The Empire Windrush brought many people to the UK to help rebuild the country after World War II. If it had still been in service a few years ago, the Tories would have been trying to use it to deport them all again.
The Tory government simply won’t do right by the victims of the Windrush scandal:
On 6 April, Britain’s government faced legal action by campaigners over its refusal to accept key recommendations made by an inquiry into the Windrush scandal, which affected thousands of Black post-war immigrants.
Suella Braverman in January refused to accept three of the changes previously promised by the Conservative government.
The … independent inquiry issued 30 recommendations, which Braverman’s predecessor agreed to adopt in full.
However, Braverman rejected more powers for Britain’s independent chief inspector of borders. She also refused a commissioner to safeguard migrants’ interests, and the holding of reconciliation events.
The group Black Equity Organisation, created last year to campaign for the civil rights of Black Britons, said it was seeking a judicial review of the home secretary’s decision.
There was no immediate comment from [the Home Office] as to the legal action.
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Minister for inhumanity: Priti Patel’s “Hostile Environment” policies have involved Home Office staff in illegal activities in the past. Now she is being challenged in court to prove her plan to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda is not also against the law.
10 years after the launch of the ‘Hostile Environment’ policy, representatives of Home Office staff are challenging the government in court over things they are being asked to do.
The Public and Commercial Services Union and the Immigration Services Union are challenging Priti Patel’s policies to “pushback” small boats in the English Channel and to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda.
They have strong justification: the “pushback” policy is likely to break international law on asylum while the idea of deportations to Rwanda copies a previous policy by Israel – that didn’t work and was abandoned.
And the Conservative government has a record of “Hostile Environment” criminality.
We all know – don’t we? – about the Windrush Scandal that illegally targeted for deportation a generation of people who had the right to live in the UK but whose documentation had been destroyed.
The Home Office has also wrongly accused 34,000 international students of cheating in English language tests and failed to ensure that innocent people were not wrongly deported.
An Institute for Public Policy Research report in 2020 concluded the hostile environment policy had fostered racism, pushed people into destitution, wrongly targeted people who were living in the UK legally, and had “severely harmed the reputation of the Home Office”.
In the wake of the Windrush scandal the Home Office committed to introduce a total transformation of the department, including a review of the hostile environment policies – and failed to complete it.
So it should be no surprise that civil service representatives are trying to protect workers from having to take part in Priti Patel’s potential crimes.
One glance at comments on the “Hostile Environment” policy by Nazek Ramdan, the director of the charity Migrant Voice, should make the reason crystal clear:
“Perhaps no other policy in living memory has left such a malign mark, a stain like an oil slick. It is racist, xenophobic, immoral, illegal, unfair, punishing, divisive, mean-spirited, discriminatory and counterproductive.”
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Patel: see the posters behind her? The only UK aid she likes is helping foreigners off British soil. Odd, considering she is herself the daughter of immigrants.
Priti Patel’s Home Office has been disproportionately targeting Jamaicans for deportation.
And it seems clear officials know their actions are racist. Otherwise why would they have spent a year trying to withhold the information after The Guardian made a simple Freedom of Information request?
Jamaicans are 10 per cent more likely to be deported than people from other countries, even though the same rule applies to all of them:
Under the UK Borders Act 2007, foreign nationals who are jailed for a single offence for at least 12 months will normally be considered for deportation on their release, with exceptions under human rights rules – for example, having children in the UK, and for people who have been trafficked.
A comparison of Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Home Office data between 2015 and 2020 showed that once people from European Economic Area countries were excluded, as they are not covered by the act, an average of 65% of overseas nationals jailed for at least 12 months were deported.
For Jamaican nationals, this proportion rose to 75%, however, despite the much greater likelihood of their having significant ties to the UK. For other former British colonies in the Caribbean, such as Trinidad and Tobago, and St Lucia, the rates were higher still.
The statistics also showed that 90% of Nigerian nationals were deported, and 76% of those from Ghana. For Albanians, the rate was 90%, and for Vietnamese nationals 84%.
Concern has also been registered about deportations to Albania and Vietnam, which have known issues with human trafficking connected to organised crime.
The Guardian reported that it had only been able to publish its findings after “a year-long freedom of information battle”:
While the MoJ supplied the information within weeks, the Home Office refused, saying that to do so would be “likely to prejudice diplomatic relations between the UK and a foreign government”, and could hamper the operation of immigration controls.
The Guardian appealed to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which ruled against the Home Office, calling the department’s arguments “vague” and “generic”, and noting that no attempt had been made to substantiate them. “The commissioner will not accept at face value assertions made by a public authority that, in her view, require a proper and fuller explanation,” the ruling stated.
Even now, the Home Office has tried to justify its disproportionate targeting of people from Jamaica: “We do not target specific countries.”
The record states otherwise – because the Windrush scandal showed how the Home Office deliberately destroyed records proving that people of Jamaican origin had the right to remain in the UK, and then pursued an aggressive policy of deportation against them.
It seems Priti Patel has kept up the deportations, despite protestations of fairness.
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Matt Hancock: would you believe a promise by this man?
Matt Hancock has promised that the government will pay compensation to people infected by contaminated blood products – and their families – if a public inquiry into the scandal demands it.
What a pretty promise!
Here it is:
The health secretary told the inquiry: “I respect the process of the inquiry and I will respect its recommendations, and should the inquiry’s recommendations point to compensation, then of course we will pay compensation.”
This Site has reported on the infected blood scandal before, and the Guardian‘s account of it is as good as any:
As many as 30,000 people became severely ill after being given factor VIII blood products contaminated with HIV and hepatitis C imported from the US in the 1970s and 80s. Others were exposed to tainted blood through transfusions or after childbirth. On average one person is dying every four days, with approximately 3,000 haemophiliacs having died to date.
The question is: why should we believe Hancock?
His record hardly speaks for his honesty.
And as for his government’s record on payouts… here’s the National Audit Office, discussing another recent scandal:
95% of Windrush victims have yet to be compensated.
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The Empire Windrush brought many people to the UK to help rebuild the country after World War II. If it had still been in service a couple of years ago, the Tories would have been trying to use it to deport them all again.
This is scathing – and it comes from the National Audit Office, no less:
95% of Windrush victims have yet to be compensated.
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The Empire Windrush brought many people to the UK to help rebuild the country after World War II. If it had still been in service a couple of years ago, the Tories would have been trying to use it to deport them all again.
This Writer was hoping people affected by the Windrush scandal would have something to say about the government’s attempt to whitewash institutional racism in the UK.
And they do.
The Windrush scandal happened because a Conservative Home Secretary deliberately destroyed documents that proved people who immigrated into the UK to help rebuild after World War Two – and their descendants – had a right to remain here.
Years later, after allowing time for those affected to forget that there was likely to be any problem, the Tory government started contacting members of the so-called “Windrush generation” and their descendants, declaring that there was no record of their UK citizenship, stripping them of their rights and deporting many of them.
It was, by definition, a racist scandal, instigated by the nation’s most fundamental institution – its government. And now a government run by the same party is trying to claim that the UK does not have a problem with institutional racism.
The report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities mentions Windrush in its foreword, as an instance “where ethnic minority communities have rightly felt let down”, but continues: “Outcomes such as these do not come about by design, and are certainly not deliberately targeted.”
The second, and only other, reference to the scandal comes in the conclusion, when it is mentioned in passing as an exceptional example of things going wrong.
This is clearly inaccurate. The Lessons Learned review, an independent investigation into the causes of the Windrush scandal, found that the Home Office had displayed “institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness” on race issues, “consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism”.
Let’s see what some of the Windrush generation have to say about it:
Patrick Vernon, whose campaigning helped force the government to take action on Windrush, said: “I can see why they haven’t included it. If they had focused on the scandal they would have had to admit that there was a systematic, structural failure in how the Home Office targeted the Windrush generation.”
Anthony Brown, who runs the Windrush Defenders Legal group in Manchester, and who was himself affected by Windrush problems, said he was frustrated by the suggestion that the scandal had been dealt with and it was time to move on. “I don’t feel that the government has fundamentally taken on board what the Windrush scandal means. A whole cohort of people were marginalised.
“The narrative of the report is that it is up to the individual to succeed: if you work hard, keep your head down, you will achieve and be successful in Britain, and if you don’t then, that’s your fault. The policies of the hostile environment took away people’s rights, but the report tries to say: actually you have all the rights you need.”
Satbir Singh, the chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, said it was remarkable that Windrush attracted barely a passing mention in the report. “To suggest that these are solved problems that do not need addressing is to gaslight millions of people who know the difference between their own lived experiences and the fictions the government would prefer us all to believe,” he said.
Community activist Desmond Jaddoo, who helps run the Windrush National Organisation to secure justice for thousands of people who were wrongly classified as immigration offenders by the Home Office, was disappointed by the report. “There was a culture of not believing members of the Windrush generation, who had to jump through hoops to prove that they were telling the truth.”
Elwaldo Romeo, who was told he was in the UK illegally and faced detention after 59 years in the country, said he was disappointed by what he had heard of the report. “There’s no compassion and no understanding of what we have gone through,” he said. “Of course they want to sweep it under the carpet. Is there racism within the governmentint and the Home Office? Yes.”
Yes there is. Think of the obstacles Priti Patel put in the way of people trying to get the compensation they deserved after being targeted for discrimination.
Even after being told they were wrong, Tory ministers tried to pretend they didn’t owe restitution to the people they had wronged for the injustice they had wrought.
The only question now is how long we have to wait until Boris Johnson retracts the report and apologises for releasing such an arrogant screed of gaslighting propaganda.
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The Empire Windrush: if the people who arrived on it to help the UK rebuild after World War Two had known how they and their descendants would be treated after 2010, would they have bothered?
If at first you don’t succeed (in persecuting and killing people), try, try and try again seems to be the Conservative motto.
The Windrush scandal was a national outrage. Now we learn that the Home Office could have avoided harming people – but deliberately chose not to.
Where is the fury over this?
the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration (ICIBI) said the department had failed to implement a series of recommendations he has made since 2016 calling for better monitoring of the impact of the hostile environment.
“Had they been, some of the harms suffered by the Windrush generation and others may have been avoided,” said the chief inspector, David Bolt.
The Windrush Lessons Learned review, published in March last year, demanded a “full review and evaluation” of the hostile environment policy devised while Theresa May was Home Secretary – and current incumbent Priti Patel accepted the recommendation in July.
But Mr Bolt said ministers had done little to evaluate the measures, both in terms of the efficiency of the processes underpinning them, including the costs to third parties carrying them out, and their effectiveness in delivering the hoped-for outcomes.
Chai Patel, legal policy director at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, said the hostile environment must be scrapped before “more lives are lost or destroyed”.
“Even the government’s own immigration inspectorate no longer has any faith that Ms Patel’s Home Office intends to fix the mess it has made of the immigration system,” he said.
Does anyone?
But this story seems to have been buried.
Do thousands more people have to be harmed, deliberately, by Priti Patel before we all wake up again, or are we going to let her get away with it next time?
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The Empire Windrush brought many people to the UK to help rebuild the country after World War II. As I never tire of pointing out, if it had still been in service a couple of years ago, the Tories would have been trying to use it to deport them all again.
People are reacting to this announcement with scepticism – and who can blame them?
Here’s what the government has said:
The government is to give more money to victims of the Windrush scandal, which saw hundreds of people wrongly threatened with deportation.
Home Secretary Priti Patel announced that the minimum payment will rise from £250 to £10,000, and the maximum from £10,000 to £100,000.
The figure will be higher still in “exceptional” circumstances, with money coming through quicker than before.
In the analysis inset by Westminster Hour‘s Jack Fenwick, though, he said
One person [told] me they won’t believe it until a cheque is in the post.
Who can blame them?
The big scandal of the Windrush compensation scheme so far is that people have died before receiving compensation. Did their descendants get the cash? That would have been reasonable, in the circumstances. Taking it back would not.
And what about people who were wrongly deported. Has the Home Office made any effort to contact them, apologise, and ask them to come back? Many of Priti Patel’s deportation victims have suffered terrible ill-treatment since deportation, so that is a can of worms that needs to be opened.
So it’s a nice announcement. But we need to action, not just pretty words.
Dr Allin-Khan is referring to a letter by Holly Lynch, signed by more than 60 Labour MPs, deploring Priti Patel’s decision to deport more people including, it was said, at least one person who was of the Windrush generation or descended from it.
I've written an urgent letter to the Immigration Minister. There are serious concerns that the injustices of Windrush could be repeated. We've asked for answers to a series of urgent questions. pic.twitter.com/5QDNln0y3U
“As a member of the Labour Shadow Cabinet, my role is to intervene in matters related to mental health (because I am the Shadow Minister for Mental Health). Members of the Shadow Cabinet do not speak in debates, sign letters, sign EDMs or intervene in matters which are not related to their role. This rule has been in place for as long as I know, it was the same when Jeremy Corbyn was leader.
“I have noticed that my name was put on a list along with 12 colleagues, suggesting we were the only people not to sign this letter. No member of the Labour Shadow Cabinet signed the letter, indeed, almost three quarters of Labour MPs didn’t sign the letter. Does that mean that they don’t care? No, of course not. Sometimes they miss the deadline to sign, sometimes they can’t sign, sometimes they make representations in different ways. It’s very disappointing that some would single out me and 12 other colleagues, suggesting we were the only ones not to sign – simply to fit their political agenda.
“My background has seen me work in war torn countries, disaster zones and refugee camps helping the world’s most marginalised and vulnerable people. I always care deeply about these issues and to suggest otherwise is incorrect. I’ll continue to liaise with my colleagues in the Home Affairs team with regards to this, and other important issues.”
My recollection is that Dr Allin-Khan is distorting the issue. Shadow Cabinet members weren’t criticised for being the only Labour MPs not to sign and it seems to me that she was deliberately creating a “straw man” argument with a ready-made response (that other Labour MPs also failed to sign).
As for her claim about Shadow Cabinet members:
Maybe that is true.
Perhaps it should change.
It seems Shadow Cabinet members are using their position to avoid expressing opinions on the most important matters of the day – the actions of the Tory government – abrogating their responsibilities as members of Her Majesty’s Opposition.
Meanwhile they line up to vilify members of their own party when they are accused – falsely, as we learned in the case of Jeremy Corbyn – of breaking party rules that are so badly-written that they can be made to mean whatever the current leader desires.
Isn’t that, you know… wrong?
Some people seem to think so:
“As a Shadow Cabinet member, I wasn't able to sign it…”
Oh, and it seems Shad Cab members like Dr Allin-Khan can’t even face the responses their protests attract:
Cowards in the shadow cabinet now avoiding all accountability by muting replies. These people are living in an amoral bubble, and they know it. All Labour MPs should have signed this, as all should have opposed this legislation. How do they sleep at night? @DrRosenahttps://t.co/IV9BwRLrz7
Meanwhile, Home Secretary Priti Patel has taken the opportunity provided by this failure of opposition to attack critics of the flight, saying it involved the deportation of “vile criminals” and was nothing to do with the Windrush scandal.
In that case, why did the flight contain only 13 people after last-minute legal challenges succeeded in gaining a reprieve for 23 others?
Oh, that’s right. As Ms Patel said, it was all the fault of “do-gooders” and “lefty lawyers”.
She comes across as a bad Scooby-Doo villain, after the mask has come off: “I would have got away with it too, if it hadn’t been for you pesky lefty lawyers!”
Sadly, in her case, the significance of the mask is reversed. In Scooby-Doo it was always a fright mask being replaced by the villain’s rather ordinary face. With Ms Patel, it is the genuine, hate-filled, face that is the horror.
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The Empire Windrush brought many people to the UK to help rebuild the country after World War II. If it had still been in service a couple of years ago, the Tories would have been trying to use it to deport them all again.
It is ironic that the Conservative government’s own review of its behaviour in the Windrush Scandal was called Lessons Learned, considering its plan for a mass deportation to Jamaica tomorrow (December 2) shows that the Tories have learned nothing.
The Home Office failed to comply with the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) under the Equality Act 2010 when implementing Theresa May’s “hostile environment” strategy, according to the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
Why is this not headlined "Conservatives in unlawful breach of racial discrimination laws, says EHRC"? https://t.co/mv4qxysvqq
— CrémantCommunarde#ActivistLawyer ⚖️ 🌻 ✋ (@0Calamity) November 25, 2020
May’s plan, which commenced in 2012, was originally intended to make staying in the UK as difficult as possible for illegal immigrants – people who do not have leave to remain, in the hope that they would leave of their own accord.
But the policy’s severe harm to members of the so-called Windrush generation – whose documents showing that they were allowed to stay in the UK were destroyed by May’s Home Office shortly after she took over responsibility for it in 2010 – was ignored, dismissed and disregarded, despite the fact that the Home Office was warned about it repeatedly.
Perhaps part of the responsibility for this lies in the fact that the Tory government, obsessed with outsourcing work to private, profit-making firms, told landlords, banks, doctors and employers to carry out ID checks and report people who lacked adequate documentation.
As a result, thousands of people – yes, thousands – were denied access to health care, benefits and housing, before being deported illegally.
Engagement with representatives of the Windrush generation – people who came to the UK, mostly from Jamaica, to help rebuild the country after World War Two, after the government of the day promised to allow them to settle here (see the 1948 Nationality Act) – was limited.
The EHRC report said the consequences – which have included several deaths – were “foreseeable and avoidable” and the organisation’s interim chair, Caroline Waters, said the treatment of the Windrush Generation was “a shameful stain on British history”.
Windrush Scandal A 'Shameful Stain On British History', Says Equality Commission | HuffPost UKhttps://t.co/FLxKBUHgjp
ThisCounterfire article is damning in its condemnation of the policy:
Dehumanisation and discrimination are built into the very concept of the ‘hostile environment’. For the Tories, the purpose of the policy was twofold: to divert growing anger at their austerity policies and to undercut the rise of far-right rivals like Ukip by appropriating their unabashedly dehumanising and racist ideology.
That’s right – the Tories under Theresa May adopted a deliberately racist ideology. And the policy of dehumanising victims was taken directly from the Nazi playbook, as Jews know very well from bitter experience.
Counterfire continues:
The lives of migrants and ethnic minorities are routinely exploited and endangered for the political gain of those in power in this way. This is not recognised in the EHRC report, which is only able to recommend a set of vague rectifications that rely heavily on the government’s good will, such as the recommendation for the Home Office to ‘prioritise and act early’ on its Equality Act duties.
The Home Office under current Home Secretary Priti Patel has made a public commitment to avoid any similar events occurring.
So it is strange that Ms Patel is determined to force as many as 50 more people out of the UK – including another member of the Windrush generation – in a specially-chartered flight tomorrow:
NEWS: And it's officially confirmed. The @ukhomeoffice are planning a pre-Christmas mass deportation of Black British residents to Jamaica on 2nd December. Despite #COVID19 risks they think that they have capacity to deport 50 people on the flight. #Jamaica50@DetentionActionpic.twitter.com/lC7AcxDzig
Immediately after it was revealed that the flight was taking place, no fewer than 82 BAME celebrities wrote to six airlines known to have carried out such flights, begging them to reject contracts to carry out any more. It is not known which airline has been engaged to carry out tomorrow’s flight.
Signatories included the author Bernardine Evaristo, model Naomi Campbell, historian David Olusoga and actors Naomie Harris and Thandie Newton, as well as lawyers, broadcasters and NGO chiefs. Leading Windrush campaigners including Michael Braithwaite and Elwaldo Romeo also signed.
Black public figures urge airlines not to carry out Home Office deportation | Home Office | The Guardianhttps://t.co/6xjYnWZTwN
And now – better late than never – 70 MPs and peers have also written to Patel, demanding that the flight must be cancelled:
The Government is doing little more than pay lip service to righting wrongs and correcting injustices. I’ve coordinated a letter asking @pritipatel@ukhomeoffice to #StopThePlane and stand alongside nearly 70 MPs and peers calling for Wednesday's flight to be cancelled #Jamaica50pic.twitter.com/eV2DPtMo4l
The letter, co-ordinated by Labour’s Clive Lewis, states:
You have previously committed to ‘righting the wrongs’ concerning the Windrush scandal. But eight months after the Windrush Lessons Learned Review was published, the recommendations have still not been fully implemented, it adds.
“Planning a pre-Christmas deportation flight demonstrates that the Home Office has so far failed to learn any lessons.”
The letter also highlights the threat posed by Covid-19 to anybody being forcibly deported:
“The conditions of deportation, such as shackling detainees to ushers for long journeys in potentially cramped conditions, risk exposing people to the virus,” the letter reads, adding that Black people are already at an increased risk of contracting coronavirus.
And there is the more tangible threat of deportees suffering harm or death at the hands of the authorities when they arrive at their destination:
“We know that five UK deportees were killed between 2018 and 2019. Some people in detention have scars from past abuse in Jamaica, or siblings who have been murdered.”
Strangely, Labour leader Keir Starmer has not signed the letter – nor have 12 of his front benchers. They are: Angela Rayner, Anneliese Dodds, Nick Thomas-Symonds, Lisa Nandy, Ed Miliband, Jon Ashworth, Rosena Allin-Khan, David Lammy, Jess Phillips, Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting and Yvette Cooper. Are we to conclude that these MPs approve of the Tories’ racism?
On the other hand, one of the signatories is former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn:
Let us not forget, as you get outraged:@JeremyCorbyn was one of the few who voted against the act that led to the Windrush Scandal – a ‘shameful stain on British history’.
Such a bastard, eh? Or, maybe, not the man the MSM & anti-Corbyn mob have led you to believe him to be. pic.twitter.com/7tqZVYRCb6
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush (@WarmongerHodges) November 25, 2020
There is absolutely no doubt that the Conservative government’s racist deportations of people who have every right to remain in the UK should stop. This Writer also has absolutely no doubt that they won’t.
Priti Patel’s record marks her out as a vicious racist who delights in dehumanising and tormenting others.
It is sad to see that she faces no opposition from the so-called Opposition front bench.
But we should remember that the people who have opposed this obscenity are those who have been vilified by the Tory Establishment and their lackeys in the mainstream media. They have lied to us; they are not to be trusted.
And we need to find better ways to oppose them.
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