Tag Archives: generation

Deporting people from foreign countries is not new – but it shows we are regressing

The Empire Windrush: the people brought to the UK on this ship in 1948, the Chinese deported back to that country two years before, and Afghan asylum-seekers who face death trying to cross the English Channel are all victims of the same primitive racism.

It’s always sad to see proof that a country is evolving backwards – especially when that country is your own.

That’s exactly what This Writer saw, watching an old BBC documentary series called Mixed Britannia.

It showed me that the current fervour for shipping people of foreign extraction who have been re-defined (take careful note of that: re-defined) as “undesirables” out of the UK (destination: anywhere) is a regression to the attitudes of more primitive times.

In the series, the late George Alagiah relates what he describes as the “shameful” episode in which people who were originally from China but had settled in Liverpool, some having married local women, were separated from their families in a night-time raid, thrown onto a ship and sent directly back to their country of origin.

Their labour had previously been welcomed but then it was considered no longer to be needed and racist law-makers dispensed with their services, with extreme prejudice.

Their wives and children were not told the truth about what had happened; they were left to believe they had been deserted by their husbands.

This happened under the otherwise-progressive Labour government of Clement Attlee; it should perhaps serve as a warning to us all that we should be careful not to view history through rose-tinted glasses, or any other distorting prism.

Mr Alagiah went on to show how attitudes had improved over the decades leading to 2011, when Mixed Britannia was made.

Hindsight renders it ironic that he referred to the arrival of the Empire Windrush, packed with passengers from the West Indies who had been promised UK citizenship in return for their help in rebuilding our then-war-torn nation, as a great step forward that happened only a few years later.

Today, the Windrush Scandal is one of the deepest scars on the face of the Conservative administration of 2010 onwards; documentation proving the right of the Windrush generation to live in the UK was deliberately destroyed and people who’d had every right to believe they were UK citizens were forced through a deportation process that was entirely unwarranted, unfair, and illegal. The Tories have yet to make full restitution to those they wronged.

Today we live overlooking the river of blood (to adopt a phrase) that used to be the English Channel – where refugees and asylum-seekers place their lives in the hands of criminal gangs because they have no safe, legal route to claim asylum in the UK; the Tories have closed them all off and say anybody trying to make the crossing is coming here illegally.

Does that include people from Afghanistan who worked as employees of the UK government and its forces there for 20 years after the post- 911 invasion, as implied by this social media post about the people who died or were rescued in the tragedy that happened on August 12:

“Their labour had previously been welcomed but then it was considered no longer to be needed and racist law-makers dispensed with their services, with extreme prejudice.”

It fits, doesn’t it?

Remember: The current Conservative government has deliberately dismantled the UK’s immigration and asylum system in order to make it impossible to properly process people coming to these shores to claim asylum.

They have done this in order to fool you into thinking that our borders are being overrun by foreigners who have no reason to come here.

They believe they need to put a fake enemy in front of you because otherwise you will realise that the only real enemy you have is the current Conservative government.

At the time of writing, Mixed Britannia may be viewed via the BBC iPlayer here.

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Why are the Windrush generation STILL waiting for compensation?

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 in 2017, the Tories would have been trying to use it to deport them all again.

It’s 75 years since the Empire Windrush docked in the UK with cabins full of what political correctness tells us were Afro-Caribbean people who had volunteered to help rebuild the UK after World War II.

In 2017 we discovered that thousands of these people were in danger of being deported by a racist Home Office under the leadership of Theresa “Go Home” May, because they didn’t have paperwork showing that they had a right to stay in the UK indefinitely.

And what was the reason they didn’t have that paperwork? Nobody in the government had bothered to give it to them and Home Office staff had deliberately destroyed their own copies.

These government choices led to detentions and wrongful deportations that would have made any fascist regime proud – until this disgraceful persecution of innocents was exposed and public outrage put an end to it.

The government of the day promised compensation to all those who had been wronged.

That was in 2017. Many of those affected by the Windrush Scandal are still waiting.

And in the meantime, let’s remember, the Tory government merrily pumped £800 billion into the hands of its rich mates and donors, in return for nothing at all worth mentioning.

The matter was supposed to get an airing on the BBC’s Politics Live today (Thursday, June 22, 2023) but the discussion very quickly deviated onto the much less fraught subject of opportunities for people from ethnic minorities in the UK today.

So here’s Jeremy Corbyn:

You’re welcome, Jeremy. As someone who highlighted the Windrush Scandal at the time, I find the praise of the UK’s leading anti-racist MP extremely pleasant.

The issue of reparation for colonial crimes is complicated and may take a long time to untangle.

But Windrush is straightforward. The only reason compensation has been delayed is that the government are racists who don’t like paying money to black people. Or so it seems to me.

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Does think tank’s finding support Labour’s case for a national energy firm?

This speaks for itself:

A publicly owned electricity generation firm could save Britons nearly £21bn a year, according to new analysis that bolsters Labour’s case to launch a national energy company if the party gains power.

Thinktank Common Wealth has calculated that the cost of generating electricity to power homes and businesses could be reduced by £20.8bn or £252 per household a year under state ownership, according to a report seen by the Guardian.

The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, has committed to creating “a publicly owned national champion in clean energy” named Great British Energy.

It’s interesting that a state-owned company would save homes money; when electricity was privatised under Margaret Thatcher, we were told our bills would be lower.

So it seems the Thatcher government lied to us.

And that leads me to my second point: if privatisation has led to higher bills, then why not just nationalise the privatised energy firms?

Source: State-owned electricity generation firm ‘could save Britons nearly £21bn a year’ | Energy industry | The Guardian

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Is this the sinister truth behind Liz Truss’s energy price cap plan? [VIDEOS]

I’ll cut to the core: Liz Truss’s energy price cap plan preserves commercial profits at the expense of the public.

She’s putting you in debt so the shareholders of firms like Shell can profit.

That’s the gist of this clip:

But is this what follows the reason?

So, Truss worked for Shell and has received a donation from a wife of a BP executive, and now she is giving money to them and charging us in order to do it.

And did you notice the claim in the top video that Truss is now in thrall to the European Research Group MPs? Watch this:

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Less than a week after the EHRC damned the Tories over the Windrush scandal, deportations continue

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.

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.

Most of the government’s Windrush victims are still awaiting compensation.

Some have died before receiving it.

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”.

This Counterfire 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:

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.

And now – better late than never – 70 MPs and peers have also written to Patel, demanding that the flight must be cancelled:

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:

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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Prejudiced Tories are unfairly denying benefits to people whose relatives die of Covid-19

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Sanction centre: it isn’t a sanction as such, but anyone receiving compensation for the death of a relative due to Covid-19 will be automatically denied state benefits.

Doesn’t this show how sly, sneaky and underhanded Boris Johnson and his Tory friends are?

If any low-paid frontline NHS and social care workers die of Covid-19, their relatives are entitled to claim a £60,000 lump sum under a Tory compensation scheme.

But if they are already claiming benefits and they do this, they will lose their entitlement to those benefits, meaning they could not claim Universal Credit, Housing Benefit or Pension Credit.

Some of you might think that’s fair; £60,000 is a lot of money, after all.

But this is at a time when Boris Johnson has been dishing out huge sums – £563,400 to consulting firm McKinsey for ‘advice’ that is likely to see the new National Institute for Health Protection sink without a trace, £150 million on face masks that can’t be used, an unspecified amount to Public First for the ‘A’ level results fiasco. Why should benefit claimants lose out when these fat Tories are making such a killing?

Perhaps more to the point, other compensation schemes such as those for the Windrush scandal and the Grenfell Tower fire do not affect entitlement to state benefits. Why should this be different?

The Tories have no answer to this question. Their spokesman is quoted as saying, “It has always been one the central principles of Universal Credit that decisions on awarding the benefit should take into account individuals’ existing ability to meet their basic needs, so that we maintain our focus on supporting families in most need.”

But the Windrush and Grenfell schemes are exempt from being taken into account.

It seems the Tories have created a hierarchy of merit – and relatives of Covid-19 victims have been ruled undeserving, even while ministers’ cronies are mopping up the last coppers from the Treasury that Johnson has emptied.

Source: UK families bereaved by Covid-19 lose eligibility for welfare benefits | Universal credit | The Guardian

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EU citizen registration scheme isn’t risking another Windrush scandal – the first one isn’t over!

Bumi Thomas: this jazz musician’s citizenship of the UK is in the balance and the government has already tried to deport her.

EU citizens living in the UK may find themselves the focus of another Windrush-style scandal if they fail to apply for “settled status” – but it seems the first Windrush scandal isn’t over and people are still being deported.

According to The Independent:

EU nationals are in danger of slipping through the cracks of the government’s Brexit registration scheme and turning into another Windrush-style scandal, citizens’ groups have warned.

MPs on the EU future relationship committee were told by community groups that there was simply no way to tell whether how many people had been left out of the scheme because there were no accurate figures for how many were eligible.

EU nationals in the UK have been expected to sign up for “settled status” because of Brexit bringing an end to free movement, but campaigners have complained that the scheme is poorly designed and will leave some people behind.

There are concerns that some EU nationals – particularly vulnerable people – may not realise they need to register, and may find themselves being removed from the UK without understanding why.

This raises uncomfortable parallels with the Windrush scandal, in which documents showing that people had emigrated to the UK and had every right to be here were destroyed by the Conservative government.

The Tories then contacted these people, demanding proof of a right to live in the UK. When they could not produce it, they were deported.

And they still are.

Yes, government representatives have apologised; yes, they said it would not happen again. Either those Tories were mistaken or they were lying.

So we see twin brothers Darren and Darrell Roberts being threatened with deportation to two different countries after completing prison sentences because – despite having been born in the UK – the Tories say they have no legal status here.

Darren, 24, is being sent to Grenada because that’s where his mother was born; brother Darrell will go to the Dominican Republic in one of the errors for which the Home Office under the Tories is justly infamous – he has no family there because his father was born in Dominica, which is a completely different nation.

All children born in the UK are eligible for citizenship but there is an application process with attached costs, which have risen enormously in recent years. Some might argue that this has happened alongside the rise of overt racism in the UK’s government.

The correspondence received by Darrell is certainly racist; it offers him a financial incentive to “return home” – implying that his home must be a foreign country because he is black. This is a young man who was born in London and has lived in the UK for his entire life, remember.

Legally, the government will undoubtedly say it is well within its rights as neither brother has citizenship. But they were still minors when they were imprisoned and their childhood has been described as “traumatic”, so it may be unsurprising that no citizenship applications were completed for them.

Windrush was about sending black people “home” because they couldn’t prove they belonged in the UK. This is no different.

And what about jazz musician Bumi Thomas, who was born in 1983, after the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher passed their British Nationality Act that stripped automatic citizenship from children born to parents from UK colonies?

Despite having been born in Glasgow in 1983 and living in the UK solidly since 2000, she found herself fighting a -crowdfunded – legal battle to remain in the country of her birth.

An immigration tribunal judge has ruled in favour of withdrawing the threat of deportation, but she must wait two years before she can apply for British citizenship. Her status is still at the mercy of a divisive immigration policy – meaning her application may be turned down and she might have to go through this process all over again.

So it seems to This Writer that we should not be discussing the EU nationals’ registration scheme as “another Windrush”. The Windrush scandal is still going on.

EU nationals are merely in danger of joining the Windrush generations as victims of a racist UK government.

Source: Brexit: EU citizen registration scheme risks another Windrush scandal, MPs warned | The Independent

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Windrush scandal victims deliver petition to Downing Street – for all the good it will do

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.

If ever you needed proof that your government tells you what to do, and not the other way around, it’s this.

The Windrush Scandal – and the “hostile environment” that spawned it – was created from a desire to rid the UK of huge numbers of citizens who came to the UK from Commonwealth nations, notably in the Caribbean, to help rebuild the nation after World War II.

Their job was done, you see, so racist politicians decided to destroy any information offering them a right to UK citizenship and then deport them on the grounds that they could not show a good reason to stay.

Of course, they were caught in the act. And in fairness, the Conservative Government apologised.

Only words.

When it came to actually providing compensation to the people they attacked – make no mistake, this was a deliberate attempt by a UK government to harm its citizens – our Tory administration has spent two years dragging its heels.

Yes – a recent docu-drama on the BBC has reminded us all of the extent of the crime here.

But I see no willingness to make recompense to people who, being poor, cannot exert any influence over the politicians who had all power over them.

Watch what happens and see if I’m right.

Survivors of the Windrush scandal have delivered a petition to Downing Street signed by 130,000 people calling on the government to speed up compensation payments and implement all the recommendations in the Windrush Lessons Learned review.

Paulette Wilson and Anthony Bryan – who were wrongly held in immigration detention centres and threatened with deportation to Jamaica, a country they both left as children in the 1960s and had not visited in more than 50 years – handed the petition to police officers at the gates of Downing Street on Friday.

They both expressed their anger that so few people affected had received compensation in the two years since the government first apologised for wrongly classifying thousands of legal residents as being in the country illegally.

They were joined by Michael Braithwaite, a special needs teaching assistant, who was sacked from the primary school he had worked at for 15 years; Glenda Caesar, who was sacked from her job as a GP administrator after more than 20 years working for the NHS; and Elwaldo Romeo, who was told by the Home Office he was facing detention and should return to Antigua, a country he left 59 years earlier as a four-year-old boy.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The home secretary has been clear that the mistreatment of the Windrush generation by successive governments was completely unacceptable and she will right those wrongs.” However, they added, Williams had recommended that the Home Office consider the review carefully before responding, “and we are committed to honouring that request”. Patel had said she would update parliament before the summer recess.

Officials in charge of organising the compensation scheme stressed that claimants should not feel discouraged by the difficulties experienced by others and should persist with making claims. A spokesperson said assistance in completing the claim form was available via the free Windrush helpline on 0800 678 1925.

Source: Windrush scandal survivors deliver petition to No 10 | UK news | The Guardian

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Two years on, why is the Windrush scandal still claiming victims?

Paul Nichols: His records were destroyed when the racist Tory government was trying to deport members of the so-called Windrush generation.

Didn’t Sajid Javid promise to “do right by the Windrush generation”, on his first day as Home Secretary? (Yes, he did.) What happened?

Yet now we see 75 Paul Nichols, who served in the British Army for nine years but has been denied a student loan at the end of 2017 – because the government has no record of him.

Why not? Because it was ditched with those of all the other Windrush people?

He can’t even get legal support with a claim for compensation because the Tories have not put enough state money into its scheme, it seems.

Campaigners say this means some people have submitted low-quality claims that may be rejected even though they are eligible, and others are not applying because the process is too complex to do without legal support.

An immigration lawyer quoted in the source article (see below) has said there is a huge difference between the resources put into the scheme to provide settled status for EU citizens and those put into helping victims of the Windrush scandal.

She said it amounted to racism by the Conservative government.

But that’s okay – right?

Because, thanks to the Tories’ relentless promotion of division between sections of our society, since they first came back into office in 2010, we’re all racists now.

Source: Windrush man who served in British army for nine years told there is no record of him | The Independent

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Hubert Howard has died – and he won’t be the last victim of the Tory Windrush scandal

The Empire Windrush brought many people to the UK to help rebuild the country after World War II. If it was still in service, the Tories would be trying to use it to deport them all again.

If you’re wondering who Hubert Howard is – that is precisely the point.

He wasn’t famous.

He was just an ordinary person – like you or me.

And the Conservatives, in government, treated him abominably.

Another victim of the long-running Windrush scandal, he died on Tuesday – just three weeks after being granted UK citizenship, 59 years after he arrived in the UK, aged three.

Here‘s The Guardian:

“Howard spent much of the last two months of his life still fighting for British citizenship from his intensive-care bed in hospital. He was granted it at the end of October when his lawyer informed the Home Office that he was critically ill, and highlighted the urgency of his case.

“Howard had not left the country since he arrived here legally in 1960. He first realised he had problems with his documents in 2005 when his employers, the Peabody housing association, asked him to show that he was in the UK legally. He tried to get a passport the following year so he could visit his sick mother in Jamaica, but the Home Office said it had no record of him and warned him that if he left the UK he might not be allowed back into the country. His mother died before he was able to see her again.

“He tried on numerous occasions to apply for a passport. In 2012 he was dismissed by Peabody because he was still not able to prove he was in the UK legally. He died in debt as a result of losing his job.”

Note that he continued to be treated with contempt by the Conservative government, even after the Windrush scandal became headline news in 2018.

This is just one example of the contempt in which the Conservatives hold ordinary people who deserve respect.

If they get the chance, they will go out of their way to harm you.

Think about that when you’re voting on December 12.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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