The Windrush Scandal is an outrage that no politician chasing cheap public support by picking on easy targets should be allowed to forget. The term “hostile environment” had originally been coined by the Labour government in 2007 to indicate how it felt illegal immigrants should be treated. But the Tory government then took the idea and ran with it, to create a policy framework which would inevitably embroil long-term UK residents in a trap which would be difficult to escape from.
It must have all seemed so simple to Government ministers who like to set meaningless targets and don’t necessarily like to look into the detail of how those targets could be met. People born overseas as British subjects had a legal right to come and live in the UK before rules were changed in the 1970’s, and didn’t tend to have proper documentation as none were needed at the time. Children came to the UK on their parents’ passports and attended schools here without any special records of their attendance being kept. One of the few pieces of evidence that did exist were landing cards showing when people first entered the country, but the Government had already destroyed those in 2010.
Pensioners who had grown up here, worked all their lives and retired, with no inkling that anyone would question whether or not they were British, suddenly found, under the Tory Government’s new immigration regime, that they were easy targets for cruel and over-zealous officialdom. They had no proof of their right to be in the UK and, because of the amount of time they’d been here, often had great difficulty in providing the evidence that was now demanded. How many of us could easily provide documentary proof of where we were living 50 years ago? And those people who had most difficulty providing evidence were clearly the easiest pickings for a newly weaponised and target-driven immigration system.
Despite the Home Office receiving warnings from as early as 2013 telling them that members of the Windrush Generation who had legal rights to be here were being targeted, it wasn’t until 2017 that the press started to report that many of these people were being wrongly detained, threatened with deportation, denied legal rights and refused re-entry into the UK after visiting family in the Caribbean. Some had lost their jobs or their homes, had their passports confiscated, and were treated as criminals without committing any crime. At least 83 people were wrongly deported by the Home Office to lands which they’d never known.

Of course, the tabloid press may love a story of Government incompetence and scandal, but it didn’t take them long to revert to their previous behaviour. Many of these papers had been endlessly calling for tougher immigration policies for the last 20 or more years but, in their hypocrisy, they did a swift about-turn at the sniff of a story about how the Windrush generation were being mistreated. Now they’re back to trotting out the line that “We must be tougher on immigration” – the same sort of blunt statements that fed public bigotry and shaped the Government’s inflexible and harsh policy in the first place.
With the Windrush Scandal, and the public outcry that followed it, you would hope that future Governments would think twice before instigating crude policies aimed at chasing misleading opinion poll ratings. But such optimism has generally been misplaced when it comes to assessing either Labour or Tory immigration policies. And for those who were caught in the Home Office web and who died before receiving any compensation for their mistreatment the damage can never be undone.