Britain’s moment of reckoning with the Windrush generation

The government’s attempt to turn its back on a shipload of Caribbean migrants who settled in the country 75 years ago has exposed Britain's uncomfortable relationship with diversity.

Seventy-five years ago, the converted troopship Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury, east of London, from Jamaica, bringing with it a few hundred Caribbean hopefuls intending to make a new life for themselves in Britain.

Some of them had served in British forces and visited London during the war so they had every reason to expect a warm welcome.

This was not the first ship to bring migrants from the Caribbean and it wouldn’t be the last, but it became emblematic of that generation who came to “the mother country”. They had been led to believe England needed them, given that the shortage of labour and the dire condition in Britain so soon after World War II had almost exhausted its reserves.

Many of these immigrants had been recruited to staff our newly created health service and our transport system so they could justifiably believe they’d been invited. Imagine then their shock when they found that wasn’t the case.

It became commonplace to see signs at lodging houses, and even shops, saying, “No Blacks, no Irish, no dogs” and it would be almost two decades before legislation was introduced to outlaw such overt racism. By then the wave of Caribbeans had been overtaken and outnumbered by waves of migrants from the Indian sub-continent, in particular from Pakistan and (what was to become) Bangladesh.

The British are a mongrel lot, not only with their four component nations swirling about within the country. The arrival of the Normans in 1066 stopped the kings of England being, in part, Viking and they became, in total, French, until six centuries later when they became Dutch and then wholly German. No hope here of racial, or even cultural, purity.

But this did not make the British any more tolerant of diversity in their midst. Historical records suggest there had long been diverse racial types around, and not only Black slaves or visiting exotic ambassadors and their retinues. Certainly, in the 18^th century there were individuals, often freed slaves or the mixed race produce of probably forced relations between white nobility and their underlings, who rose in this or that field.

By the late 18^th and early 19^th century, large communities of Black seamen had settled in some of England’s (and Wales’s) ports, giving rise to the “Black British” communities in, for example, Liverpool, Bristol and Cardiff.

At the same time, a considerable number of British people had gone overseas as part of Britain’s empire and found themselves managing the interface with foreign folk, with greater or lesser success. Australians would know that a good few others went overseas not of their own volition and ended up in some unlikely places.

But none of this softened the conviction that the British were a hardy island race, coherent in their essence, white and Christian. Such wonderful nation-building illusions can be noted even today. With the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, there was much talk of an unbroken line of monarchs for about a thousand years. (Refer to paragraph six.)

Nor had Britain been particularly tolerant of the minorities it did accommodate. Neither Jews nor Catholics had it their own way for a long while and England was the first country to expel its Jews. At the same time, and for a long time, so long as numbers did not grow too great and the incomers kept themselves to themselves, nobody minded very much.

But the Windrush generation could not hide. They were Black. Furthermore, they had an exuberant culture and expected to join in. Discrimination was rife and though it was nowhere near as toxic as the Black/White divide in the US, nor enshrined in legislation (there had been one or two Black members of Parliament as early as the 1850s), black people in Britain in the 50s, 60s and 70s did not have an easy ride; arguably their descendants are still suffering the effects.

Tomiwa Owolade, a Black British commentator of African descent, recently argued (controversially) that we should not import the “Black Lives Matter” narrative of racism from the US, where the situation is radically different. For example, in the UK those of African descent, no less Black than their Caribbean neighbours, face far less disadvantage or are dealing with it more successfully than those of Caribbean descent.

And even if you are still more likely to get a job interview if you’re John Smith rather than Moeen Asaf, it is also the case that there are nearly 70 Black MPs out of a total of 650, and yet the non-White population is just 14.4%. (You might say that this is under-representation and it is, but we don’t yet have half of our MPs as women, either.)

Perhaps more strikingly, our Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary, that is, all but one of the High Offices of State, are from (visible) ethnic minorities. Perhaps more remarkable still is that they are all from the Conservative Party, which one might have expected to be more, well, conservative.

If we were starting to feel smug about our recent record, two events swept that away. The first related to the Windrush generation. Surely now, after 75 years, those still alive would feel secure. Not a bit of it. As a result of Teresa May, who subsequently became prime minister, advocating “a toxic environment” for illegal migrants, the Home Office, our interior ministry, became even more unfriendly and unresponsive to any kind of migrant, illegal or not.

Six or seven years ago, when it became clear that some of those early Caribbean immigrants did not have the necessary papers to prove their legality, these now elderly people were taken from their homes of 70 years and transplanted to islands some of them hadn’t live in for seven decades.

The scandal broke just as the UK was trying to host the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Governments’ meeting in London. May, by then prime minister, made her blameless successor in the Home Office fall on her sword and promises were made to repatriate and compensate the victims of this gross miscarriage of justice. Some moves have been made, though it appears the process is by no means complete.

The other incident was the revelation by a leading cricketer a few years ago that he had suffered racial abuse as a member of Yorkshire County Cricket Club. Credit to Yorkshire, their rule that they would only take on Yorkshiremen born and bred did not prevent them from taking on ethnic-minority Yorkshiremen. But following his revelations, it is clear that “banter” made his life as a first-class cricketer distressing and alienating.

The Corbyn antisemitism row was, for many, a wake-up call. They had to accept that folk around them were more intolerant than they had noticed or imagined. Indeed, some realised they were themselves more intolerant than they had thought, not least the abused cricketer in question who was shown to have made off-colour comments about Jews.

Diversity in the UK is a work in progress but we still don’t know if we want migrants. Even some liberal-minded people say, without self-consciousness, that they would be happy to welcome migrants but that they put intolerable strain on our services, which are already cracking under the strain of demand.

This sounds reasonable. Cramming children into schools with insufficient teachers or not enough classrooms is a recipe for everyone to be unhappy. And what if there are not enough midwives to cope with all the extra babies being born? To their credit, though, these broad-minded people readily accept that British food is infinitely more palatable since these diverse cultures appeared on our high streets.

But frequently it’s the migrants who build the schools, and staff our transport system, our health and care system and pick our fruit and veg. What’s more, they pay the taxes and provide the younger generation disproportionately to maintain the health and care system, let alone funding pensions that aging Brits require. Set the loss of all that against an overcrowded classroom and the balance sheet looks less tipped towards closing the doors.

This ambivalence and confusion gives rise to strange consequences. Back in the 70s and 80s, Reggae, the music beat from the Caribbean, became a favoured style of skinheads and bovver boys who were rabidly racist and whose idea of an evening out was “Paki-bashing”.

Some of them though, never notable for their intellectual acumen, came to call themselves “the Yiddos” when supporting Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, partially because its colours are blue and white and partially because equally racist skinheads from other fan clubs accused Spurs of being a “Jewish club”.

Brexit was partially fought on the need to control our borders. And now we can … except we can’t. Small boats regularly deliver unfortunates illegally to our shores while the fruit goes unpicked and we don’t have enough lorry drivers and bus timetables are adjusted to accommodate the lack of drivers. You’ll be pleased to know that much was made at the time of the Australian points system which, as you know, is an enlightened way to treat potential migrants.

Might it be time to beg another group from somewhere to come and save us from ourselves? Maybe all those Ten Pound Poms who moved to Australia in the 50s and 60s will come home and sort it out for us.

Photo: File photo dated 22/06/48 of Jamaican immigrants being welcomed by RAF officials from the Colonial Office after the ex-troopship HMT Empire Windrush landed them at Tilbury. (PA)