Tag: Windrush generation

Roots of the Windrush scandal: The contempt the system has for black, working class people

Roots of the Windrush scandal: The contempt the system has for black, working class people

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights uses some pretty blunt language in its recently published report to express its disapproval of the performance of the Home Office in what has come to be known as the Windrush Generation scandal.

Not enough was in place, it tells us, to “minimise the likelihood of such mistakes being made.” “Such mistakes”, it spells out, being the lack of awareness of the rights of the individuals concerned; ignoring evidence provided by family members, lawyers and MPs and letters from Government bodies like HMRC; wrongly placing the entire burden of proof on the people under suspicion when critical information could have been obtained from another department by Home Office officials; failure on the part of the officials to adequately satisfy themselves that they had a power to detain (and deport) individuals even when evidence on the case files strongly suggested that there was no lawful power to detain these individuals; and so on and so on.

All this amounts to ‘systems failure’ rather than a bundle of errors made by a bunch of inept Home Office officials. The question it brings to mind is exactly what system is judged to have failed in this instance.  Is it the one that requires civil servants to check and double-check that their decisions comply in all respects with the requirements of the law? Or is it the bigger system, which sets out the grounds in which a group of people will be considered good immigrants, and therefore worthy of due process; or another type all together whose status as undesirables is so obvious they can be shunted off into the fast tracks that allow for detention and deportation?

Latest chapters

The Windrush migrants have had plenty of experience of the latter category, having been subjected to ‘colour bar’ discrimination in jobs and housing when they arrived in the 1950s and 60s and subsequent treatment that rarely raised their position and that of their children above that of second-class citizens of the UK.  Mauled by the education system, winnowed out of the jobs market, and so many hauled up before the courts by criminal justice procedures, the sense of being part of a big family that appreciated them has been poorly developed across all these years.

The two cases featured in the Human Rights Committee report as exemplars of the bad treatment meted out to the Windrush immigrants, that of Paulette Wilson and Anthony Bryan, ought to be read as merely the latest chapters in the history of the racism to which black working class people have been subjected for decades.  It is necessary to say black working class people because Ms Wilson and Mr Bryans’ status as, respectively, cook and painter/decorator, are as a significant part of the story as the blackness of their skin.

When it comes to immigration control, two great negatives feature as a fundamental part of the schema.  The first is coming from a poor country, conceived as a place where people of colour are predominant among the general population.  The second is being a wage-earner looking for work opportunities amongst the middle group of trades, requiring skills learnt on the job rather than the classroom.  Being both black and a seeker of a position offering a living wage is part and parcel of any visa official’s basic definition of an undesirable immigrant.

“Turning the tap on and off”

It is important to hold this in mind as the options for immigration policy post-Brexit start appearing on the table.  Liberal-types working out of the policy think-tanks encourage themselves with the knowledge that immigration will continue under whatever system is put in place, and if it can be honed down to those who the focus groups tell us are acceptable – skilled professionals and international students – then all might be well.  But by accepting this as a defensible position they are acceding to the prejudice that remains entrenched against non-professional, working class migrants.

Labour MP Caroline Flint, apparently ignorant of the fact that she was speaking in the midst of a scandal about the treatment of Windrush immigrants, offered up a vision of what her ideal post-Brexit immigration policy would look like during a debate in the Commons in mid-June.  She set out a yearning for an immigration system in which “… we can turn the tap on and off, when we choose.”

Yet when we treat people as a flow of commodities which we can be turned on and off, then we assuredly create the very situation which Flint’s parliamentary colleagues excoriated just weeks previously in a memorable debate in the same Commons.  Years spent as members of communities, as workers in pursuit of a decent living, as people raising families and doing their best to fit in, count for little or nothing when it comes to deciding when the tap has to be turned off.

Getting beyond Windrush

The Parliamentary Human Rights Committee was right to point to systems failure rather than a mere cascade of mistakes in its judgment on the Windrush affair.  But it is a failure that has its root in the deep contempt that the middle-class Britain made up of people with property-portfolios and assets yielding a stream of rent-income has for those who get by as best they can by selling their labour to whoever will buy it by the week, day or hour.

Getting beyond the Windrush scandal will mean forming an entirely different perspective on those who come from any part of the world looking for the chance to earning a living denied to them in their own countries.  It should not be that only the passage of forty or more years of living the life of working class Britain wins grudging admission that you have ‘contributed’ and therefore accumulated at least a few rights.  Rights ought to be the basis of immigration policies, available equally to the cooks and painter/decorators of this world as anyone from the more esteemed professions.

Next steps to resolve immigration crisis: a public inquiry and a public discussion about a rights-based approach to policy

Next steps to resolve immigration crisis: a public inquiry and a public discussion about a rights-based approach to policy

Virtually all the early demands for change that issued out of a public shocked to learn what has been going on with the Windrush generation scandal seem to have been met by a panicked Home Office.

An emergency task force to resolve the issue, free application procedures, a promise of compensation, and even full British passports are, we are told, to be made available to a group of people who yesterday were being fired from the jobs, made homeless, refused healthcare, and even detained and threatened with the prospect of deportation.

Immigrant rights groups have received the support of the opposition parties in Parliament for their call for a public inquiry into the way the Home Office has handled this affair.  What is needed is a judge-led examination of the entirety of the hostile environment policies which have driven what can only be described as the persecution of this group of Commonwealth citizens.

Independence critical

It is important that any such inquiry should have distance from the Parliamentary arena.  Some might feel that the Home Affairs Select Committee has done a good enough job with its recent examination of Home Secretary Amber Rudd, and its series of highly critical reports on immigration policy. The drawback here is that government ministers have one last fall-back position they can use to deflect the most severe criticism: your party tried to do pretty much the same thing when it was in power.

There is no getting away from the truth of this fact. The first ‘hostile environment’ legislation can be traced backed to Tory immigration act in the 1990s, which ended support for asylum seekers through mainstream social security systems and also imposed on employers the duty to check the immigration status of prospective employees. But New Labour was ruthless in following up on these early initiatives by ramping up the level of civil penalties imposed on employers who were inadvertently taking on people with proper papers and increasing the powers of enforcement officials to detain and deport people.

Root-and-branch review needed

It seems clear that the Tories are going to continue back-peddling to cover their mistakes over the Windrush generation and more concessions are there to be squeezed from them on this issue.  The long-delayed review of immigration policy, promised over a year ago as the basis of a post-Brexit control system, will probably have to be looked at all over again to make see if car-crashes of the kind we have seen in the past few weeks can be avoided.  The issue for advocates of the rights of migrants however has to be more than just pushing for the next concession, and instead look towards what needs to be done to build the assurance of a secure status and the proper standard to social justice into immigration policy.

The idea of a rights-based approach to immigration policy has been a constant subject for discussion among people required to think a little more deeply into the issues than most politicians – and even ministers responsible for administering controls – seem to have time for.  Its potential for providing an alternative to current systems, in which power is exercised in so arbitrary a fashion as to be almost exempt from the rule of law – was flagged up in a blog published by Migrants’ Rights Network earlier this year.

Rather than be allowed to pass as a lofty but probably unrealistic ideal for the way immigration policy should operate, we really need to find ways to root its central propositions into the public conversation currently underway.

Principles for a rights-based approach

First and foremost, immigrants need to be acknowledged people with an inalienable right to fairness and justice in all their dealing with national authorities.  The New York Declaration for Migrants and Refugees, adopted in 2016, sets out nine ‘guiding principles’ for what it calls a ‘people-centred approach’ which need thorough discussion as to how they can be applied in the UK context, particularly as we move towards Brexit.

The Windrush generation affair has told us that we need policies which rigorously disavow racism of both the direct and ‘unwitting’ institutional kinds. The ‘guilty until proven innocent’ assumptions that allowed people to be stripped of their right to work, to receive social security and healthcare, to have access to rented accommodation, the right to drive a vehicle or run a bank account, has to be ended.  The presumption behind all immigration policy should be that the people who are subject to its authority are on a route that leads, in reasonable time, to settlement and full citizenship.  At all times they should have the assurance of equality of treatment with citizens in all matters that concern their essential health, welfare and well-being.

There is a limit to the usefulness of the pop-up remedies to the injustices revealed over the past few weeks.  It is good that the Windrush generation people have moved to rapidly from fear of deportation to the grant of full citizenship in such a short space of time.  But we can only be assured that the system has been fire-proofed from such violations of natural justice if we now start to move in the direction of a consciously thought-out, rights-based approach to immigration policy.  Let’s see what we can do to get that conversation started.