The UK government has no shame. You would think that the growing calls for Boris Johnson to resign would discourage the PM from doing anything that would make him even more unpopular, like bringing the Windrush scandal back to the fore. Especially following the revelations that he and his crew were partying it up, while the rest of the country was in lockdown and many were prevented from seeing loved ones during their final days. Perhaps Johnson is confident that he will survive this political storm just as he did every other fiasco that he has had a hand in causing.
Indeed, whilst the now famous Christmas party showed the level of disregard that Johnson has for his own government’s rules, it is the further marginalisation of Black and non-white communities that show his complete indifference to the pain and destruction brought on by the Windrush scandal.
Whilst the former PM, Theresa May certainly doubled down on the ‘hostile environment’, the current government’s further tightening of immigration policies has been even more callous.
Black, Muslim and migrant communities have undoubtedly been among the hardest hit. One of the most outrageous injustices which continues still, is the ill-treatment of communities impacted by the ongoing Windrush scandal. The government failed in its promise to correct the systemic failures which led to people being wrongly deported from Britain, arrested and detained in immigration centres. Such violent state practices are set to be intensely magnified by the government’s new Nationality and Borders bill.
Many of us born in the UK have had family members- in my case it was my grandfather-who were part of the Windrush generation that decided to leave their homes in the Caribbean and put down roots in the UK. They were told “play by the rules, and you can have a decent life.”
They were lied to.
Not only did many suffer cruel and racist humiliation upon arriving into the UK, but years on, as the Windrush scandal highlighted, they continue to be targeted by anti-migrant government policies and so-called errors. The consequences of the lie they were sold would also be felt by the generations that followed, all under the government’s carefully cultivated ‘hostile environment’.
The government repeatedly claims that those deported from Britain pose a serious threat to the country. Yet, each time a charter plane is set to leave the country to deport people in the dead of the night, legal interventions from lawyers usually result in some of those people being taken off the plane at the last moment. This can often be because they have been denied their legal rights. Furthermore, we know that some have been punished and deported for minor crimes that were committed many years ago, including driving offences for which the penalties have long been paid. Many of those deported have families living in the UK, who are also made to suffer the consequences of the state’s targeting.
The ‘hostile environment’ is not a broken system, it was specifically designed this way. It was certainly never intended to protect Black people and the communities that keep the country running, the migrants that our health services, transport systems or education sector (to name but a few) all so crucially depend on.
The government may have acknowledged their failures over Windrush, but it is important to note that this only happened once public outcry was too considerable for them to avoid. The fact that little action has taken place to rectify the destruction of countless Black lives only further demonstrates this. Even the findings and promised implementations following the Wendy Williams Windrush Lessons Learned Review, have largely been ignored. Put simply, the Home Office doesn’t seem serious in its pledge to correct the wrongs of the Windrush scandal at all.
Although recently the government boasted that it had paid some £41million to victims through the Windrush compensation scheme and ‘concluded’ some of the applications, critics have said that the government’s offers were too low, and that they did not account for the stress and true scale of loss of earnings suffered by many of the victims. It is for this reason that campaigners continue to demand that the compensation scheme be made completely independent from the government.
This traumatic saga though, despite the commendable efforts of legal teams working hard to advocate on behalf of those affected by the Windrush scandal, sadly continues.
In truth, the government’s clampdown on Caribbean and African communities should have been harder fought by all those who raised opposition when the scandal first hit. I fear we have also not learned many lessons from this, let alone pressured the government enough to backtrack on its continued deportations. There's word that another round of violent removals will take place this month.
The Windrush scandal should have served as a warning, but instead the government goes on with its xenophobic and racist practices. The dire consequences of the Home Office’s increasingly draconian crackdown on some of the most vulnerable communities will damage the cultural fabric of our society forever and instead, it will instil a heightened climate of fear.
All those who oppose the growing tide of racism across the country must form a strong political alliance to oppose it. The government’s actions and intentions are clear, and if the predictions regarding further deportations are true, our work must begin now. It is not too late to rectify our mistakes and truly demonstrating our solidarity to migrants everywhere.
Richard Sudan is a journalist and writer specialising in anti-racism and has reported on various human rights issues from around the world. His writing has been published by The Guardian, Independent, The Voice and many others.
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