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.