MICHAEL WOOD’S VIEW

When, in February, I wrote a column about the British Nationality Act of 1948, I could hardly have imagined how relevant it would become to a story that has dominated news headlines over the past month.

The act, as readers may recall, was one of 20th-century Britain’s most extraordinary pieces of legislation. The fruit of the Commonwealth Conference of 1947, it came out of the tumultuous time in which the empire was breaking up, leaving India tragically partitioned. The act gave British citizenship, and with it the right to travel to and settle in Britain, to the people of the empire – in theory, a quarter of the Earth’s population. It was while the bill was being debated in June 1948 that the Empire Windrush landed at Tilbury, with 492 people from Jamaica seeking to live and work in Britain; the symbolic beginning of Commonwealth migration in the 1950s and 60s, and, as we see it now, a landmark in our national history.

The 1948 act was never intended to inaugurate mass migration into Britain. It was to bring people in to help battered postwar Britain’s public services, transport and NHS. But lest we think the welcome was open-hearted, there were those who thought the Windrush should not be allowed to land; even a few hundred Jamaicans, many of them veterans who had fought for Britain against Hitler, were felt by some to be too many. The newcomers faced horrendous racism and discrimination from the outset.

Now we know that, in their campaign against illegal immigration, the government has called into doubt the citizenship of the Windrush generation and their children and grandchildren. Incredibly, even their landing cards have been destroyed – an extraordinary act of vandalism of important sources for future historians, let alone as vital documents for personal and family histories.

Seventy years on, the act no longer stands. The Brave New World it heralded was dismantled by the 1971 and 1981 acts, which introduced strict immigration criteria. But nothing could change the status of the 1948 migrants and their descendants. The migrants (as it said on their passports) came as British citizens, a status confirmed by the 1948 Nationality Act when it came into force a few months after Windrush landed.

The big historical picture, though, seems to me worth restating – for the British empire shaped us all. Whatever our origins, it is the biggest fact in our modern history. For more than 200 years, the empire occupied many lands, exploiting their people and their resources. But by Queen Victoria’s death, it was already acknowledged that British citizenship extended to all the peoples of the empire. In the First World War, more than 1 million Indians fought for king and country, and 74,000 died; even more Indians were killed in the Second World War. Some 10,000 men and women from the West Indies volunteered for military service in the Second World War, and thousands more joined the Merchant Navy and the RAF, where 400 air crews and 6,000 ground staff were from the West Indies – more than from any other part of the empire. The Windrush generation had not only fought for Britain, but many came as skilled engineers, mechanics and fitters, to find jobs less skilled than those they had trained for.

“We were coming to the mother country,” said Bristol’s first black ward-sister, the community leader Princess Campbell, interviewed in our series The Great British Story. The 1948 act simply confirmed that. In one sense, how many people came was beside the point; the government’s job was to give them homes and work. We were the former imperial power and everyone living in Britain had benefited from the empire – except, of course, those who had lost their lives.

To ignore those facts now, 70 years on, is not only to misrepresent our laws; it is also to misunderstand the meaning of our history. But to see the mainstream press and papers now treat the Windrush generation as a national treasure is a good sign. Seventy years is a long time but thankfully, despite the actions of our government, our collective memory is longer. For more on the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948, look out for David Olusoga’s feature in our July issue