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Opinion

Dehumanising rhetoric on immigration shows we have learned nothing from the Windrush Scandal

The government’s long-awaited analysis on the historical roots of the Windrush Scandal has uncovered disturbing parallels to the stance on immigration today, writes Refugee & Migrant Forum of Essex and London’s Nick Beales

The government has finally published an independent report into the historical roots of the Windrush Scandal. The report is deeply embarrassing, setting out in great detail how immigration policy has been designed over an extended period to reduce the proportion of non-white people living in the UK. What is also clear though is how so little has changed in how the government of the day designs and implements UK immigration laws and policies.

In painstaking detail, the report evidences how cruel, draconian and racist laws and policies are implemented time and time again, and seemingly nothing changes, with politicians of all stripes doomed to repeat their predecessor’s mistakes. This has played out in real time in recent years, with any number of sinister and ultimately failed policies replicating what has gone before.

Consider the UK’s treatment of low-paid Black workers. In the two World Wars, the UK government readily conscripted Black people from the empire, yet was determined that these people who fought for the UK should not be allowed to settle here. In 2024, the UK shamefully mistreats migrant care workers, lionised during the pandemic for looking after our ageing population but now viewed as a problem to be fixed. This year, then home secretary James Cleverly banned those on care visas from bringing dependant family members. The Conservative government wanted a faceless workforce, stripped of their right to a family life, to care for our sick and elderly. What they did not want is to recognise these people as human beings with wants and needs, fully deserving of a stake in society.

Or we can look at the UK’s differing approach to citizenship for its white and non-white population. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 created two tiers of British citizenship for those in former British colonies, ‘belonging’ and ‘non-belonging’ citizens. Essentially, the former were white people with unimpeded access to mainland UK and the latter non-white people whose entry was restricted. Today, for non-white dual nationals, especially British Muslims like child-trafficking victim Shamima Begum, their citizenship is increasingly contingent on their conduct with successive home secretaries only too willing to strip them of British nationality.

Perhaps the biggest similarity though is the way politicians use dehumanising language to whip up hatred against migrants and distract from their own failings. Enoch Powell in the late 1960s insisted that different racial groups could not co-exist harmoniously, Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s talked about us being “swamped by people with a different culture” and more recently we have Nigel Farage’s incessant race baiting. Last year, then immigration minister Robert Jenrick claimed refugees “tend to have completely different lifestyles and values to those in the UK”. As if wanting a better life for you and your family was somehow inalienably anti-British.

Who the government wants to admit to the UK also remains driven along racial lines. In the aftermath of World War II, in desperate need of workers, the government actively encouraged eastern Europeans to come, while simultaneously drawing up plans to redirect the Empire Windrush, carrying Black British subjects, to east Africa. The parallels today are unmistakeable, with Ukrainian refugees welcomed while those from other conflict zones such as Sudan, Afghanistan and Gaza are threatened with forced expulsion to Rwanda.

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The determination to create ever harsher legislation, which makes things more complicated for the Home Office as well as those in the immigration system, is also a repetitive cycle. In hindsight, the 1960s and 1970s immigration legislation blitz perhaps served as a template for the Immigration Acts of 2014 and 2016, the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, the Illegal Immigration Act 2023 and finally the Safety of Rwanda Act 2024. Or look at today’s 10-year route to settlement, which unquestionably discriminates along racial lines and has created so much additional work for the Home Office that they now take upwards of 18 months to process straightforward visa renewal applications. 

What is most striking though is how our governments’ determination to appear tough on immigration never satisfies figures like Powell and Farage. They do not propose workable solutions and simply use anti-migrant sentiment to whip up discord. Yet they always dictate the terms of the debate.

For 14 years, the Conservative government sought to placate these people. The result: a few thousand refugees needing sanctuary is treated as an existential crisis requiring the shredding of the entire international framework.

If the Labour government is serious about being a force for change, it should read this report carefully, learn from the past and focus on immigration policy that is not shaped by racist intent or playing to a nationalist gallery. It should view those affected as human and recognise how Britain’s colonial past shapes its present. More of the same will simply perpetuate a racist and broken immigration system.

Nick Beales is head of campaigning at Refugee & Migrant Forum of Essex and London.

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