Chapter 9: New Contestations of Race and Empire

Abstract

In April 2018, Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative government came under pressure and public outrage over its mishandling of the so-called Windrush Scandal, a result of the policy of ‘Hostile Environment’ to immigrants, which May had introduced in 2012 during her time as Home Secretary. The Home Office embarked on a policy of denial of rights, wrongful detention and deportation of men and women who had moved to Britain as young British imperial subjects before 1973 and never regulated their status since, believing that the automatic right to remain granted in the 1971 Immigration Act made them de facto British citizens. While Caribbean diplomats had been raising the issue for several years and the Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman had covered a number of cases of government mistreatment, public outrage only began mounting in March 2018. Gentleman reported the case of Albert Thompson, who had arrived from Jamaica as a teenager in the 1970s. Despite having lived in London for 44 years, he was being wrongfully charged £54,000 for cancer treatments as he was unable to prove he was a British national. The case caused a public stir and was picked up by the leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn. However, the outpour of public outrage only began in earnest after the Guardian’s Gary Younge coined the term ‘Windrush Generation’ to refer to the victims of this systemic injustice. The expression drew attention to the presence of these men and women—none of whom had actually arrived with the SS Windrush and many having come from Africa rather than the Caribbean—as the result of British imperial policy. It invited reflections over the colonial dimension of not only immigration and diversity in Britain, but also of racism and abuse of state power. The scandal thus prompted inevitable connections between Black belonging in Britain and the imperial story that experienced not only their presence, but also their hardships.