A contemptuous betrayal of the British tradition of fair play

By TREVOR PHILLIPS, the former equalities chief who says he could so easily have been one of the dispossessed Windrush generation

As the child of Caribbean immigrants who believed deeply in the values of the nation — this nation — into which they were born over a century ago, I’ve no doubt my parents would have been bewildered and outraged by its treatment of the ‘Windrush generation’.

Nor would they have been impressed by the Government’s shambolic attempts — once it had been forced into a corner — to rectify the situation.

It is clear to me that were it not for the presence in London of dozens of Commonwealth heads of Government, the growing anger among MPs from all parties — and campaigns by this newspaper and others — they would have tried to dismiss the matter as a small storm in a Caribbean teacup.

Indeed, the Prime Minister had initially rejected a meeting with 12 Caribbean heads of state to discuss the immigration problems faced by tens of thousands of British citizens who have lived, worked and paid taxes here for decades but who suddenly found themselves without rights.

Confusion

home secretary Amber Rudd made a humiliating apology and promised to charge a special home Office task force with ensuring no more Windrush-era British citizens will be classified as illegal immigrants because they do not have documents to prove otherwise.

My parents would regard it as a betrayal of that most fundamental trait of the British: a desire for fair play. And if they were alive, they might turn to me and say: ‘there but for the grace of God go you.’

the events of the past few days have certainly brought it home to me just how fortunate I was to be born in London.

I was an accidental baby. When, on a spring day in 1953, my mother discovered that she was pregnant with her seventh child, she wailed to her friend: ‘What am I going to do?’

For an immigrant family living in a slum tenement, having yet another mouth to feed was a catastrophe.

even if my eldest sister, who had responded to the call by health Minister enoch Powell to come and serve the fledgling Nhs, had moved into the nurses’ hostel at the hospital where she worked, we just weren’t going to fit.

And back then, no one was offering council houses to ‘coloured people’. so, like many of the Windrush generation — the children of Commonwealth migrants and named after the empire Windrush, the vessel which brought the first workers here from the West Indies — I was put on a boat to British Guiana in the West Indies.

there I was brought up, with a swarm of siblings and cousins, by my aunt and grandmother in the fishing village from which we came. I returned to London five years later to join my family, went back to the newly independent Guyana in 1967, and arrived back to study for a chemistry degree at Imperial College in 1971.

Not once was my entry ever questioned, because I could wave my precious blue British passport. had my parents’ ‘accident’ taken place during one of their periodic visits to their native British Guiana, I doubt that I would now be lucky enough to pen this article from my UK home.

My mother would probably have stayed in Georgetown for the birth, and if I’d come to London at all, I cannot imagine that I would be able to produce the documentation showing the required employment and residence qualifications ranging over a working life — which includes over a dozen employers, countless different jobs, and ten different homes — that is being demanded of many of my generation now.

the calculations made by people like my parents at that time were entirely economic.

For them, immigration restrictions did not exist because they had been born into the British empire.

they were all subjects of the same sovereign, they rose and slept under the same flag, they sang the same national anthem, and like my father, a wartime sergeant, many had worn the same uniform in battle against the same enemy.

they were not naïve; they knew that some were unenthusiastic about their presence.

In our book Windrush: the Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain, my brother Michael and I traced the story of the boat which brought 492 migrants here in June 1948.

Despite the fact that most of the men on the boat had fought in the British armed services — several were RAF veterans of the Battle of Britain — the anxiety about these darkskinned Britons was acute.

But their passage was guaranteed; that dark blue passport held the magical incantation that afforded protection against all threats: ‘his Britannic Majesty’s Principal secretary of state for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Requests and requires in the Name of his Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.’ None of the Windrush voyagers could have foreseen a world in which the entitlement to this pledge could be be cast aside by bureaucrats in Whitehall, without so much as a peep of protest from ministers.

Under the Immigration Act of 1971, anyone who arrived here before that date was given leave to remain — but many never applied for a passport or became naturalised citizens.

When, under tough new rules aimed at illegal immigrants introduced in 2014, they were required to produce a passport or a wealth of documentation to work, rent a home, open a bank account or hold a driving licence, they could not. And so they were, quite outrageously, put into the category of illegal immigrant.

As many as 57,000 of my fellow British citizens were, in effect, being abandoned to statelessness.

People who, like most Caribbean folk, live well-ordered, hard-working lives, faced losing their livelihoods and their homes simply because they were unable to find documents that the heartless bureaucrats at the home Office have never themselves had to produce.

Campaign

the campaign mounted by the Daily Mail and others has rattled Whitehall. But ministers and bureaucrats offered little more than a bored shrug of elegantly suited shoulders.

Of course, this is the familiar experience of people of colour. there is never any shortage of sanctimonious twaddle about Whitehall’s commitment to diversity. Yet when confronted with an opportunity to act in the interests of minorities, the machine freezes and, as we have seen, puts lives on ice.

No one who has read a word I’ve written or said would ever describe me as a liberal on immigration or multiculturalism. But I believe humanity must be a factor in the execution of public policy.

As a former Chair of Britain’s human Rights Commission, I believe that the plight of the Windrush Generation was exactly the kind of situation where the importance of human rights should have trumped the neat simplicities of immigration regulation.

the Prime Minister speaks of burning injustices. Despite clumsy efforts to right a wrong, this one should be searing a hole in her conscience.