https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/feb/02/windrush-grandfather-at-risk-of-deportation-after-almost-50-years-in-uk

In 2012, home secretary Theresa May launched the hostile environment. What was it?

During the UK’s 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. 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.” She later 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.

The hostile environment policy led to two major scandals, the Windrush scandal and the Mediterranean scandal. I am concerned here with the Windrush scandal.

The name refers to the “Windrush generation”, British citizens from British colonies and ex-colonies in the Caribbean who had come to the UK to work and help rebuild the country after the Second World War. The first group came by boat, the SS Empire Windrush, in 1948. What happened during the hostile environment was particularly scandalous because this whole cohort of people who had been citizens for decades were told they were not. The House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, which later 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.

The Guardian story shows that the hostile environment has not disappeared. Samuel Jarrett-Coker is the latest of its victims to be revealed. There were half-hearted apologies, despite court cases won, and a failed compensation scheme set up. Yet many people have probably concluded that the scandal is over and the ill-treatment of its innocent victims a thing of the past.

Not any more.

Samuel Jarrett-Coker, 13 years after Cameron and May spawned the hostile environment, is in danger of losing his home and is threatened with deportation, after a lifetime in the UK, all because he hasn’t got a passport and, says the Home Office, must prove his British citizenship or be thrown out of the country.

I have written to my MP in Hull, Diana Johnson, about Samuel. I have explained to her that there is

absolutely no justification for Mr Jarrett-Coker’s treatment. The arguments put by the Home Office in his case were dismissed and settled in court in the Hubert Howard case in 2019, when Lord Justice Underhill declared that Hubert Howard’s residence in the UK “was lawful from his first arrival in 1960”.

The Home Office has been consistently abusive for decades. There’s not much we can do about the distant past. But we can bring the Windrush scandal to its end. I have suggested to Diana Johnson that as

we now have a Labour government, of which you are a member, it must surely be possible, now, to bring such Home Office abuse and the Windrush injustice, to an end. Three things should surely be done: stop the Home Office’s abuse; give Mr Jarrett-Coker his citizenship rights; and give all the surviving Windrush victims the compensation they deserve. If these actions are not taken, and fast, and if the Home Office is allowed to continue its abusive ways unchecked by politicians, not one of our ethnic communities (in Hull or anywhere else) is safe.

Read about Samuel Jarrett-Coker and then write to your MP. They all need to know, or be reminded of, what is still being done in our name to the innocent victims of what Theresa May called the “really hostile environment”.