Opinion

Theresa May’s blunder

April 19, 2018
Theresa May
Theresa May

The law of unintended consequences has hit home with a vengeance in the UK. The political victim is Prime Minister Theresa May but the real victims are up to half a million people living in Great Britain who came to the country before 1971 from the British Commonwealth, the independent states that emerged from much of the old British Empire.

These people fell foul of a get-tough policy on immigration May introduced in 2012 when she ran Home Affairs. It required people seeking work, property, benefits and healthcare in the UK to have documentation proving their right to be in the country. But civil servants who advised May on her legislation failed to realize that a policy aimed at scooping up those with no entitlement to be in the UK would also hit whole families who had been invited to Britain from 1948 onwards, largely from the West Indies, when Britain was seriously short of labor.

The so-called “Windrush Generation” named after the liner, the Empire Windrush, which brought the first arrivals from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other West Indian islands, settled and worked in the UK. They regarded themselves and were indeed treated by successive governments as British citizens. There are no identity cards in the UK and by no means all of the Commonwealth arrivals sought to obtain passports. Thus when May’s legislation came into force, they had no documents to prove their right to be in the country. Perhaps the greatest blunder by officialdom was the destruction in 2010 of the landing cards that recorded the arrival of West Indians from the Windrush and subsequent migration vessels.

If this were just a bureaucratic bungle it might not have mattered. But May’s tough immigration rules have led to serious injustices with attempts to deport people of West Indian ancestry who had lived most or all of their lives in the UK. Many have been refused benefits and medical care, including one man with serious cancer. This is as ironic as it is outrageous since key jobs into which thousands of the Windrush Generation moved included hospital nurses and porters. For years London’s bus drivers and conductors were also largely from the West Indies.

Ever since May’s immigration law, politicians and civil rights campaigners have tried to highlight the deep injustice being inflicted on more and more of the Windrush generation. The response of Whitehall officialdom and their political masters has been lamentable. The original line was that problems would be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The implicit view was that it was not the government’s fault if, in the 70 years since Windrush families had been in the country, a large number of them had failed to obtain any documentation proving their British citizenship and residency rights. Given that at the time these families arrived they were legally citizens of the British Commonwealth with the right to live and work in the UK, this probably never seemed necessary to them.

Even a day before May backed down and apologized for the damage her legislation had caused, Downing Street officials were denying there was a problem and talking vaguely about a possible “amnesty”. Britain desperately needed black West Indian workers 70 years ago. They, therefore, need no amnesty because they are not criminals. This is a sad and scurrilous episode with deplorable racist undertones.


April 19, 2018
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