David Olusoga on why we need to talk about Windrush
On Friday, I attended a lecture titled ‘We Need to Talk about Windrush’ by the historian David Olusoga at Bristol SU, held by the BME Network as part of Black History Month.
Olusoga is actually based in Bristol, and has written articles for The Guardian on Bristol’s links to slavery and the Colston Hall debate, such as ‘Bristol’s Colston Hall is an affront to a multicultural city. Let’s rename it now’ and ‘Bristol: the city that lauds the slave trader’.
Bristol’s history was not the focus of this lecture, however: rather, the Windrush scandal of 2018 and how we should trace its roots within British government, right back to before the arrival of the first members of the Windrush generation in 1948. Here I recognised a clear assertion of the importance of humanities research: studying our history to better understand our present.
As its title suggests, Olusoga’s lecture centred on the Windrush generation: 492 British citizens from the West Indies who arrived in the UK on 21st June 1948 on the ship ‘Empire Windrush’. They were exercising their right as citizens of the British Empire to relocate to Britain.
Fast forward to 70 years later, the 2018 Windrush scandal: the government's outrageous treatment of the children of the original Windrush generation, who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s. As part of the Conservative government’s ‘hostile environment’ policy aiming to tackle illegal immigration, 57,000 people were redefined illegal immigrants and faced the threat of deportation. This change in legal status was due to a 2014 change in the law that eliminated the exemption in a 1971 immigration law, that Commonwealth citizens who arrived in the UK before 1971 were not required to provide evidence of their residence in the UK. Therefore, from 2014, Black British citizens were forced to show proof of their residence, such as payslips from decades before, and if they failed to do so, were denied medical care, their benefits and even detained.
Olusoga’s aim in this lecture was to convey that the Windrush scandal was not just a blip, not just a government mess-up (that the press ceased to discuss just a few months later), but rather characteristic of institutional racism within our government. He described how these attitudes were articulated (using the biological language of scientific racism) even before the Windrush generation set foot in the UK: the Windrush was seen as an ‘invasion’ and a threat to the ‘harmony and cohesion of our people’, according to a 1948 telegram.
Rather than discuss at length the content of Olusoga’s lecture, I want to highlight a point he made towards the end, about where the responsibility lies for the detonation of the crisis (the 2014 change in law). He questioned whether those behind this policy were completely lacking historical and institutional memory (‘historical amnesia’ in his words) or whether they in fact knew how this change of law would catch the children of the Windrush generation in the system, and simply didn’t care?
Time will tell, he explained, when the official government documents are released in 30-50 years, but he highlighted the responsibility of the legal profession and academia to see this scandal coming, to predict and flag up the damage it could cause, and their complete failure to do so. He ended with this reflection: if we see the scandal as a stress-test for Britain’s institutions, then they definitively failed.
And, in my view, that is the Public Role of the Humanities – to use our knowledge of the world (in this case, our knowledge of history) to influence our society today (in this case, immigration policy). As public historians, our role is to apply pressure upon stories being recognised, or re-written, in the official narrative, otherwise we risk people’s lives (like those of the children of the Windrush generation last year) being destroyed by historical amnesia or wilful ignorance.