1968 to live with her grandparents. She went to primary and secondary schools here and went on to work as a chef, a career that included a time at the House of Commons restaurant. Although she travelled to the UK legally, Paulette received a letter in 2016 saying that she was an immigration offender and needed to return to Jamaica immediately, a country that she had visited for 50 years.
Standing up for Reason
“You are specifically considered to be a person who has failed to provide evidence of lawful entry to the United Kingdom”.
Home Office letter
Subsequently, Paulette was arrested twice and spent time in Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre before being transferred to another in Heathrow before a flight to Kingston in 2017. It was only her local MP, Emma Reynolds and the Refugee and Migration Centre in Wolverhampton that prevented her from being deported. Wilson later said that she had been put through “the worst headache anyone could go through”. Subsequently, Wilson and her daughter Natalie spent the next two-and-a-half years highlighting other cases of people who had arrived in the UK legally in the 1950s and 1960s before being wrongly categorised as immigration offenders. She even delivered a petition to Downing Street calling for compensation to be sped up. A protracted process that she was disappointed was taking so long. Sorry is a very easy word to say bit needs to be backed up with actions.
So dire was this case that anyone who employed Paulette after this letter was issued would face a £20,000 fine and her landlord could be spot fined for not declaring her illegal immigration status and she could also be charged for NHS treatment. She also had to travel 24 miles to a Home Office reporting in Solihull for two years and was told if she missed an appointment, she would face a £5,000 fine. A building that she said “smelt of sweat and fear”. A “hostile environment” that was introduced by the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, under the watch of the Prime Minister at the time, David Cameron. A policy that was aimed to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands.
Paulette received an interim compensation payment for her treatment. A woman who sadly died suddenly, aged 64 in 2020 but will always be remembered for her tenacity and determination. When children at her primary school said Enoch Powell was the greatest, she punched them. Paulette was a small woman who was always beautifully dressed, her dreadlocks covered with eye-catching headscarves and a lady with a powerful voice. One-of-a-kind, gutsy and bold.
