Jamaicans who arrived in Britain as children face deportation this week – we will not forget this government’s cruelty

The Windrush scandal is more than simply an injustice faced by Black Caribbean and African communities. It’s a damning indictment of modern Britain, writes Richard Sudan

People attend a 2018 protest in Windrush Square, Brixton, in solidarity with scandal victims (PA)

When the Windrush scandal first came to light a few years ago, most decent-minded people were outraged. As a Windrush descendant myself, this one felt particularly personal.

But for families directly impacted by the wrongful detainment and deportation of members of Britain’s Caribbean communities, this saga represents nothing short of an ongoing campaign of terror. People who entered the country as British citizens being pulled from their beds in the dead of night, shackled, chained and shuttled off to immigration detention centres while being denied human and legal rights, due to the Home Office’s own admitted error, is a source of national shame.

This pain and indignation has been further compounded by the fact that the Windrush generation entered the country as British citizens to rebuild the nation after the war, in which some of them fought. For a country that often claims to be free from institutional racism, but with a deep colonial history, the imagery of Black people being placed in chains, caged, dehumanised and humiliated is not lost on the descendants of slaves.

But this shameful chapter in Britain’s history is far from over. The family members of the original Windrush generation have also felt and continue to feel the force of the “hostile environment”, created under the previous government and continued by the current one.

There is a new deportation charter flight scheduled to take place in a few days’ time, on 11 August. The government claims: “None of those to be deported are British Citizens, British Nationals or members of the Windrush generation.” Campaign group Movement for Justice believes otherwise, however. They suggest that at least three members of those set to be removed from the country are relatives of the Windrush generation. Some of those detained in recent weeks are understood to have entered the country as children, have grown up and lived in Britain for decades, with little or no recollection of Jamaica. They are, to all intents and purposes, British.

“Three are connected to the Windrush generation through relatives, one of those three was sent as a child to live with his Windrush generation grandparents here in the UK,” a statement from Movement for Justice reads. A deal was brokered in 2020 between the UK and Jamaica ensuring that those who entered the UK as children would not be deported on charter flights.

The government is predictably sticking to the line that those to be deported are hardened criminals who represent a threat to public safety. But, just as we have learned from previous campaigns to stop deportations in the past, and the many successful legal interventions, nothing could be further from the truth. As May Bulman reported in The Independent last week, “Movement for Justice said that the majority of the men were convicted of non-violent drug offences, and all have served the full time a judge deemed commensurate with their crime, with several having had a history of being abused and raised in the care of social services.”

Many have families and British born children in the UK, who are now being punished for often minor crimes committed years and sometimes decades ago, for which the penalties have long since been paid. Essentially, by being detained and deported, they are being punished twice. And families are being torn apart.

Some of those languishing in immigration detention centres prior to removal, denied legal rights and sometimes medical necessities, will have their lives endangered should they be removed from the UK and sent to Jamaica, and elsewhere. Indeed, we have learned since the scandal first erupted, that some of those wrongly deported died as a result of destitution and vulnerability. The serious endangerment of human life alone should be enough for human rights to be safeguarded, and removals halted, irrespective of nationality.

And we’ve also seen plenty of reports in the past, highlighting allegations of abuse in the immigration removal centres themselves, amid claims of dangerous conditions of Covid-19 compromising the safety and lives of detainees.

Hopefully, some of those scheduled to be deported will be removed from the charter plane, likely at the last minute, due to legal interventions. Home secretary Priti Patel has described those making this happen as “activist lawyers”. This is a disgraceful slur.

The government should be learning from its own errors and implementing the changes it outlined in the Windrush Lessons Learned Review. It should be getting a grip on the highly criticised Windrush compensation scheme which has seen pay-outs allocated to only a fraction of victims.

While a large majority of the public will be against the ongoing deportation charter flights, the effect of them continuing plays directly into the hands of racists and the growing tide of populism. Images of the home secretary attending dawn immigration raids are similar to those of Nigel Farage on the English coast with binoculars declaring arriving dinghies full of desperate families as an “invasion”. It’s dog whistle politics of the worst kind, designed to appease a nasty political base.

Of course, every country has the right to implement its own immigration policies. But the Windrush scandal and all that it reveals is about more than that. It’s about the wilful failure to acknowledge and fulfil basic human rights. And it’s having an utterly devastating impact.

Ultimately, this is about more than Britain’s Black communities. All migrant communities, regardless of status, should be deeply concerned about the government’s ongoing charter flights. If the system is so flawed that it can wrongly impact Black UK communities, then it can and very likely will, impact other communities too.

Despite growing public support for halting the deportations, the campaign so far has not been effective enough to see the government change direction. That means even more momentum is needed. The Windrush scandal is more than simply an injustice faced by Black Caribbean and African communities; it’s a damning indictment of modern Britain. The responsibility to change it falls upon the shoulders of all who say they respect democracy, human rights, dignity and fairness. History is recording this moment, and Britain must do the right thing.