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Dedication

To Nurse Thelma Rock, her mother, and her son Colin, who were our neighbours in the 1950s. Thelma’s mother slept at our house until she found a place of her own.

They were part of the Windrush generation

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Introduction

The creation of a “hostile environment” for migrants was announced by Theresa May, the UK’s Conservative (Tory) Home Secretary, in 2012. Although she said it was intended for “illegal” migrants, it turned out that, under this policy, almost anyone could be made “illegal” if they were either a migrant themselves or a descendant of one. This became clear as the Windrush scandal unfolded.

    “Windrush scandal” is the name eventually given to the UK government’s cruel and unjust treatment of thousands of British citizens, notably in – though not confined to – the decade following 2012. The citizens in question were members of the “Windrush generation”, who had come perfectly legally from British colonies and ex-colonies in the Caribbean, to work in the UK, helping to rebuild the country after the Second World War. The first group came by boat, the SS Empire Windrush, in 1948. The scandal affected the original arrivals and their descendants, as well as subsequent arrivals and their descendants. Under Theresa May’s new legislation, they were told they were not British after all. They were sacked from their jobs and deprived of their citizenship rights. The policy was set up to fulfil the election promise of Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010 that he would reduce immigration to “less than tens of thousands” a year. In her turn, May undertook to ensure the removal of “illegal” migrants from the country. Some of the Windrush generation were indeed deported.

    In this series of blogs, I will tell how the hostile environment was set up and how it was used against the Windrush generation, highlighting the case of one of its victims, Hubert Howard, to show in personal terms the devastating impact of the scandal on individuals. I will examine the response of the government after the scandal was revealed in 2017.

I will argue that what happened was not simply an accident. or the result of bureaucratic mismanagement, or due to poor judgment on the part of politicians and officials; it was the result of deliberate acts of government, having at their root the history of UK and European racism. I will show (contrary to the myth that post-war governments encouraged and welcomed these post-war immigrants)  that, from the start, Labour and Conservative governments actively sought, by administrative means, to discourage and prevent them from coming to Britain. Later, they alleged that such immigration was harmful to British society in various ways. The allegations were proved embarrassingly groundless. These attempts continued throughout and beyond the 1950s, until parliament was finally provided with an excuse to pass the restrictive Commonwealth Immigration Act 1962.

I will show that in subsequent years the Conservative Party remained against large-scale immigration of black people into the UK and imposed strict legislative controls on them; I will also show that the Labour Party, though disguising its own hostility, introduced similar restrictive legislation. I will discuss the Labour Party’s approach to immigration and highlight events during the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown between 1997 and 2010 suggesting that the hostile environment existed under Labour well before Theresa May’s announcement in 2012.

I will examine the failed compensation scheme set up by the Tory government and, finally, I will show that Windrush victims are still being targeted today, under a Labour government claiming to be committed to change.

    But I begin with the announcement of the hostile environment policy and show how the Windrush scandal followed and how it became a catastrophe for so many people.

Creating hostility

During the UK general election campaign in 2010, David Cameron, leader of the Tory opposition, pledged to reduce the UK’s net immigration per year to “less than tens of thousands” if he became Prime Minister. After the election, he led a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats (LibDems). He appointed Tory MP Theresa May as Home Secretary, who seemed as determined as he was to get immigration numbers down. She announced her intention in an interview in The Telegraph in 2012, saying,“The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants.”^[1] The following year she introduced an Immigration Bill, which would become law in 2014, and explained its purpose in the following way:

Most people will say it can’t be fair for people who have no right to be here in the UK to continue to exist as everybody else does with bank accounts, with driving licences and with access to rented accommodation. We are going to be changing that because we don’t think that is fair … What we don’t want is a situation where people think that they can come here and overstay because they’re able to access everything they need.^[2]

She was careful to say that her hostility was directed at people who were “illegal” and thus to imply that the hostility was “fair”. But we will see how easy it was for her to pin the “illegal” label on innocent people, make false accusations against them and turn their lives upside down.

      At this stage, May’s legislation and her language could be seen as simply in line with a long-standing Tory approach to immigration. Her comments were reminiscent of remarks by a previous Home Secretary, referring specifically to asylum seekers: in 1995 Michael Howard had declared that the UK was seen as

a very attractive destination because of the ease with which people can get access to jobs and to benefits. And while, for instance, the number of asylum seekers for the rest of Europe are [sic] falling the number in this country are [sic] increasing [and] only a tiny proportion of them are genuine refugees.^[3]

Likewise, Tory Social Security Secretary Peter Lilley told the Tory Party Conference in the same year:

Genuine political refugees are few. The trouble is our system almost invites people to claim asylum to gain British benefits. That can’t be right – and I’m going to stop it. Britain should be a safe haven, not a soft touch.^[4]

In 2013, however, May made clear that the environment would now become unmistakably hostile. The hostility would be expressed not only in legislation but also in government actions. This included a crude attempt to frighten migrants into leaving the country and to create hostility to them in local communities: in July 2013, the Home Office sent vans, displaying the message, “In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest”, into six London boroughs. It was a pilot scheme, lasting one month, and the Home Office claimed that it resulted in 60 people “voluntarily” returning to their home countries and that it saved taxpayers’ money.^[5] There was, however, a good deal of public disquiet and the vans were not used again.

    But the legislation, too, was unmistakably hostile. As May’s Immigration Bill started its journey through parliament, it was obvious that many of its provisions would be particularly worrying for asylum seekers: grounds of appeal against refusal and deportation would be reduced from 17 to four and a “deport first, appeal later” policy would be introduced for people judged as being at no risk of “serious irreversible harm” if returned to their countries of origin, or indeed to other countries similarly approved by the government.^[6] This was particularly dangerous since such judgments, made by caseworkers or secretaries of state, are notoriously unreliable.^[7] So these legal changes were worrying enough. But it became clear that Home Office definitions of who was an “illegal immigrant” were equally unreliable, and dangerous, as the Windrush scandal unfolded.

    What happened to the Windrush generation under the hostile environment policy was particularly scandalous because this whole cohort of people who had been citizens for decades were suddenly told they were not citizens at all. The House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, which investigated the scandal, summed up what happened to them in a few succinct sentences. Members of the Windrush generation were

denied access to employment, healthcare, housing and other services in the UK. In some cases, people who had every right to live in the UK were targeted for removal, held in immigration detention, deported or prevented from returning to the UK from visits abroad. Upon trying to resolve their status with the Home Office, they faced obstacles such as “often insurmountable” requirements for decades-worth of evidence to demonstrate their time in the UK and significant application fees.^[8] 

When it came to removal from the country, some decided, with their history erased, to leave before they could be forcibly removed and thus retain some dignity.^[9] For others, the hostile environment ruined their health.

Persecution enforced by law

May’s Bill passed into law, becoming the Immigration Act 2014. It required employers to demand evidence of their employees’ immigration and citizenship status, NHS staff to demand the same of their patients, private landlords of their tenants and banks of their customers. Other public bodies were instructed to do likewise, and new powers were given to check the immigration status of driving licence applicants, refusing those who could not provide evidence and revoking licences already granted.^[10] When such checks were made, it turned out that large numbers of people who had lived and worked in the country for decades had no documents to prove their citizenship (no passports, no naturalisation papers). They were declared “illegal”. Most of them were part of the Windrush generation and their descendants.

Rhetoric versus reality

When the Empire Windrush passengers arrived at the UK’s border, no questions were raised about their citizenship or their right to enter and live in the UK. Indeed, for more than a century citizens of the British Empire had enjoyed those rights. In their rhetoric, many UK politicians treated this as a principle to be proud of. In 1954 Henry Hopkinson, Tory Minister of State for Colonial Affairs, declared:

We still take pride in the fact that a man can say civis Britannicus sum [I am a British citizen] whatever his colour may be and we take pride in the fact that he wants to and can come to the mother country.^[11]

Moreover, rhetoric apart, the decision to maintain these long-standing rights after the war was taken on hard political and economic grounds: as the countries that had formed the British Empire began to gain their independence, and the Empire became the Commonwealth, good relations with those countries were deemed vital if Britain was to maintain an economic foothold in the regions of the world it once ruled. So, in the very year the Empire Windrush sailed, the British Nationality Act 1948 confirmed those rights to British citizenship.^[12] Later, the Immigration Act 1971 confirmed them yet again: although the Act granted only temporary residence to most new arrivals, crucially it still granted Commonwealth citizens protection from deportation.^[13] However, by the beginning of the next decade, an erosion of their right to protection had begun. The British Nationality Act 1981 created a new status – that of “British citizen”. In doing so, in the words of Lord Justice Underhill in the Court of Appeal in 2019, it

assimilated the position of Commonwealth citizens to that of other foreign nationals, by requiring them to naturalise … in order to acquire British citizenship.^[14]

Arguably, the protection given by the 1971 Act still existed, since it had not been repealed. But by the end of the decade the Immigration Act 1988 had removed it. Section 1(5) of the 1971 Act had ensured that Commonwealth citizens “settled in the United Kingdom at the coming into force of this Act” would retain their freedom “to come into and go from the United Kingdom”.^[15] The 1988 Act, however, removed it in a single sentence: “Section 1(5) of the … Immigration Act 1971 … is hereby repealed.”^[16] During the passage of the 1988 Act through parliament, concerns had been raised in the House of Lords by Lord Pitt.^[17] “I wish that the Government would think through these matters,” he said:

We are talking about people who have been here for 15 years. During those 15 years they have been contributing to the state through taxes, rates, their work and their contributions to society. In 1971 the Government gave them a pledge. I ask them for Christ’s sake to keep it.^[18]

Despite this urgent plea, the Bill received the Royal Assent and became the Immigration Act 1988, and the protection given in the 1971 Act was removed. Nevertheless, the confirmation of their rights in the 1948 Act remained and another Act, Labour’s Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, seemed to give similar protection.

 “… a great deal of thought …”

Theresa May claimed in the House of Commons in 2014 that the government had “given a great deal of thought to the way in which our measures will operate.”^[19] May and her officials certainly noticed a provision in the 1999 Act. It worried them – and they did something about it. The Guardian reported in 2018:

All longstanding Commonwealth residents were protected from enforced removal by a specific exemption in the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act – a clause removed in the updated 2014 legislation.^[20]

They removed it deliberately, without warning and without debate.^[21] One attempted justification, once the removal of the clause had been discovered, didn’t wash at all: a later Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, told the House of Commons in 2018 that the clause had been removed because it was unnecessary – there was already protection in the 1971 Act.^[22] It didn’t wash, first, because the 1971 protection had been repealed, as we have seen, by the Immigration Act 1988; secondly, if they believed at the time that the protection still existed, why did they inflict the threats and punishments that immediately followed the passing of the 2014 Act? The answer is that they were determined to implement the hostile environment and, after giving the matter a great deal of thought, they removed the protection in the 1999 Act and set about persecuting the Windrush generation.

   The consequences were predictable and intended. As employers, NHS staff, landlords, bank staff and other authorities checked the status of their current and potential workers, patients, customers and clients, more and more people were told that their lack of documentary proof of citizenship meant that they were not citizens at all. They were illegal. They had, in the words of Theresa May, “no right to be here”. They had to go. In April 2018, journalist Gary Younge gave examples of the cruelty inflicted on the Windrush generation and their descendants in the name of the “hostile environment”:

There’s Renford McIntyre, 64, who came to Britain from Jamaica when he was 14 to join his mum, worked as a tool setter, and is now homeless and unemployed, after he was fired when he couldn’t produce papers to prove his citizenship. Or 61-year-old Paulette Wilson who used to cook for MPs in the House of Commons. She was put in Yarl’s Wood removal centre and then taken to Heathrow for deportation, before a last-minute reprieve prevented her from being sent to Jamaica, which she last visited when she was 10 and where she has no surviving relatives. Or Albert Thompson, a 63-year-old who came from Jamaica as a teenager and has lived in London for 44 years. He was evicted from his council house and has now been denied NHS treatment for his cancer unless he can stump up £54,000, all because they question his immigration status.^[23]

In the next blog, I will tell the story of Hubert Howard, one of the saddest victims of the hostile environment and the Windrush scandal.

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[1] James Kirkup, “Theresa May interview: ‘We’re going to give illegal migrants a really hostile reception’”, The Telegraph, 25 May 2012: Theresa May interview: ‘We’re going to give illegal migrants a really hostile reception’ (telegraph.co.uk)

[2] Cited The Guardian, 10 October 2013: Immigration bill: Theresa May defends plans to create ‘hostile environment’ | Theresa May | The Guardian (accessed 28/5/2023).

[3] Playing the Race Card, 7 November 1999, Channel Four Television, London.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Operation Vaken: evaluation report, Home Office and Immigration Enforcement, 31 October 2013: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/operation-vaken-evaluation-report; Hattenstone, S., “Why was the scheme behind May’s ‘Go Home’ vans called Operation Vaken?”, The Guardian, 26 April 2018: Why was the scheme behind May’s ‘Go Home’ vans called Operation Vaken? | Simon Hattenstone | The Guardian

[6] Immigration Act 2014, s. 17(3), insertion 94B(3).

[7] Mouncer, Bob (2009), Dealt with on their Merits: the Treatment of Asylum Seekers in the UK and France, University of Hull, paras 6.5.9, 6.5.12, 6.6.1-6.6.4: file:///C:/Users/Bob/AppData/Local/Temp/b76ecf82-0f04-4115-975d-917a3a324502_Dealt%20with%20on%20their%20merits.zip.502/519233.pdf; Shaw, J. & Witkin, R. (2004), Get it Right: How Home Office Decision Making Fails Refugees, Amnesty International, London.

[8] The Windrush Compensation Scheme, House of Commons Home Affairs Committee Report (24 November 2021), para. 1: The Windrush Compensation Scheme – Home Affairs Committee (parliament.uk)

[9] “What is Windrush and who are the Windrush generation?”, BBC News 27 July 2023: What is Windrush and who are the Windrush generation? – BBC News

[10] Immigration Act 2014.

[11] Cited, Hayter, T. (2000), Open Borders: The Case against Immigration Controls, Pluto Press, London, p. 44.

[12] Ibid., p. 43.

[13] Immigration Act 1971, ss. 1(5) and 7 (1); Gentleman, A., “‘I’ve been here for 50 years’: the scandal of the former Commonwealth citizens threatened with deportation’”, The Guardian, 21 February 2018: ‘I’ve been here for 50 years’: the scandal of the former Commonwealth citizens threatened with deportation | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

[14] Case No: CA-2021-000601, Royal Courts of Justice Strand, London, WC2A 2LL (27/7/2022), para. 11:   Microsoft Word – Howard for hand-down _2_.docx (dpglaw.co.uk)

[15] Immigration Act 1971, s.1(5): “The rules [made by the Secretary of State relating to how the Act would work in practice] shall be so framed that Commonwealth citizens settled in the United Kingdom at the coming into force of this Act and their wives and children are not, by virtue of anything in the rules, any less free to come into and go from the United Kingdom than if this Act had not been passed.”

[16] Immigration Act 1988, s,1: Immigration Act 1988 (legislation.gov.uk)

[17] David Pitt was born on the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1913. He won the Island Scholarship to have further education abroad and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He returned to the Caribbean, but settled in Britain in 1947. He was given a life peerage in 1975. He died in 1994.

[18] Cited, Williams, W. op. cit., p. 58: 6.5577_HO_Windrush_Lessons Learned Review (publishing.service.gov.uk).

[19] Hansard, House of Commons, 30 January 2014, cols 1124-25: Immigration Bill – Hansard – UK Parliament

[20] Taylor, D., ”UK removed legal protection for Windrush immigrants in 2014”, UK removed legal protection for Windrush immigrants in 2014 | Commonwealth immigration | The Guardian

[21] Ibid.

[22] Hansard, House of Commons, 23 April 2018, cols. 628-29).

[23] Younge, G., “Hounding Commonwealth citizens is no accident. It’s cruelty by design”, The Guardian, 13 April 2018: Hounding Commonwealth citizens is no accident. It’s cruelty by design | Gary Younge | The Guardian