Windrush: 70th Anniversary

David Lammy Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

For, I hope, very obvious reasons, I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in the debate. In so doing, I think of my parents, who are no longer with us, of my brothers and sisters, and of so many aunts and uncles. I think of the life that we all lived in Dongola Road, Tottenham, in the 1970s and 1980s. I mention Dongola Road because at the top of the road lived another family, briefly. It was the family of our former colleague Paul Boateng. As I summon up those memories, I am so grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes)—my dear friend—for initiating the debate, and for giving Parliament a moment to reflect on a most exceptional generation.

Today I want to remember the contributions of the 492 West Indian immigrants who arrived at Tilbury docks on 21 June 1948, and the 524,000 Commonwealth-born people who followed them until 1971. My own father arrived in 1956, from Guyana, and my mother arrived in the late 1960s. It is important to remember, when we think of those families arriving here, that when they arrived they were very young. My father was only 24, and he was actually at the older end of the scale among those who were on the boats. He produced my older brother just two years later, in 1958. I reflect, now, on what it means to become a parent in one’s mid-20s, in a new and strange country, juggling work, schools and health visitors: all those new things. In paying tribute to these people, we should reflect on how challenging that must have been at times. I hope that we also think about the first-generation immigrants who still come to our country, of how they manage to get by, and of the circumstances in which we support them.

Today, of course, I also want to think about the thousands of nurses who came to Britain before 1971, to form the backbone of our national health service—women like my aunts, whom I watched working late nights and early shifts with incredible pride and dignity; women who toiled for all Britain’s sick and injured. I think of the thousands of transport workers who were recruited directly from Bridgetown and Kingston, and who for 70 years worked as bus and train drivers, and cleaners and wardens, in Britain’s stations and on Britain’s streets. And in thinking of those transport workers, I think of my own mother, who did her own stint at London Underground, and of many occasions meeting her at Camden Town tube station, where she was based. I think of course also of Lord Bill Morris, elected general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, the first black general secretary of a trade union in Britain, who found his home in the movement after arriving in 1954—a British trade unionist for all British workers. And I think of great writers who have shaped our nation: people such as Andrea Levy and Zadie Smith, who have given us such moving insights into British life. And I am not sure that I would be able to be a politician were it not for the tremendous work of the scholarly Stuart Hall and CLR James, defining leaders in British political thought, but also the work of those who have been a little more of the street and the frontline: I think of my predecessor Bernie Grant and Linton Kwesi Johnson, whose language and tone always chimed with me.

Today I think of the descendants of the Windrush generation, whose parents and grandparents were told that there was no space under the British flag for them and that there was “no black in the Union Jack.” We tend when we celebrate to look at the positive, and nothing is more positive than Jessica Ennis, Daley Thompson, Linford Christie, Kelly Holmes or Colin Jackson draped in the Union Jack. And as I say that, of course our hearts are with Sterling, Smalling and Danny Rose, who will step out on Monday in the 2018 World cup sporting white, red and the three lions on their shirts.

But while reflecting on this great contribution there must also be a moment to think about the uncomfortable truths—the tough and the hard times—and to think about the struggles of those communities. As I stand here as the Member for Tottenham in London, I want also, as has already been touched upon, to think about communities in St Paul’s in Bristol, Chapeltown in Leeds, Handsworth in Birmingham and Moss Side in Manchester, and historical black communities in Tiger Bay in Cardiff and of course in Liverpool. These people formed the fabric of British society and today we remember them and thank them.

But we also remember the troubles that led up to the Notting Hill riots, the Brixton riot and the Tottenham riots, in which PC Keith Blakelock lost his life. We think also of the great injustices that lie behind parts of the pain and the stain on this country: the stain of the murder of Stephen Lawrence and those young people who lost their lives in the New Cross house fire.

Those on board HMT Windrush were invited here as a result of a Britain crippled by war: a Britain facing chronic shortages of staff; a Britain with a dream of healthcare for all but no way of making that happen. It was a Britain whose hospitals were barely functioning, whose trains were barely running, whose streets were reeling from the destruction and devastation of German aeroplanes that bombed this country, a Britain in desperate need.

Britain called, and they came. It is important to recognise why they came to the mother country, as they called it. They came because they wanted to take part in building Britain’s future, but they also came because there was little future left for them in the Caribbean. Like in Britain after the second world war, the homes of those on board the Windrush and the many boats that came after it had also been destroyed by a foreign power—a foreign power had left much of the Caribbean in a sorry state. Unlike in Britain, however, the siege of those countries had lasted for 300 years. Three centuries of colonial rule had stripped the Caribbean of much of its wealth and resources, and left behind an unsustainable plantation economy. Under the British, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish and the Portuguese, the Caribbean region and Latin America and south America had become little more than a warehouse from which to extract profit.

In 1948, the societies that had once been made up of slaves and their owners were instead made up of rich planters and landless, low-wage labourers. People in the Caribbean had been emancipated from slavery in 1834, but they had achieved their emancipation in name only. Ten years before HMT Windrush arrived on British shores, labourers in Barbados were earning the equivalent of just £3.50 a day. Half the workforce worked in manufacturing and agriculture. Many were employed on sugar plantations and forced to work for extremely low wages. They worked in unbearable conditions, their children were suffering from malnutrition and they faced an influx of disease.

In Jamaica, searing unemployment ravaged society. Britain had closed sugar plantations in favour of cheaper labour elsewhere, and the consequences were devastating. Labour riots were commonplace as people became increasingly frustrated by the destitution that they faced. In Guyana, society was reeling from the Ruimveldt riots in the earlier part of the 20th century. Again, much of the economy was crippled, and people were working in bauxite mines and on sugar or rice plantations for very poor wages and in very poor conditions. People were rioting as a consequence. We cannot forget that Britain’s development was grounded in the underdevelopment of the Commonwealth. Britain’s industrial revolution relied on the deindustrialisation of India, and its profits were built on the exploitation of Caribbean plantations and on the backs of Egyptian cotton farmers and Barbadian sugar producers.

We cannot forget that those on board the Windrush came to Britain filled with the promise of the British motherland, yet this was the same Britain that had promised away all their riches and resources. It was the same Britain that has never faced justice for the crime of slavery, and that stole 12 million people from their homes in the dead of night and carted them like cattle across the ocean and into slavery. This had never before been seen in the world. Britain was still paying off its debts to slave owners in 2015, but it has never paid reparations to those who are the descendants of slaves.

This is the same Britain that, sadly, has recently failed the Windrush generation. It had failed them previously, and it has failed them again today. Many of the Windrush generation have once again been made destitute by the British state. They have had their rights stripped from them, and they have been thrust into despair and desperation. The injustices that the victims face today have a long history, and it is a history that Britain must never forget. I do not say that to evoke guilt. This is not really about guilt. If you do not know where you are from, you do not know where you are going. If you just teach your young people the very best bits of history and do not examine the tougher bits, as the modern nations of Germany and Japan have had to do, you will make the same mistakes over and over.

I am so proud to be a parliamentarian in this great nation, and it is the privilege of my life to speak in this Chamber, but I worry that the “great” in Great Britain is too often predicated on an inability to examine the truths of parts of Britain’s past. The heart of that past is colonial, and as we think about the Windrush generation we do not just think about the fact that they landed in 1948; we think about the umbilical cord between Britain and these people, because they were brought from Africa. The surname I have is not the surname of my ancestors; neither is Diane Abbott’s and neither is Dawn Butler’s. Those surnames were given to us by our slave masters. The language that we speak is a language we learned, because our ancestors lost their language and their culture. That is at the heart of the Caribbean tradition. It is an area of tremendous hybridity. In the Caribbean—I might say the same of Latin America—there is a meeting of the world’s people that is best explained by the carnival of Trinidad or the reggae of Jamaica. That is the area that I know.

Many of the Windrush generation have once again been left destitute in recent times. The injustices that the victims face today have a history that we must remember. The story began in the 1700s and today, most painfully, we have been forced back across the Atlantic by the British Government in unlawful deportations justified by the “hostile environment.” That environment told Windrush citizens that they have no right to the British public services to which so many of them had dedicated their lives and to which their ancestors had contributed. The nurses who toiled in our hospitals, the train drivers, and the other public sector workers upon whom Britain relied were told that their contributions were null and void, and that they should leave this country immediately. Seventy years on, the Government thanked the Windrush generation for their service to this country by throwing them into detention centres and deporting them.

Those victims have still not seen justice, and the Government’s response to the crisis continues to be inadequate. Why is there still no hardship fund for the Windrush victims? Why are innocent British citizens who have been made homeless and jobless by the Home Office being forced to wait months for compensation? People have been pushed into rent arrears and debt by the Home Office, but they still have no financial support. Why are they still being punished for the failures of the British state? Why have 32 of the 63 Windrush citizens unlawfully deported as a result of the Government’s hostile environment policy been refused their right to return to Britain? Why has the Home Secretary decreed that they should be exiled abroad instead of facing British justice in British courts as British citizens?

Why has my constituent Oliver Hutchinson, who arrived from Jamaica in 1970, still not seen justice? He is a citizen by right, but for all of his life he has lived in fear of immigration enforcement and has been unable to get a job, access benefits or even have a stable home. He was arrested recently at a routine appointment with the Home Office on a bench warrant that was 20 years old.

Why has the Windrush taskforce, which has been specially appointed to support victims of the scandal, delayed its response time? Why are hundreds of victims who have contacted the taskforce regarding their citizenship still waiting for an appointment at the Home Office?

Above all, today I think of the victims of this crisis, victims who are still facing desperate uncertainty, and the Government’s subsequent response. I think of Oliver Hutchinson; of Balvin Marshall, a British citizen made homeless and jobless by the hostile environment; of Rosario Wilson, whose grandfather arrived in Britain in the 1950s and who has spent thousands of pounds trying to prove his citizenship; and of my 27 constituents with ongoing cases and the thousands of other Commonwealth-born Britons who live in fear and uncertainty.

I say to the Secretary of State, who has said of those Windrush citizens with criminal records who have been sent back to the Caribbean that he has no intention of bringing them back, that that is unacceptable. It is unacceptable because they are British citizens first. This country has had no such debate on the deportation of criminals. This country stopped deporting criminals to parts of the Australian Commonwealth in 1868. How can it be that, with no debate and no discussion, it has been deemed acceptable once again to deport British citizens, even if they have a criminal record, back to the Commonwealth?

Can I say how badly this has gone down in the broader Commonwealth and how sad and embarrassing it was that we had this discussion and this debate during the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting? This is not what the Commonwealth expects of the mother country. It has been a very painful episode indeed.

As we commemorate this epic contribution and we think of the joys and the heroes, I thank God for people like Trevor McDonald and Moira Stuart entering my household on Dongola Road and lifting the spirits of my family and my cousins over so many weeks, months and years. As we think about all those great sons and daughters of this great region, let us also think of what further contribution we can give to these people, people who—I hope my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) will allow me to say this—in some ways contain a little fragility because of that slave history.

There was no reparation for those slaves, and the Caribbean nations have been united in wanting to put the issue of reparations back on the table at the United Nations as they think of their futures. Why do they do that? It is because, as they celebrate so many years since independence—Guyana celebrated 52 years of independence just a few weeks ago—and they look forward to the future, they think about the economies they inherited and they think about all they have achieved but, frankly, there is a sense in which they were abandoned. It is important that this country hears and listen to those calls for support, particularly against a backdrop of the Government making it clear that they wish to enter into trade negotiations with those countries once again. Let us consider: what do reparations look like for those Caribbean nations? How do we make that work? What dialogue do we as a country need to have with those people?

Can we also think about our heritage in this country? In the last few years we have seen the birth of the Black Cultural Archives, based in south London; the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool; and organisations such as the Stephen Lawrence Centre and the Bernie Grant Arts Centre. Many of these organisations are struggling today. Frankly, they are struggling for a handout from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. What they should have got was a proper endowment, from which they could derive interest, that bought them security so that they could continue to make a contribution to this country. As we think about those landing cards that were destroyed, let us redouble our efforts on behalf of organisations such as the Black Cultural Archives.

Finally, let me say that we are having this debate against probably the most depressing backdrop possible, having seen the murder of 78 young lives here in the city of London. May I say most gently that there is something that connects these murders at this time with the sorts of crime that we see also in African-American societies and, sadly, in parts of the Caribbean, particularly in Trinidad and in Jamaica. That story is a story of dislocation. It is the story of a lack of fatherhood and role models, and it is a story that begins with those plantations. If you take a black man and you say to him that you can move him across the country to another plantation and strip him from his family, so that he does not own himself or his relationship with his wife or with his children, you create a phenomenon that is very real in those communities: the phenomenon of the babymother, where it is not my wife or my husband, but my babymother or my babyfather. That legacy lives on in our communities. It is a community that has been way too accustomed to violence. This is the dislocation of not seeing those role models in front of you and never hearing your history, and this is about how that affects generations years and years later. We are a community of tremendous resilience, but we cannot all be resilient. So in thinking also of that more painful legacy, let us think about the renewed support that this country needs to give.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Grant]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for correcting me on that point.

Earlier speakers have mentioned some individuals who made an incalculable contribution to making London what it is, to making England what it is and to making the islands of Britain what they are. I want to mention someone who, in some ways, has nothing to do with Windrush, but whose story illustrates something quite important. His name was Andrew Watson. He was born in Guyana of a Glasgow father and a Guyanese mother. His father was almost certainly an administrator on a plantation, but probably not a slave owner, although I cannot be too sure. His mother had certainly been a domestic servant at best, and she may well have been a slave. Andrew came over to the UK with his dad—we think it was after his mother died or when she became too ill to look after them. As his dad was very wealthy and well connected, Andrew had a privileged upbringing. It was the kind of privileged upbringing that very, very few Caribbean people living in the United Kingdom at that time could ever have dreamt of.

Andrew was also an exceptionally talented footballer. In 1881, he won an international cap for Scotland. He was the first black person ever to play for Scotland. I wish that we could have him back now. He played only three games for Scotland, and the results were Scotland 6, England 1; Scotland 5, Wales 1; and Scotland 6, England 1. If only we could have him back now. The reason why he stopped playing was that, for employment purposes, he had to move down to London, and the rule was that if a player did not live in Scotland, they could not play for Scotland and if they had played for one country, they could not play for another.

Andrew was the first black player to win a major trophy in any area of Great Britain. He was in London for part of his career. He was the first black player ever to appear in what we now know as the FA cup. Ninety-three years after Andrew Watson, the second black player turned out to play for Scotland. I remember him—I remember watching Paul Wilson of Celtic on the telly when I was a teenager. I was surprised to hear that Paul Wilson was the second black player to play for Scotland, because I only saw the colour of his jersey; I did not notice what colour he was.

It is a sobering thought that Andrew Watson did not experience any kind of racism. People noticed that he wore a different colour of boots to the rest of the team—in those days players had to buy their own boots, and his dad bought him a different colour from the rest of the team—but he does not appear to have suffered from any kind of racism at all from the press, from supporters or from his colleagues. Paul Wilson experienced racism when he first turned out for Scotland, and experienced it regularly when he played for Celtic, as indeed did the first generation of black players to play anywhere in the United Kingdom.

[Mr Lammy]

I hesitate to interrupt the hon. Gentleman. I am hugely appreciative of the fact that he has put on the record the link between Scotland and the Caribbean region. I took a DNA test not so long ago and it turns out that I, too, am a Scot. I am very well aware of my connections to the Blair family, and so potentially a former Prime Minister, and also to the Laing family, and so potentially a Madam Deputy Speaker.

[Peter Grant]

I knew there was something special about the right hon. Gentleman that I just could not put my finger on; all is now revealed. He might well find that he has more Scots blood in him than I have, because the more I look back at my ancestry the more I discover that a lot of it is actually from Ireland—Northern Ireland, rather than the Republic.

I am of immigrant descent. We all are. My ancestors may have come to mainland UK a few years before the ancestors of some hon. Members, but we are all immigrants. There is nobody left in the UK who can claim to be 100% indigenous English, Welsh, Scots or Irish. We would do well to remember that, because the question is not about who is an immigrant, it is just about how long we have been an immigrant for.