Hostile Windrush environment ‘can be traced to post-war governments’

The hostile environment that created the Windrush scandal was 70 years in the making - and may even be traced back to the attitudes of both the Labour and Conservative governments after the Second World War, according to a new documentary.

At Tilbury Dock where the Windrush docked in 1948 David Olusoga - (C) Uplands Television Limited - Photographer: Tim Kirby

The BBC Two programme - The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files - looks into the background of the scandal which saw a generation of black citizens who settled legally after the Empire Windrush ship arrived from Jamaica in 1948 being told decades later to prove they had the right to stay.

The documentary says the scandal came from “a hostile environment that was 70 years in the making”, and looks at the various immigration measures which may have paved the way for it to happen.

Researchers looked at archive material including Cabinet papers, while historian and broadcaster David Olusoga also hears first-hand of the ongoing suffering of victims including grandfather Anthony Bryan.

He was detained and threatened with deportation to Jamaica despite having been settled in Britain for more than 50 years. He was unable to show documents proving his immigration status.

Many skilled men, including some who had fought for Britain during the Second World War, had arrived on the Empire Windrush in answer to a call to help plug the labour shortage. Since then they had worked, paid taxes and made a contribution to the economy, culture and society.

Speaking of the documentary which he fronts, Mr Olusoga states the scandal did not “come out of nowhere”, and it is “intimately linked” to both a legal and a racial definition of Britishness.

Both the 1945-51 Labour government and Sir Winston Churchill’s Conservative government that followed it could be seen as having a negative impact on the Windrush generation, according to the programme.

It says that black people with British links had set sail on the Empire Windrush feeling like they were coming back home to the mother country. It was unknown to them that politically they were seen as a serious embarrassment, and even described as an “incursion”.

Mr Olusoga later reflected “the government does not thank them for solving their labour problem, the government tries to work out how to make their arrival into a problem”.

Mr Olusoga said he was brought up to have huge respect for the 1945-51 Labour government for its role in the welfare state and the NHS, but “the other truth is that that government was committed to the imperial project”.