A disgrace to Britain

The times in my life when I have felt truly ashamed to be British are rare. I have been embarrassed occasionally — Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson comes to recent mind — but not actually ashamed since the phoney ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and the ‘dodgy dossier’ associated with the Iraq war. Tony Blair made me ashamed to be a Brit and it was the last time I joined a public demonstration against anything along with perhaps millions of others.

There is going to be no mass taking-to-the-streets in protest at the reason for my shame today. There will be isolated pockets of public anger but for the most part the response will be muted. The matter at hand has little resonance for the generations below me, a man in his 70s, and very few reading this will ever have heard of a ship called the ‘Empire Windrush’ so a little historical context is in order.

The Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in June 1948 and was carrying workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other Caribbean islands, there at the invitation — note that word — of the British government which needed to urgently address the postwar labour shortage. Many of the passengers were children and it is they, now in their old age, that are the focus of a scandal that goes to the dark heart of the British Establishment and the racism that lurks within.

The Windrush generation were mostly Commonwealth citizens (not all came from the Caribbean and some came from Pakistan) and the children that came with them are now finding themselves declared being in the UK illegally, some have been detained and some, an unknown number, have already been deported. The British government maintains that they are unable to provide a continuous verifiable record of their residency in the UK and that a primary document is missing — the record of their arrival. It is missing because it does not exist anymore, and those records that did exist — the landing cards — were destroyed in 2010 reportedly because they were taking up too much space and would not fit into a new building under construction.

Some of the stories that are emerging are truly heartbreaking. Michael Braithwaite was interviewed by the BBC, an elderly man exuding both dignity and grief, the camera holding his face in close-up reading the pain he is experiencing having been told he is ‘not British’ having lived and worked in Britain most of his life. His story is typical of so many others. Men and women now past retirement age who find their roots and foundations cut away by a callous government concerned only with crunching the immigration numbers, not the vaguely anomalous status of a few thousand wholly innocent men and women.

These Windrush children became manual workers, postmen, nurses and drivers and cleaners — low-status jobs paying poorly. They paid their taxes and national insurance, married and had their own children and began to settle into a content old age. So far as they were concerned they were Brits. How wrong can you get.

Cutting to the chase the government has accepted that somebody somewhere has got something terribly wrong, has caused and is still causing untold pain and grief and needs to right a manifest wrong. The status of the Windrush generation must be clarified and the burden of proof modified to allow old men and women to live out their lives in peace and dignity.

British PM Theresa May has apologised to leaders of Caribbean nations. Home Secretary Amber Rudd got up in the Commons and apologised as well — the first time ever I have seen a cabinet minister of that seniority say ‘sorry’ for anything. She said that the Home Office had “become too concerned with policy and strategy — and loses sight of the individual”. Correct.

On June 22^nd every year there is a celebratory ‘Windrush Day’. Perhaps by then the British government will have done enough, just enough, to wipe this stain from the national escutcheon. And why bother to write about it in Pakistan? Think voiceless and powerless minorities Dear Reader. Constitutional pariahs? Murders in Quetta? Ring bells for anybody, does it? Until next week, then…

Published in The Express Tribune, April 19^th, 2018.

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