On 26 September a remarkable document was published on the government website. The Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal is an independent historical report commissioned by the Home Office in response to the 2020 Wendy Williams’ Windrush Lessons Learned Review.
Williams was commissioned to look into the ‘Windrush scandal’ which hit headlines in 2017/18 as it became apparent that thousands of people who came to Britain from then Commonwealth countries, primarily in the Caribbean, between 1948 and 1973 had been unlawfully deprived of their right to live and work here. Many had been deported; others lost homes, benefits, jobs; there were resultant health breakdowns and deaths. The full extent of the damage remains unknown.
One of Williams’ recommendations was that the Home Office should ensure that its staff ‘learn about the history of the UK and its relationship with the rest of the world, including Britain’s colonial history, the history of inward and outward migration and the history of black Britons’.
The Home Office then commissioned an independent researcher whose report was made available to Home Office employees in 2022. It has only now been made public following a legal challenge to the refusal to publish it in response to Freedom of Information requests.
The report is an extensively researched history of British immigration law dating back to Roman times but focusing in particular on the post-war period. It castigates all the governments of the era, both Labour and Conservative, describing the various immigration and nationality acts of 1962, 1968, 1971 and 1981 as ‘designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK’.
The report pulls no punches. Explaining how the Windrush scandal happened, despite there being an ‘amnesty’ during 1980s in which former Commonwealth citizens were able to register for citizenship, it says:
‘…the Home Office, whose relationship with Britain’s minority ethnic communities was at an historic low following the race riots of the early 1980s and all their associated tensions, spent too little time and money informing the people affected by the abolition of [UK and Colonies] citizenship about what this would mean for their citizenship status: they would henceforth be left without documentary proof of their “right to abode”.
‘Such breakdowns in communication are the result of decades, even centuries, of dysfunctional relationships between Britain’s institutions and Black and minority ethnic people. The politics of Britain’s borders, which have been administered for more than a century by the Home Office, are now inextricably connected with race and with Britain’s colonial history. Different governments will interpret this narrative in different ways, but all must acknowledge that it cannot be ignored.’
Nicki Jameson
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 302 October/November 2024
