The powerful words in the headline are from British actor, comedian, and producer Sir Lenworth George Henry, known to the world as Lenny Henry. He was speaking at a memorial for Stephen Lawrence, who was 18 years old on April 22, 1993, when he was stabbed to death by a gang of young white thugs while waiting for a bus.
On 23 April, a memorial service was held to mark the 25th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence’s death. The service was attended by politicians including Theresa May, who had a front-row seat for the occasion. But she might wish she hadn’t. Because comedian Lenny Henry used the occasion to destroy her government’s record on Windrush and institutionalised racism.
Henry started his speech speaking about the Windrush generation and asking:
Who’s got four pieces of documentation for every year they were alive?
But he had a central message he wanted to impart with his speech:
When it comes to fighting racism, institutional or otherwise, there is no finish line.
You don’t get to an age when we can finally breathe out and say, ‘yes… no need to worry about racism anymore!’
After addressing the Windrush scandal that has erupted in England last Sunday in 'If you lie down with dogs, you get fleas': MP blasts Brit Home Secretary over 'Windrush Generation,' I decided to follow-up on the ongoing controversy.
The history of right-wing policies in Great Britain toward the black population from their former “colonies” is ugly. They came by invitation to fight and die to defend England in two world wars, and stayed on as British citizens to take jobs that were often not wanted by white Brits. That history evokes the story of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans who were drafted to fight immediately after being made citizens, and who were driven to the mainland to work on farms, in garment factories, and as domestic workers.
Like the black Brits, Puerto Rican blood was shed for us all. And the thanks received has been to be left in the longest blackout in U.S. history, and to be considered “not American” by Trump and his followers.
Racism and colonialism go hand in hand.
Windrush veterans: ‘It’s more than an insult’
We went to one community centre in Peterborough, where every Friday a group of elderly British West Indians, many of whom served in this country’s armed forces and even fought in wars for Britain, gather for lunch and for company. We spoke to them about what this has meant to them and how they feel about their country.
To add insult to injury, in the midst of deporting and insulting black Brits, the government is recruiting nurses from the Caribbean to prop up its depleted stock of National Health Service (NHS) nurses.
At the same time as the Windrush generation’s disenfranchisement, Britain is making a nursing recruitment drive in the Caribbean to help alleviate the one in 10 nurses who left the NHS in England and Wales – but at what cost?
Government launches Windrush 2:0 with Caribbean recruitment drive to plug nursing gap caused by Brexit
The government has launched a recruitment drive for nurses in the Caribbean despite ongoing concerns over the treatment of the Windrush generation.
Nurses from Jamaica are to be targeted as potential recruits for the health service, the government has revealed, in its latest move to try and help mitigate the UK’s nursing recruitment crisis by looking overseas.
It shows hallmarks of the years following the Second World War, when the British government began to encourage mass immigration from the countries of the British Empire and Commonwealth to fill shortages in the labour market.
The British Nationality Act, which gave citizenship of the UK and Colonies to all people living in the United Kingdom and its colonies, and the right of entry and settlement in the UK, has become a topic of much contention recently.
At the time it offered migrants better prospects in what was often referred to as the mother country.
The government’s latest “earn, learn and return” scheme seems to carry many of the same traits.
An interesting royal side-note:
Major kudos to Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman for her relentless pursuit of this story.
I smiled when I saw this tweet from her proud father-in-law
For the past six months, Amelia Gentleman has been investigating the Windrush scandal. Here she talks about what it has been like to report on the story.
How did this story come about, and why did you start reporting it?
In October, I was contacted by a small refugee charity, the Refugee and Migrant Centre, in Wolverhampton. It was really worried because its client Paulette Wilson, 61, a former chef who had worked in the House of Commons, had been detained pending imminent deportation. The charity explained that Paulette had moved to the UK in 1968 when she was 10 and had never left. Because she had never applied for a British passport and had no papers proving she had a right to be in the UK, she was classified as an illegal immigrant. Luckily she was released before she was deported, but she had spent a week in detention, despite having done nothing wrong. I went to interview Paulette at her daughter’s flat – by this point she was homeless because she had lost access to benefits – and was astonished at the way she was being treated. Although her MP had intervened to get Paulette released, the Home Office was still telling her she was liable for deportation. She was devastated.
…
Why do you think it has taken so long for the government to act, and for politicians to voice their outrage?
For a long time it was incredibly frustrating because the Guardian was publishing interviews I’d done with people whose lives had been ruined by this situation and no one in government seemed to care very much. It was only when the Barbados high commissioner revealed that Downing Street had rejected a formal request from all 12 Caribbean high commissioners to meet with Theresa May at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting that the story became huge. We put that on the front page, and then reported David Lammy’s outraged letter to the government signed by 140 cross-party MPs, and within 24 hours Amber Rudd was apologising for the “appalling” behaviour of her own department. The prime minister has apologised twice so far this week as a result of the Guardian’s Windrush reporting – it’s a positive outcome.
What has the public reaction been so far, including from Guardian readers?
Our readers have been so generous. Yesterday I opened letters with a cheque for £20 and an offer to pay the full £1,200 naturalisation fee for one person I wrote about.
British public television Channel 4 has been broadcasting extensive news coverage of Windrush and recently broadcast this forum.
The Windrush generation, campaigners and politicians discuss the scandal in a Channel 4 News special just yards from the Home Office. Watch it all live here. The Home Secretary has said all victims who are fighting to be British will get citizenship and compensation. Will our audience, many of whose lives have been ruined by the crisis, believe her? Joining our live debate will be Labour MP David Lammy, who described the Windrush controversy as a "day of national shame", and leading Conservative Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg. You might think the government's spectacular U-turn on the Windrush generation has solved the problem. They will now be able to get British passports free. It should never have happened, said the Home Secretary, as she finally promised to fix it. But why did she suddenly change her mind after months and years of ignoring the outrage? And is Windrush a unique mistake - caused by officials? Or was it the policy? The political atmosphere - a toxic, racist undercurrent driven by public alarm about immigration? And has the government actually solved the problem? Or are there many scandals unfixed? Tonight we have gathered those directly affected, whose lives have been ruined, together with leading politicians, campaigners and thinkers, And we'll be live in Jamaica. What does it say about us? This Britain?
Here’s a clip with MP David Lammy from the program:
The fact that Lammy was born in Britain hasn’t penetrated the skulls of haters:
MP Diane Abbott, who is also the “Shadow Home Secretary,” was born in Britain to Jamaican parents in 1953. In 1987, she became the first black woman elected to Parliament.
She has made it clear that the current Windrush situation is a result of May’s immigration policies
As the protests grow, Prime Minister Theresa May continues her rants about “illegal immigration.”
Prime minister refuses to review harsh rules - or explain why warnings that it would trap Windrush generation were ignored
Theresa May has vowed her “hostile environment” to tackle illegal immigration will continue, despite the Windrush scandal – insisting the public demands it.
Under fierce criticism in the Commons, the prime minister refused to review the harsh rules she introduced or explain why warnings that it would trap people who arrived in Britain legally decades ago were ignored.
Instead, Ms May said the crackdown – which has turned employers, the NHS and landlords into de facto “border guards”, critics say – enjoyed widespread support.
The crisis had been caused by the “environment she created in six years as home secretary when she knew full well of the problems the Windrush generation were facing”, Mr Corbyn alleged.
Here’s a disturbing non-Windrush side affect for a white diplomat.
The baby son of a former British High Commissioner was denied a UK passport after he was born in a Caribbean state where his father was in post. Former UK diplomat Arthur Snell, who served as British High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago from 2011 to 2014, said he was left feeling “powerless and nervous” after the Home Office refused to grant his newborn son a passport in 2011.He said it resulted in his child being rendered “stateless” as he was ineligible for Trinidadian citizenship.
While Mr Snell said he was able to “quickly resolve” the issue, he said it illustrated a “cultural priority within the Home Office to reject wherever possible” – highlighting that, as a white diplomat, he was easily able to resolve the problem where many others can’t. “What it showed me was that the Home Office tends to default to no as an answer because of the hostile policies. It seems they want to make it as difficult as possible for someone to be British – like that’s almost the mission statement,” Mr Snell told The Independent.
Though May and Rudd have now offered apologies and vowed to fix the situation for Windrushers, their weasel words aren’t getting much traction. This opinion piece in The Guardian by Hugh Muir is an excellent read.
A faraway scene comes to mind when I think about the Conservatives and black Britain – and it should trouble Theresa May as she surveys the wreckage of the Windrush fiasco. It is of a man who lives in my father’s Jamaican village, at the top of the hill, who each day has to come down to the village square to fill plastic barrels with standpipe water. Once I tried to help him carry just one of them and almost suffered a hernia. He is the epitome of what brought the Windrushers to Britain. The social services are minimal; the communal provision is patchy. They are people who know that, by and large, what they need they must eke out for themselves.
Margaret Thatcher, had she not been gripped by irrational dread of “alien cultures”, would have liked their way of thinking. Certainly her party as we know it today should benefit from a younger generation whose political thinking has been inspired by can-do forebears, especially as they move into higher income and social demographic groups.
The reason it does not is that, through words and deeds, the Conservative party presents to a critical mass of black people as racist. Think of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, custom-built to restrict black migration and condemned by Hugh Gaitskell as “cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation”. Think of the 1964 Smethwick election, with its unofficial Tory candidate slogan: “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.” Think Enoch Powell. Think Thatcher’s Powellesque warnings about the country being “swamped by people with a different culture”.
He concludes:
Plastic bags, Grenfell, modern slavery, social disparity, housing shortages, apprenticeships: the list of issues the May government has flapped at in a now characteristic half-hearted way grows daily. She promises to tackle racial inequalities. She makes a totem of it. Next stop, Windrush scandal. Her government cannot buckle down and govern in any measured, coherent sense. It is giddy, confused, arrogant, afraid; terrified of threats from a resurgent Labour without and careerist mutineers within – and buffeted throughout its flight by the wild turbulence of Brexit. How can it do anything other than stagger the length of the aircraft applying sticking plasters?
Even a prime minister with the appropriate skillset of vision, efficiency and empathy would struggle. Theresa May, lacking all three, doesn’t stand a chance. The result is what we have witnessed. Her government, until it was shamed by the media and the public, did not have the wit or ability to address the Windrush issue until it raged around them – even though it had half a year to see it coming. That should worry us. And that failure has widened a chasm between the Tories and the voters they need and should be able to engage with, many of whom now live in Conservative suburban marginals. That really should worry them.
Lammy relentlessly calls out B.S.
I’m planning to watch the Windrush Debate in Parliament tomorrow, April 30.
The British Parliament is to debate the Windrush issue on April 30 following a successful petition launched on the matter.
The Parliament considers all petitions that get more than 100,000 signatures.
The petition calling for an amnesty for all Windrush children has garnered more than 160,000 signatures so far.