Ugandan Asians

Fiona Mactaggart Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

I am proud to have supported the request for this debate in a meeting of the Backbench Business Committee. It is an important debate, but I slightly regret its title on the Order Paper, which should refer to the “Anniversary of the expulsion of British nationals of Asian origin from Uganda”, as it was only because this group of people shared a passport with other British citizens who were born in Britain that they were accepted here when they sought entry to the UK after expulsion from Uganda.

Permission to enter was not given easily. I have talked to some of those who were queuing desperately outside the British high commission, panicking and in fear of Amin’s henchmen. They reminded me that it was not until Canada decided to admit 6,000 refugees and Amin started rounding up white Britons that Edward Heath agreed to act. Indeed, Himat Lakhani, whose family were expelled and who himself helped to welcome people here, tells me that the Canadians handed out water and provided them with chairs to sit on. He suggested that they managed to encourage the cream of those who fled Uganda to go to Canada as a result of that positive treatment.

A few years before, in a similar process of Africanisation, British people of Asian descent were being squeezed out of Kenya. That led to one of the most shameful acts of a Labour Government, agreed to by this House: the hasty passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, which created a racial divide in UK citizenship between those who had an ancestor born in Britain and other family members who were citizens of the UK and colonies. My predecessor as MP for Slough opposed that Act. I praise her and other rebels who joined her in opposing it, one of whom is still a Member, my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick). I would like to put on record my praise for him.

Following the 1968 Act, the Government announced the creation of the special quota voucher scheme to admit a small number of British national heads of household who were under pressure to leave Kenya, and later Uganda. When the Uganda expulsion took place, the scheme was insufficient, but it continued for years and led the European Commission of Human Rights to find the UK guilty of “inhuman and degrading treatment”. The scheme discriminated against women who were not heads of households but who held UK and colonies citizenship. The waiting time for the issue of quota vouchers in India reached eight years in the mid-1980s—I remember that because I was trying to help people in the queue. Of course, Amin’s action meant that the quota voucher system could not cope. Praise is due to Ted Heath for ignoring those such as Enoch Powell and the dockers who argued that we did not have a responsibility to those people. He recognised that we did.

The refugees came here facing cold weather, dismal conditions in the ex-military camps to which they were sent and a nation determined to keep them out of places where they knew people and had relatives, as we have heard. Leicester council even took out newspaper advertisements trying to keep them away. It is interesting to speak to people who were part of that. They tell of the fear they felt in Uganda and of how they arrived with nothing but the clothes on their backs, which were inadequate for British weather. They were fed ham sandwiches in those Royal Air Force camps, even if they were Muslims. They had to share beds. It was often not the warm welcome that we sometimes like to remind ourselves of, although there were individual families who provided the warmest of welcomes.

Himat, along with Mary Dines, formed the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants—for which I later had the privilege of working—and set up a co-ordinating committee to support those who wanted to go to the “red areas” that the Government were trying to keep them out of. He became a social worker in Southwark. In that role he dealt with 30 families who were the last to leave the camps—those with a disabled member or some other substantial disadvantage. He told me last night that nearly every one of those 30 families, welcomed into a council house, now owns their own home; so this is a story of success, but also one with some lessons for us in Britain.

The first thing we should do is celebrate those such as the hon. Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara), whose ancestry is from the Uganda Asian community, together with other hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel) and Shriti Vadera—the right hon. Baroness Vadera in the other place, who was formerly a Minister. Those people have all contributed enormously to our civic, economic and general life in Britain.

While celebrating those achievements, however, we should not forget that the history of our legislation and our rules has not always been one to be celebrated. Just months after we had accepted the Ugandan Asians, in February 1973, this House debated new immigration rules that further downgraded the citizenship of that community. British citizens were given a lower level of priority than Commonwealth citizens who had a grandparental link to the United Kingdom. The creation of that racial divide has been a slur on our immigration policy for years.

The history of this process contains lessons for us as legislators and for Ministers. I was in the House in March 2002 when, in reply to a question from my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann), a Home Office Minister announced, without any consultation whatever, the abolition of the special quota voucher scheme, saying that it had become irrelevant and was no longer necessary. That sent out an important signal. The people concerned held British overseas citizenship passports, and we continued to have an obligation to them.

It is no accident that one of the first actions that Hitler took against the Jews was to remove their citizenship. Citizenship is key to creating a person’s identity. By excluding people, a state can entrench social exclusion. I know that that Labour Minister was acting innocently on the basis of bogus briefing by civil servants, but we as Members of Parliament need to stand against that kind of injustice. I was glad that, because I knew the history and had been involved in campaigning for so long, I was able to brief the then Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), and, within a month, ask him a question to which he responded that he agreed in principle to look again at the matter. By July of that year, the next Minister of State at the Home Office was able to announce that:

“British Overseas Citizens who currently do not hold, and have never given up another nationality will be given an entitlement to register as British citizens.”—[Official Report, 4 July 2002; Vol. 371, c. 525W.]

The Home Secretary described the people concerned as having

“a deep commitment to this country and a heritage linked with it.”—[Official Report, 24 April 2002; Vol. 384, c. 354.]

He was quite right.

We are today recognising the fantastic contribution that these Britons—and let us call them that—have made to the country of their citizenship. The fact that they have done so well is largely due to their commitment to education. I represent a racially diverse town, and I know that all sorts of migrants bring energy, courage and a commitment to learning. Anyone who starts a new life and builds up their family thousands of miles away from the place where they were born and brought up has to have the qualities of courage and imagination. One of the reasons why the United Kingdom is a vibrant and dynamic economic and cultural leader, as well as an exciting place to live, is the contribution of those and other migrant communities.

We also need to use this debate as an opportunity to remind Ministers to treat advice with scepticism. The same civil servants who had told that Home Office Minister that the special quota voucher scheme was irrelevant and no longer necessary were, within a month or two, briefing the Home Secretary that if the change that I was proposing were to be adopted, hundreds of thousands of people would pour into Britain. They did not do so. Both those bits of advice were, frankly, spurious.

There is another lesson for us. The moral panic that led to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 and to places such as Leicester saying “We’re full up; stay away” is very similar to some of the things that we hear today about asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants. We need to show the courage that was shown by Sir Peter Soulsby, Joan Lestor and others. We need to say, “We are not going to go down that road. We are not going to be moved by the likes of the Daily Mail to say that this is a problem to be opposed.” We must stand up for what is right, and for matters of principle. We must resist the siren calls of hatred. We must tell people that Britain is a successful country because it is a tolerant country and because we have so many different races and traditions that are able to contribute so well to our success and our future.