It isn’t just Windrush generation who have fallen foul of UK immigration rules

As someone who arrived in Britain with my mother days before my fifth birthday in 1948, I have followed the Empire Windrush story with more than interest and considerable empathy. We were not even from the Commonwealth. We were refugees from Eastern Europe. My parents had to register with the Aliens Department, which I seem to remember was bracketed with Firearms. They never resented this, but felt safe in this country.

They applied and got naturalisation as soon as my father had been in this country for five years. Their fear had always been of enforced repatriation to what was no longer the country they had grown up in, resulting in certain death at the hands of the occupying power, the Soviet Union. The fact that such betrayals were known about at the time was demonstrated in the play Cockpit, recently staged at the Royal Lyceum. Yet the effect of the Nazi-soviet Pact on the Baltic States and Poland is glossed over.

I grew up knowing that my status as British by Naturalisation was inferior to those actually British-born, but my security was shaken when renewing my passport 20 years ago. On all previous occasions I had merely sent in the old passport and a form. Now, because of changes in regulations, I had to produce documents I didn’t know I had: my birth certificate, which was irreplaceable, but was in Latvian on high acid content paper, a translation of it by a colleague of my mother’s on University of Edinburgh paper, naturalisation certificate, added to my father’s certificate, and a very tatty copy of the change of surname in a copy of the Edinburgh Gazette.

My mother, late in life, came to resent the question “Where do you come from?”, often asked with malicious intent. I remember, in the 1980s, being employed (because I sound native British) to book a room in a B&B for a Russian dissident whose own enquiry had been turned down because she sounded foreign. There is a difference between racism and xenophobia. The Home Office seems to be suffering from both. MARINA DONALD (NEE GRINBERGS) Tantallon Place, Edinburgh I wonder what evidence Martyn Mclaughlin has to support his assertion that the Windrushfiascoisadeliberate act by a cynical and calculating government (Perspective, 18 April)?

I have no intention of acting as an apologist for the Prime Minister, or the Home Secretary for that matter, but to suggest that this mess is deliberate Government policy really does stretch credulity. The Labour Government is not off the hook in this; it was they who opened the doors to mass immigration which then resulted in a voter backlash, which in turn led the government of the day to try to tighten immigration rules. New rules were introduced to tackle illegal immigration, for the greater good, and that was surely the right thing to do. It is now clear that the rules were implemented harshly and without very much common sense being applied by those enforcing them.

So yes, there may be a case against ministers for not managing the process correctly because these poor, affected individuals have been very badly mistreated.

It is indeed appalling, but to say that this situation is deliberate, is headline-grabbing nonsense. Ministers involved in these issues undoubtedly have made mistakes but to label them heartless people determined to deport the ‘Windrush’ generation is quite malevolent.

Without evidence, Mr. Mclaughlin’s article, powerfully describing the human cost of this policy, should be dismissed as a piece of political invective rather than a fully researched piece of investigative journalism.

LW TURNBULL Edderston Road, Peebles