Assembly Speaker, 14 November
Amelia Gentleman - Journalist for the Guardian
This week we had the pleasure of being introduced to Amelia Gentleman, journalist for the Guardian newspaper who won the Paul Foot Award for reporting the Windrush scandal.
Gentleman started by explaining the trajectory of her work which is based on looking at how government policy ‘plays out’ when it is introduced. During the Windrush scandal, she was therefore an integral part in looking at immigration and changes to the home office system - These pieces of information being the breakthrough to spotlighting the impropriety of government policy at the time.
The Windrush scandal was brought by the Conservative party’s then home secretary Theresa May. In 2017 people originally from Commonwealth countries were being wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened and in some cases faced with deportations, due to serious flaws in the home office's hostile environment policy. The ‘Windrush’ generation are those who arrived in the UK from Caribbean countries between 1948 and 1973. Many took up jobs in the new NHS and other sectors affected by Britain’s post-war labour shortage.
Gentleman expressed how, with the introduction of this policy, many of these individuals from the Caribbean, now in their 50-70s and legal citizens of the UK, received letters stating they were illegally living in the UK. She explained the circumstances of victims of this crisis such as Paulette Wilson, who was born in the British colony of Jamaica in 1956 and moved to England at the age of 10 to live with her grandparents legally. Throughout Wilson’s years living in the UK she worked and paid taxes for 34 years, however in 2015 she received a shocking notification from the government claiming she was an illegal immigrant. She was then barred the right to legal rights including government benefits and healthcare, denied the right to seek work and forced into homelessness. As a reporter for the Guardian, Gentleman interviewed her along with many more victims of this catastrophe to deduce what exactly was happening. In attempts to reclaim recognition of the individuals’ legal status in the UK, she was shown the uncooperative responses from the home office stating that ‘the documents were not in order’ and that the individual should get a lawyer.
Amelia elucidated how during the British colonial period, under the 1948 Nationality Act all commonwealth citizens (independent countries which often before were part of Britain's colonies) were British citizens so were able to move from their country to live in Britain as a legal citizen. However, they weren’t issued with any paperwork. So in 2012 when Theresa May (the home office secretary at the time) issued a policy called ‘hostile environment’ where employers, landlords, NHS staff and other public servants had to check an individual’s immigration status before offering them a job, housing, healthcare or other support. This made life very hard for the Windrush generation. It also left them in a predicament where they were charged with illegal immigration but were unable to produce the right paperwork since they weren’t handed any previously.
After this revelation, Gentleman expressed how there was huge commissioning and spotlighting in the Guardian news on this outrageous scandal foregrounding the failures of the government and their target on those from ethnic backgrounds with unlawful deportation and deprivation. This successful attempt to pressurise the government expedited it into publicly announcing the drastic flaws in their immigration policies, transporting those deported back to the UK and issuing a £50 million compensation scheme for those affected in the Windrush. However, Gentleman added that this scheme has been very slow to take effect and some individuals affected have passed away without receiving their share of compensation.
This talk not only stressed the catastrophic misuse of policies and the effect of racism in politics but also highlighted that although we live in an era of fake news and scepticism of the media, journalism can have a heavily positive impact and force change for the better.
This talk has left us all speechless at the events of the Windrush scandal revealing the long- term impacts of the British empire on today's current affairs but most definitely also impressed with Amelia Gentleman’s input into bringing justice to the victims.
We would like to thank her for taking the time out of her day to join and enlighten us on this affair. This talk is one we most certainly will not forget.
Zahra
Senior Prefect
