A recent scandal in Britain relating to Caribbean immigrants reminded me why, after spending 11 years in the country getting a great education, I never thought of staying a day longer. Though largely sheltered from British society’s insidious structural racism by being confined to the spires of ivory towers, I noted, for example, the Macpherson report of 1999-2000 that declared — something ethnic minorities had known for decades — that the Metropolitan police suffered from "institutionalised racism."
In the decade after Macpherson, African and Asian minorities suffered 1.5-million more stop-and-searches than white Britons.
The "Windrush generation" are Caribbean nationals whose parents migrated to Britain between 1948 and 1971, welcomed by the government to fill post-war labour shortages and guaranteed the right to British citizenship. Many who had travelled as infants on their parents’ passports did not have travel documents.
In the past four years, the British Home Office, acting like a Dickensian "Circumlocution Office", required these arrivals from half a century ago to prove that they had not left Britain for two consecutive years and produce four pieces of evidence for every year they had resided in Britain, while the ministry inexplicably destroyed an archive of old landing slips that could have proved the arrival of many of these migrants.
These policies have had a devastating effect on the lives of more than 5,000 law-abiding Caribbean immigrants who have lived in Britain for decades. Many have suddenly lost their citizenship, jobs, homes, benefits, pensions, access to public services, been jailed and been deported.
As home secretary, current Prime Minister Theresa May set out, through draconian immigration acts in 2014 and 2016, to create a "hostile environment". In a reversion to the worst Orwellian tactics of the Nazi era, employers, landlords, banks, schools and hospitals were turned into border guards, asked to check the papers of immigrants under the threat of hefty fines or even jail terms.
May spoke, in xenophobic tones, about "citizens of nowhere." She set out to reduce the number of immigrants to Britain to the arbitrary figure of 100,000 annually, regardless of the human cost. She also bizarrely insisted that students be included in these numbers.
Home Office bureaucrats were given targets for deportations, sometimes breaking the law to achieve their quotas. These policies have had a devastating effect on the lives of more than 5,000 law-abiding Caribbean immigrants who have lived in Britain for decades. Many have suddenly lost their citizenship, jobs, homes, benefits, pensions, access to public services, been jailed and been deported.
Her Majesty’s Government’s response to this scandal has been as inept as its handling of it. Tory home secretary Amber Rudd followed in May’s footsteps until she was forced to resign in April under relentless questioning from the Labour Party. A reasonable request from Caribbean leaders at the Commonwealth summit, in the same month, for May to discuss the Windrush scandal was turned down.
This has not been Britain’s finest moment. These events have ironically coincided with the 50th anniversary of racist Conservative politician Enoch Powell’s notorious "rivers of blood" speech in which he warned of race wars if immigration to Britain continued. Today, 86% of the country’s population is still white. The contributions of Caribbean citizens to British life — in the arts, politics, literature, food and sports — have rarely been properly recognised, except superficially through annual Notting Hill carnivals.
Boris Johnson, the Falstaffian British foreign secretary, epitomised the continuing prejudice at the heart of the British establishment when he noted that Caribbean people in the country were "multiplying like flies".
The tired cliché about Britain’s "sense of fair play" was never evidenced by a nation that had colonised a quarter of the earth’s surface, populating countries with its citizens uninvited and ruling over them without their consent as a "heaven’s breed" of imperial supermen. The irony of the hostility towards citizens of countries that Britain colonised (and benefited from their slave plantations in the Caribbean) is thus rather rich. The sun did finally set on the British empire, but its sins continue to linger in the mother country.
• Adebajo is director of the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg.
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