Windrush

Lord Cryer Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

Thank you for the warning, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is an honour to follow a former member of the Anti-Nazi League. I have always thought that the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) was a bit of a closet pinko; she obviously needs to be looked into by the Conservative Chief Whip. I should like to congratulate my right hon. and hon. Friends on bringing a proper level of scrutiny to bear on this issue, including the shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), and the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper).

In particular, I want to congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), who really kick-started this and brought the issue out into the public spotlight. I should like to point out that his predecessor was Bernie Grant, who was a friend of mine. He came here from Guyana—it was British Guyana when he was there—with his head held high, proud of where he came from and proud of where he was going. That is the whole point about this scandal. People like Bernie are now being threatened with deportation. I say “people like Bernie” because he cannot be threatened with deportation; sadly, he passed away some years ago.

I am dealing with between 30 and 40 cases in my constituency. I have a big Windrush community. As a proportion, I am dealing with a very large number of cases. These are people who have been threatened with deportation, and I will give two brief examples. The first is a woman, and she is a classic Windrush baby case. She came to Britain as a baby in the 1960s, and she cannot remember Jamaica, which is where she was born. She has a broad east London accent, and it is pretty obvious that she is as quintessentially British and a Londoner as anyone else, yet when she went to apply for a passport for the first time in her life, having brought up a family and worked here for all these years, she was told not only that she could not have a passport but that she was going to be deported back to Jamaica. As she said, it is a country that she cannot remember.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[John Cryer]

I can’t really say no, can I?

[Ellie Reeves]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. A constituent of mine who came to Britain as a child in 1972 was recently detained upon his return from Jamaica after visiting his father, who has dementia. He told me about his humiliation and that he has had no recourse to public funds since then. He now cannot visit his father again for fear of being detained. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is a travesty and that my constituent, along with his, should be afforded the same rights as every other British citizen without further delay?

[John Cryer]

Of course, I agree.

My second example is more unusual and involves a woman who came from Jamaica when she was a baby. She was abandoned by her parents and grew up in a nunnery, which—Members can tell what is coming—was closed down and demolished after she left, and its records were lost. Again, this is somebody with a broad east London accent. She is quintessentially British and has the right to stay here, but she was told, after she had been through all that, “We’re going to deport you.” That is the sort of culture that we are dealing with at the Home Office, and I suspect that it goes across Government, which I will come to in a minute.

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

I actually agree with the hon. Gentleman. There are aspects of this case that are deeply concerning, and I hope that the Government learn from it. May I suggest that, at the end of the day, we have to protect Government records and civil servants’ advice to Governments to ensure that civil servants can give advice with candour? Given that we will have an inquiry, which we all hope will go to the heart of the matter, we should look to it to take the issue back to where it began, which was before 2010.

[John Cryer]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman about the inquiry, but this is an issue of transparency. He and I agree about an awful lot of things, but we are on opposite sides of the fence here. The documents should be put in the public domain. We can redact certain things, such as civil servants’ names, but the names of elected people should not be redacted.

Both the cases that I mentioned earlier resulted in victories, but I am dealing with many other cases. Over the past two or three years—this goes back a long way—I have spent an awful lot of time writing to schools, former employers, colleges and the police. In one case I even had to write to the Army to try to check the records to prove that people who had every right to be here could assume that right.

This country has close ties with the Caribbean and with other Commonwealth countries, and we should bear in mind that this debate will be watched across the Commonwealth. Thousands of people will be watching us in countries such as Jamaica, India and Pakistan. Those close ties with the Commonwealth, and with the Caribbean in particular, have their roots in an appalling institution: the empire. It was built on piracy and slavery, but nevertheless the one good thing to come out of that poisonous institution was the Commonwealth, which has always given relatively small countries, often with little political and economic clout, a platform for their voices to be heard, especially here and particularly at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meetings.

After the war, a series of Governments in this country and in others worked to foster the bonds with the Commonwealth, but those bonds have now been loosened. It is not simply that communities in this country have been given cause to fear what might happen, which is bad enough; we have also undermined relationships with countries across the globe. I never thought I would see the Prime Minister of Jamaica standing in Downing Street, expressing his dismay at the British Government and their policies. That goes way beyond what any previous Jamaican Prime Minister has said, and previous Prime Ministers were fairly critical—I am thinking of Michael Manley and his father Norman. Nobody has expressed such sentiments in the heart of the capital. This Government’s job now is to rebuild links with the affected communities and reassure them that they are safe and not under threat. The Government also need—this includes the Foreign Office—to rebuild links with the Commonwealth countries that have had their faith in Britain shattered.