Amina Taylor |Message to ministers: Ignore the Windrush plight at your own peril

The UK government is showing the world that it is indeed a generous country by allocating £150 million from the public purse to helping some of the most vulnerable families fleeing war and persecution.

But before you get too excited and try and figure out how your local council can further help you get into your own home, relax rules that will allow you to continue to use qualifications from home, and allocate tens of millions into providing a stipend for the lovely families and individuals who have opened their doors and their hearts to you, swing by a mirror, check your hue and your passport because unless you’re from the Ukraine, this act of Conservative generosity does not concern you.

A fulsome statement from Felicity Buchan, minister for housing and homelessness on the government’s own website reads:

“The UK has an honourable tradition of offering shelter to those fleeing the horrors of war. Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of hosts in this country, over 124,000 Ukrainians have now found safety in the UK.”

My heart is full for these individuals. No one should have to stare down a complete decimation oftheir way of life, not to mention a real risk of harm or even death. And I know I’m going to catch heat for this, but I can’t help wondering what it would have taken for this administration to use its immense reach and resources to genuinely honour its own pledges to the Windrush generation and everyone who has been affected by a travesty entirely of the government’s own making?

The majority of the Windrush generation arrived to this country as British subjects, post-World War II, under the rules of the Nationality Act of 1948. These individuals, primarily from the Caribbean, were coming to a country, which for generations, had been viewed as the Motherland, the North star, and despite its colonial past, thousands of these nurses, teachers, labourers, soldiers, and every profession in between still had an affinity to a land they had never set foot on before.

They would assist the Crown, and in return, they could make enough for a semblance of a life in the United Kingdom, help support families back home, and then maybe one day return to the sunshine from whence they had come.

We know the story - many didn’t have the clear trajectory or the happy ending. There are many tales of racism, qualified professionals being forced to work in whatever menial job they could get because of who they were and where they were from.

There were families who were forever torn asunder, never to be reunited with loved ones. But all this was to be endured because of the hope that something better existed.

Changes to immigration rules meant that members of this generation and their descendants found themselves on the wrong side of new policies, on the receiving end of a ‘hostile environment’ that no longer recognised the debt the UK owes to this community.

WARNING

Five years ago, when Labour politician David Lammy passionately addressed the House of Commons about the plight of those who had been denied access to the NHS, forced out of employment, deported and detained, little would we have guessed that on the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush to Tilbury in Essex, these issues would still not have been justly resolved.

We already know that there has been a massive walking back on key pledges made in the wake of the Windrush scandal. There are still unconfirmed numbers of those who are still stuck in Home Office purgatory. Families still separated by travel restrictions with some of the elders in question, perhaps not due to live much longer to celebrate the end of what has been a life-changing situation. The backlog of cases means individuals are still struggling to be compensated for the horrors they have had to endure. Many will die before they ever see a penny of that money.

So my question to the current Home Office administration is: If you can oversee an entirely new immigration strategy for one group of individuals because it is clear to all that their situation is untenable, why has it been so difficult to afford other communities the same treatment? We are not asking for Ukrainians to be treated poorly. Absolutely not. This two-tier system has simply exposed what many of us have known for the longest time: that the failure to act and deal equitably with these matters is a political choice.

With a recent survey claiming that 67 per cent of ethnic minority respondents said black and Asian people faced discrimination in their everyday lives in Britain, there is clearly still work to be done. The ‘othering’ of communities in the UK through government policies, media reports, and good old-fashioned bigotry does little to bridge the gap. The Windrush generation and their descendants are finding this out all too clearly.

Yet all is not lost. Let’s show this administration that there is a political cost to ignoring our plight. Let the ‘lessons need to be learnt’ blah blahblah speech we are usually palmed off with actually come to mean something. Happy Windrush celebrations, comrades! L et’s ensure that our plight serves as a warning of a history never to be repeated.

- Amina Taylor is a journalist and broadcaster. She is the former editor of Pride magazine and works as producer, presenter, and correspondent with Press TV in London.