The Windrush generation was built on agency
by Lord Sewell, CapX:
By victimising the Windrush generation, we’ve forgotten their successes.
As a child, I attended Sunday School at St John’s Anglican Church. We were taught each week the best stories in the world. What is clear to me is that narratives are everything. And as black kid whose parents came to Britain in the 1950s, those Biblical stories have not only shaped my life, but may well give us a clue about the untold story of black success in Britain.
One of my favourite stories was the one about housebuilding, told by Jesus in the Book of Matthew:
‘Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.’
I love this story because it reminds me of the proper story of the so-called Windrush generation, now forever associated with the scandal instigated by Theresa May’s hostile environment strategy.
In 2012, May, who was Home Secretary at the time, introduced the Hostile Environment Policy, saying that: ‘The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants.’ It was meant to be a display of power against illegal immigration, but it failed to see that a tiny minority of people from the Caribbean, who did not build their house on the rock but lived in Britain, would be harmed by this policy.
We now have a story of a people defined as victims of a hostile nation that not only treated its overseas citizens with hatred and contempt, but also tried to deport those who did not have their papers. The Windrush scandal has now buried itself into the collective conscience as a group of people who simply got ripped off by the British.
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