Gus John | Windrush and the ‘Dettol’ Commissioner

The United Kingdom Government has announced the launch of the Office of the Windrush Commissioner, to be hosted by Caroline Woodley, mayor of Hackney, and Cllr Carole Williams, Cabinet lead for Windrush, at Hackney Town Hall, on July 16.

I have given the newly appointed Windrush Commissioner, the Reverend Clive Foster, the moniker ‘Dettol’ Commissioner because people of the so-called Windrush generation grew up with Dettol and genuinely trusted it to kill all known germs and sanitise against all possible nasties. It is still to be found in many a ‘West Indian’ household in Britain nowadays.

So why ‘Dettol Commissioner’?

Because the government is clearly casting the Windrush commissioner in the role of overseer in the domestic colonial office to take care of business in the black colonies across the land and sanitise stuff.

In the last eight years, the word ‘Windrush’ has come to be associated much more with the historical fact that just over 1,000 people from the West Indies, some 492 of them from Jamaica, disembarked the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks in east London on June 22, 1948, than the fact that the British state persecuted many of them in what became known as the Windrush Scandal, following the 2016 Immigration Act.

That scandal was exposed in 2017 when it was discovered that black folk who had been resident in Britain for more than 50 and 60 years were being made to produce documentary evidence of their right to remain and to work in Britain.

But not one of them ever thought they were classified as ‘illegal’ immigrants, having been law-abiding, God-fearing, hard-working citizens all those decades. Many had come to Britain either as unaccompanied minors or escorted by people known to their families but who were not blood relatives. Nevertheless, their failure to produce the required documents led to loss of job, loss of accommodation, loss of healthcare, and in far too many cases, loss of life.

ALL FILES DESTROYED

Two years before the news of that scandal broke, the government itself had destroyed all the files it had kept of who had come from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia in the period it arbitrarily designated as encompassing the ‘Windrush Generation’, 1948 -1973. All it would have needed to do was to check the names of those it had identified as ‘illegal’ against those entry records.

As a result of massive protest and legal challenges, the government commissioned a review of its immigration and deportation practices, and it set up a scheme to compensate those who it wrongly dubbed illegal, detained, or/and deported. The Wendy Williams Lessons Learned review recommended the appointment of a migrants commissioner in acknowledgement of the fact that it was not only people who the government associated with the ‘Windrush’ who had been wronged and so egregiously denied justice by the British state.

Meanwhile, even as elderly black residents were still dying, becoming mentally and physically ill through stress, and becoming destitute and living as vagrants, especially in their former Caribbean homelands, some black folk here were seeking the endorsement of the British state for having come as patriotic colonial subjects to ‘help rebuild’ post-war Britain. They campaigned and were given a Windrush monument, a Windrush Day, a Windrush railway line, and lately, a Windrush commissioner.

Whenever I see ‘the Windrush Line’, it reminds me that in Manchester, in the 1960s to 1980s, we used to call the No. 53 bus ‘the African Queen’. It ran from Cheetham Hill to Trafford Park and was always full of black workers, women and men, all going to work for lower wages and in the most challenging conditions at Kellogg’s, Dunlop’s, and especially, Turner’s Asbestos. Many of my friends lost their fathers and grandfathers through prolonged and unimaginably painful suffering from asbestosis after working for many years in unsafe conditions at Turner’s.

Imagine if ‘Transport for Manchester’ were to rename the 53 bus route the ‘Windrush route’ in honour of the Windrush generation that helped to rebuild Manchester’s industrial base.

That is the history that this sanitising and romanticising Windrush narrative erases.

CORE PRIORITIES

The Dettol Commissioner is beginning in his post with “a national listening tour shaped by four core priorities: honouring the Windrush legacy; delivering justice through fair and timely compensation; rebuilding trust in public institutions through meaningful reconciliation; and driving cultural change within the Home Office to prevent future injustices”. The government does not explain what the Windrush legacy is and who or what is being honoured.

The Home Office did not need a commissioner to tour the country listening to people bare their souls and relive their hurt about the injustices and wrongs they continue to suffer. The Home Office itself has the data on the number of claimants denied compensation, some 68 per cent, let alone the unknown number of those eligible to claim who fail to do so for a variety of reasons.

Given the egregious nature of the harm caused by the Windrush Scandal, from the outset, the government should have made would-be claimants eligible for legal aid and worked with lawyers to finetune the claiming process and the operation of the compensation scheme, generally.

Denying access to justice, even by default, constitutes a repetition of the harm and a continued denial of people’s human rights, including the right to life.

For the Dettol Commissioner not to demand immediate action on legal aid but instead to go around the country having conversations is tantamount to complicity in human- rights abuse and in political hubris.

As for rebuilding trust in public institutions through meaningful reconciliation, heaven knows what this means, or how and why it falls to the commissioner to carry the burden of restoring the community’s trust in public institutions, ones over which he has absolutely no jurisdiction or control.

Driving cultural change within the Home Office to prevent future injustices is surely the task of senior managers. Reverend Clive Foster is not a permanent secretary nor is he a designated senior civil servant. Is the expectation that Home Office staff would become more empathetic as a result of the Dettol Commissioner’s charismatic intervention? At the end of the day, the government’s main priority is still to keep out as many people with black skin as possible.

So, Dettol Commissioner or not, vigilance and all we know about the British state necessitate that we deconstruct everything Windrush and the Windrushisation of everything.

Professor Augustine John is a human-rights campaigner and honorary fellow at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London.