Windrush

David Lammy Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

At its heart this motion is about the hostile environment, and that is why so many of us are here this afternoon. The Home Secretary has committed himself to a “fair and humane” immigration policy. In my view, it is not possible to have a fair and humane immigration policy alongside the hostile environment. That is a paradox and a total contradiction in terms. He has said that he wants to move from a hostile environment to a compliant environment. Let us think about what compliant means.

Compliant means to obey rules to an excessive degree. Compliant means the action or fact of complying with a command. I say to the new Home Secretary: has he forgotten our history? I remind the House that I am here because you were there. I say “you” metaphorically. The Windrush generation are here because of slavery. The Windrush story is the story of British empire. And the Windrush community and its ancestors know what hostile and compliance mean. We know what compliance means. It is written deep into our souls and passed down from our ancestors. Slaves having to nod and smile when they were being whipped in a cotton field or a sugar cane field were compliant. Watching your partner being tied to a tree, beaten or raped on a plantation is compliance. Twelve million people being transported as slaves from Africa to the colonies is a compliant environment.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Lammy]

I will not.

Windrush citizens being abused, spat on and assaulted in the street but never once fighting back was a compliant environment. Black Britons being racially abused at work but never speaking up because they need to put food on the table know all about a compliant environment. Turning the other cheek when the National Front were marching through our streets was a compliant environment. Young black men being stopped and searched by the police, despite committing no crime and living in fear of the police, know what it is like to be in a compliant environment. And thank God that Doreen Lawrence defied that compliant environment.

[Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)]

As my right hon. Friend says, the terminology does not help. Does he agree that we also need a change of policy to get to the root causes of why this happened in the first place and to prevent it from happening again?

[Mr Lammy]

My hon. Friend is exactly right.

I want to make it absolutely clear that it is my view that this belief about a compliant environment goes all the way back to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. This Parliament provided compensation, worth £17 billion today and paid for by the British taxpayer, to the 46,000 British slave owners for the loss of their property. The slaves got nothing. And now their descendants are being shackled and chained, dragged on to deportation flights and sent back across the same ocean that Britain took their ancestors from in slave ships centuries ago.

[Stephen Doughty]

As ever, my right hon. Friend is speaking with incredible words, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood). Was my right hon. Friend as shocked as I was yesterday to hear the new Home Secretary say that he was not aware of any cases of wrongful deportation? Many such cases have been raised in public, let alone the incidents of wrongful detention. I have a letter here from the Home Office that admits that one of my own constituents—a British citizen—was wrongfully deported. Is he surprised by that?

[Mr Lammy]

I am staggered by it because there are thousands of people in the Caribbean who have lost their jobs and livelihoods, and are desperate to get back to their loved ones. But we still have no numbers from this Government.

I stood in this place five years ago and warned about the impact of the hostile environment. I told the then Home Secretary that her Bill was a stain on our democracy. In recent weeks, we have seen how the Windrush scandal has become a stain on our democracy and on our national conscience. I warned about the impact of a policy that would take us back to the days of “No Irish, no blacks, no dogs.” I stood in this place five years ago and read from Magna Carta, the foundation of our democracy, which says:

“No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled…nor will we proceed with force against him…except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.”

Yesterday, in a Committee Room in the Palace of Westminster, we heard testimony from British citizens who have been seized and imprisoned, who have been stripped of their rights, who have been outlawed or exiled, and who have been treated like criminals in their own country. So I ask the Minister: how many more Windrush scandals do we need before this hostile environment, or indeed compliant environment, is scrapped? How many more injustices? How many more lives ruined? Because I will be back here in five years’ time if we continue down this road to great injustices in our own country.

In recent weeks, we have seen so many Government Ministers and Members of the House talk about the issue of illegal immigration, conflating illegal immigration and the Windrush crisis. This is symptomatic of the hostile environment and its corrosive impact. What we have seen in this House, with Members standing up to talk about illegal immigration, is a perfect metaphor for the hostile environment and how it works: a blurring of the lines between people who are here legally and illegal immigrants, scapegoating innocent people, and blaming immigrants for the failures of successive Governments. Toxic anti-immigrant rhetoric created the demand for the hostile environment. Then we got a divisive policy handed down by our current Prime Minister, pandering to prejudice and aided and abetted by a hateful dog whistle emanating from our tabloid press. This was all reinforced by politicians too craven to speak the truth about immigration and too cowardly to stand up for the rights of minorities. Conservative Members want to lecture us about illegal immigration. The hostile environment is not about illegal immigration. The hostile environment is about raising questions about the status of anybody who looks like they could be an immigrant. It is about treating anybody who looks like they could be an immigrant as if they are a criminal.

Where does the hostile environment get us to? Let me tell you. It leads to cases in my own constituency of people being dragged out of their homes, going to Yarl’s Wood, and not able to do midwifery exams. It leads to people losing their jobs and their livelihoods. So I say to Conservative Members and Members across this House, on behalf of the Windrush generation: keep in mind that spiritual and let freedom reign. It will only reign when this country turns back from the path it is on, ends the compliant environment in which I know my place, and starts along a humane path that has at its heart human rights. [Applause.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. The right hon. Gentleman has made a terrifically rhetorical speech and he deserves to be congratulated, but not by clapping. Could the House just say “Hear, hear”?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Main]

I take the point, and I hope the right hon. Lady gets the answers that she deserves. I think that all Conservative Members feel that the Windrush generation have been done a huge disservice. To conflate this debate with other forms of immigration, slavery and whatever else people have chucked into the mix, including fishing, does a disservice to the debate we must have about the wrongs that were done in the processing of the Windrush generation.

[Mr Lammy]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Mrs Main]

No, I will not give way on that point.

We need to look at the process and truly analyse it. Heartfelt apologies have been made, which is absolutely correct. Anyone whose life has been disrupted—I do not dispute that many have been—deserves that apology, but we need to look at how it went wrong and what went wrong and make sure that compensation, if appropriate, is given. No Conservative Members would say any differently. The people of this generation are here absolutely legally, and we need to ensure that their position is corrected, so that neither they nor their children or family in future have any of these issues.

However, the motion before us is about how much protection is given to the people who advise those in government. This wide-ranging text, mentioning Ministers, senior officials, special advisers and so on, makes such an onerous and invasive request. If this request was taken to the nth degree on every contentious topic—for example, the invasion of Iraq—where would it end? How can a Government get the information they need and think outside the box, and how can text messages be sent between Ministers, if they believe that nothing can be said within Cabinet that cannot at any time be requested in an Opposition day motion?

If there are papers that show how this process came to happen in the way it did, I hope they are brought forward, as the Home Affairs Committee has requested, but this motion goes to the nth degree of asking for “advice” to be published—what sort of advice? Does that include oral advice, minutes taken, emails and text messages? The motion also mentions “all papers” and “correspondence”, but it is only for the selective dates that the Opposition feel may be helpful to their cause. This is not the way to sort out a problem that has occurred over decades. This problem must be put right, and I believe the Home Secretary has the passion to put it right.

The semantics and picking apart of the word “compliant” are ridiculous. Most Conservative Members would agree that the Home Secretary is a man of great compassion who cares deeply about—

[Mr Lammy]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have had to cope with the hon. Lady saying that we cannot link the Windrush generation to slavery. I have had now to cope with her suggesting that my “Oxford English Dictionary” definition of “compliance” in my speech was wrong. Can she correct the record?

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I understand that passions are running high, but the right hon. Gentleman knows that that is not a matter for the Chair. He has made his point. The hon. Lady may address it if she wishes to, but it is up to her.