MV “Empire Windrush”

Baroness Young of Hornsey Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Grand Committee

[Baroness Young of Hornsey (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, does us all a great service by initiating this debate and inviting us to consider a number of significant issues.

The late Professor Stuart Hall, an inspiration to so many artists and academics, scholars and politicians across the world, who arrived in Britain from Jamaica in 1951 as a Rhodes scholar, was a great chronicler of some of society’s contradictory approaches to racial and cultural identities. The ability to hold two or more conflicting views or sensibilities is a hallmark of attitudes towards racial politics, whether those of the general public, the press or politicians and policymakers. Anniversaries may be counted on to bring those tensions to the fore.

The entreaties of the British Government of the day drew a positive response from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, as they did in the First World War and in the Second World War: “Come and help the mother country rebuild its shattered services and lay the foundations for new ones”. Yet as noble Lords have pointed out, the reactions to the small band of 20th century pioneers on the MV “Empire Windrush” was not exclusively welcoming, not even from the very politicians who had invited them. However, it is also important to state that the reception was not uniformly hostile either.

Contradictory attitudes mean that migrants and their descendants may be both demonised and valorised at the same time by politicians and newspapers without missing a beat. Significant achievements in the arts, science and sport may be both praised and written off as “political correctness gone mad”, depending on an editorial or political whim. Any academic wishing to write about the purpose and impact of the memorialisation of landmark events and anniversaries will find some rich objects of study this year. There are the two stages of women’s demand for the right to vote being acknowledged, as well as the end of the First World War and 70 years of the NHS.

Given our demonstrable desire to commemorate, what is it that we are seeking to achieve? How may we ensure that, in the interests of historical accuracy, we acknowledge the pain as well as the pleasure—the tension between achievement and suffering, and between racism and acceptance—afforded by remembering, without souring the whole experience? We should embrace the challenges and seek resolutions to them, not try to avoid them.

Starting from those iconic black and white photographic images of arrival at Tilbury docks, we need to ensure that women’s roles and voices are foregrounded equally alongside men’s. Let us be diligent in our research and seek out those women, here and overseas, and identify their part in this history whenever there are exhibitions or discussions about those settlers.

There are also wider stories from 1948 in terms of a wide spectrum of experiences of colonial peoples of that period. Independence movements, rebellions, caste and class consciousness, and so on, mark that period shortly after the end of the Second World War. The landing of the “Windrush” and disembarkation of those 492 men did not happen in isolation from other events and movements. This needs to be located within its historical, social, cultural and international context. We should be explicitly linking the staffing of the public sector after the havoc wrought by the war not only to the settlers who came on that ship and others like it from the Caribbean but also to those who set sail from west Africa, from east Africa and from the Indian subcontinent. How do these stories interconnect with more recent mass migrations, such as the movement of Europeans into the UK et cetera?

Another important question is how we might think more broadly about Caribbean peoples’ histories. I am sorry to the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, wherever he might be, but the history of the black diaspora in this country did not start in 1948. It goes back centuries. So many historians and cultural commentators have worked very hard to dispel that myth that we would be failing in our responsibility if we did not take the opportunity to emphasise this point whenever we can. Finally, Parliament can make a contribution in terms of looking at itself and the contradictory nature of legislation which on the one hand proposes equality and anti-discrimination but on the other introduces harsh policies around immigration and detention.

In summary, I have tried to indicate that thought needs to be given as to how this memorialisation is made to work for us and to be presented to the public at large. I hope we can adopt a more sophisticated and nuanced approach that is not afraid to engage with ambiguity and dissonance.