Windrush must have left a paper trail
From: Mike Smith, Birkby, Huddersfield.
IT seems unreasonable that our present Government is catching all the blame for the Windrush affair when surely any blame for that rests with different governments and immigration authorities going back to 1948.
Except for the distress caused to the original immigrants involved, which needs sorting immediately, it must puzzle many why establishing their legitimate citizenship should ever have been a problem.
When the Windrush left the Caribbean, it would have a full passenger list, as required in maritime law for the obvious purpose of accounting for all passengers in the event of a disaster. Those records are definitely still available.
When they disembarked with their landing cards, which we must assume were collected at the port, they were surely issued with some form of citizenship identity, either passports or other documents. If not, why not? If any such documents were issued but later expired or became lost over time, it is hard to believe there were no records to facilitate their renewal.
If the landing cards were the only permanent records available, then whoever authorised their destruction without first checking the implications was guilty of gross incompetence.
There should be no shortage of records for Windrush immigrants to establish their legitimate citizenship. It is nevertheless easy to imagine an individual needing access to that information would not get much help from the sort of tick-box officialdom we often encounter these days.
On a final point for those interested, the Empire Windrush, to give her her full name, later sank in the Mediterranean in 1954 following a fire while serving as a troopship.