Windrush scandal defies our shared moral values as a nation
LET me get this straight. Many of the children of the thousands of people who came to Britain decades ago from Commonwealth countries – who in fact were actually encouraged to come to Britain to make up for the labour shortage and rebuild the country after World War II – are now being asked to prove that they belong here.
Is that actually correct or are we in some collective nightmare?
Unfortunately, I’ve checked – and it’s really happening.
People of the so-called Windrush generation have worked for decades, paid tax for decades, contributed for decades and yet, owing to new legislation which requires them to provide the “correct documentation” to prove residence, they have had police with battering rams arrive at their front door, been ousted from jobs, had driving licences revoked, been denied access to the health service, lost their benefits and homes and even ended up in immigration detention centres and threatened with deportation.
Cue hugely bad publicity for the UK Government and apologies from Prime Minister Theresa May and Home Secretary Amber Rudd.
But an “I’m sorry” is frankly an insult given the scale of the injustice here.
Historic failures by the UK Government to keep a record of all the pre1971 Windrush arrivals granted leave to remain or issue paperwork confirming their right to be here and to keep hold of their landing cards (the Home Office destroyed them in an office move in 2010) mean children who travelled on their parents’ passports are now struggling to prove they belong in their own country.
Facing being forcibly returned to places they might have known but briefly and have not seen for 50 years, they are being told to provide what the Home Office and immigration officials have termed the “correct documentation” to prove they are allowed to be here.
But what constitutes the correct documentation is hardly simple.
One man said he’s provided documents showing decades of National Insurance and pension contributions, but they were deemed “not good enough”.
The Government has said it will set up a taskforce to help those in difficulty prove their status and resolve their cases quickly.
But many more cases are still coming to light.
And now there are also reports of similar things happening to EU nationals who have been here for years, as well as growing fears over what will happen to others post-Brexit.
Some say they will not be affected in the same way as the Windrush generation because they are likely to have a so-called digital footprint.
But I wouldn’t put my mortgage on it given the current fiasco.
One of the Windrush cases I read about involves a man who came to the UK as a teenager and has worked and paid taxes for 44 years.
But he became ill with cancer and question marks over his immigration status meant he lost his home and became homeless until he was rehoused by a charity. He was then told he would have to pay £54,000 for NHS treatment unless he could prove he was eligible.
He is still not receiving treatment.
Reading about these cases has left me feeling sick to my stomach.
I cannot believe that our country, which so often stands in moral judgement over others and considers itself in an elevated position in the world, treats human beings – in fact its own citizens – like this.
It defies logic, common sense and our shared moral values as a nation.
How can our nation be so low as to turn on the children of those who were encouraged to come here to help us out of a sticky spot after World War II?
We might have won the war but Britain was on its knees and the Windrush generation was a welcome boost. These people did the low-paid manual jobs that white British workers did not want to do. Now their children are being told they’re illegals with no status. Some have been carted off to detention centres and have tickets booked on planes back to the Caribbean. One woman only avoided deportation because of intervention by her MP. The whole situation has all come about because of tighter legislation brought in to address concerns about illegal immigration. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the UK Government are using a hammer to crack a nut. I shouldn’t be surprised, as they’ve got form. Look at the way the “crackdown” on the alleged legions of benefit fraudsters has led to genuinely sick and disabled people being subjected to humiliating tests and told they’re fit to work when an idiot could see they aren’t.
Plus this country is built on the backs of migrants, from the ancestors of modern Britons who crossed from Europe tens of thousands of years ago to the Irish refugees who fled famine to come and work in Wales to satisfy the demand for labour during and after the industrial revolution.
I just hope that in this often misguided drive to preserve what some term our British way of life, we don’t walk all over and leave boot prints on the backs of those who helped our country become what it is today.
I cannot believe our country, which so often stands in moral judgement over others and considers itself in an elevated position in the world, treats human beings – in fact its own citizens – like this