The campaign for justice on behalf of the Windrush generation is not just about political scalps. It is about a burning injustice that stretches from 10 Downing Street into the lives of thousands of British citizens. At its heart the Windrush crisis is about an immigration policy that was allowed to – even designed to – dehumanise, demonise and victimise British citizens.
It is right that Amber Rudd has gone. She had lost control of what was going on in the Home Office and lost the confidence of her own civil servants.
But the real issue is the hostile environment policy that caused this crisis in the first place, and her resignation must not distract from this fact. Each Windrush story is the hostile environment policy personified and writ large. Each case is directly linked to a policy that ignores the principle of habeas corpus by imprisoning innocent people without reference to a judge, jury or evidence of guilt. It is this policy that barred British citizens from accessing the public services and benefits that they themselves built with their own hands, staffed and paid for. It is this policy that turned employers, doctors, landlords and social workers into border guards.
Described from the outset by its architect and champion, our current prime minister Theresa May, as “deport first, appeal later”, the hostile environment was aided and abetted by a hateful dog-whistle emanating from our tabloid press, reinforced by government ministers and politicians too craven to speak the truth about immigration, too weak and cowed to stand up for the rights of minorities.
Q&A What is the Windrush deportation crisis?
Who are the Windrush generation?
They are people who arrived in the UK after the second world war from Caribbean countries at the invitation of the British government. The first group arrived on the ship MV Empire Windrush in June 1948.
What is happening to them?
An estimated 50,000 people face the risk of deportation if they never formalised their residency status and do not have the required documentation to prove it.
Why is this happening now?
It stems from a policy, set out by Theresa May when she was home secretary, to make the UK 'a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants'. It requires employers, NHS staff, private landlords and other bodies to demand evidence of people’s citizenship or immigration status.
Why do they not have the correct paperwork and status?
Some children, often travelling on their parents’ passports, were never formally naturalised and many moved to the UK before the countries in which they were born became independent, so they assumed they were British. In some cases, they did not apply for passports. The Home Office did not keep a record of people entering the country and granted leave to remain, which was conferred on anyone living continuously in the country since before 1 January 1973.
What is the government doing to resolve the problem?
On Monday, the home secretary Amber Rudd announced the creation of a new Home Office team dedicated to ensuring that Commonwealth-born long-term UK residents would no longer find themselves classified as being in the UK illegally.
Toxic, anti-immigrant rhetoric created the demand for the hostile environment and then served to reinforce policies that addressed largely non-existent problems, pandered to the basest of prejudices and cowardly blamed immigrants for the failures of successive governments. As I previously said in the House of Commons, when you lay down with dogs you get fleas, and this government is in need of fumigation.
There has been a desperate attempt on the right to separate race from immigration. But they are inseparable. The same prime minister who established a race disparity audit to reveal “difficult truths” also gave us the hostile environment. It is no coincidence that ministers and Whitehall mandarins in a government that failed to recruit a single black Caribbean person on to the civil service fast-stream programme last year saw black British citizens with Caribbean heritage as low-hanging fruit and easy targets.
When the 2014 immigration bill passed through the House of Commons for its second reading, I described it as a stain on all that we have achieved as a democracy, ignorant of our history as a nation and harking back to the period when my father arrived in this country as a Windrush citizen to be met by “No Irish, no blacks, no dogs” signs. It is a tragedy that so many British citizens have had to suffer at the hands of this government before they took notice.
In an effort to change the subject, cabinet ministers have been touring the studios trying to conflate the treatment of British citizens at the hands of their government with the issue of illegal immigration. Not only is this completely wrong and demonstrative of a worrying lack of understanding of the law, it is frankly insulting to those citizens who have been treated like criminals in their own country.
Last Thursday during the last of her statements to the House of Commons the home secretary said “illegal” 23 times, but did not even once say the word “citizen”. Last Wednesday the prime minister said: “We owe it to them [the Windrush generation] and the British people.” This is the point the government still doesn’t understand. The Windrush generation are the British people – their citizenship is, and always has been, theirs by right.
This is symptomatic of how the hostile environment operates. It blurs the lines, and raises questions about the status of Commonwealth British citizens, refugees and asylum seekers so that anybody who looks as though they could conceivably be an illegal immigrant is seen as such.
Let’s not let government ministers change the subject to illegal immigration. At root the hostile environment is a policy rooted in pernicious cruelty designed to make life so difficult for people who are here legally that they simply give up and, as suggested by Theresa May’s vans, “go home”.
I see the human impact of the policy every week in my constituency surgery. Tottenham has long been proud of its history as an open, diverse and multi-ethnic community so it was inevitable the hostile environment would flex its muscles there. Asylum seekers are banned from working, denied access to legal aid and unable to claim benefits so they seek legal support from a migrant support centre and sustenance from a soup kitchen run by a local church – both of which are in turn raided by Home Office enforcement.
Increasing leave to remain fees for people who are here legally by 238% in four years is not about tackling illegal immigration. Changing the terms of asylum seekers’ “immigration bail” – itself an explicit attempt to blur the lines between seeking asylum and being a criminal by your very existence – so that they are barred from studying is not about illegal immigration. For every horrific case of detention and the denial of rights there is a public policy decision that delivered the hostile environment in which such injustices thrive and become normal.
A minister falling on their sword is usually an attempt to draw a line under a scandal and encourage the media to move on. But the person sat in the hot seat at the Home Office makes no difference to the thousands of people suffering as a result of the hostile environment policy. An unjust law is no law at all. The Windrush generation will not get justice until it is the law that is changed, not just the home secretary.
• David Lammy is Labour MP for Tottenham and the former minister for higher education