In part two of our three-part mini-series on citizenship and identity, we'll learn about the Windrush Scandal.
Tens of thousands of individuals legally emigrated from the Caribbean to the UK after World War II. However, decades later, many faced threats of deportation from the country they considered home.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our three-part mini-series on the theme of citizenship and identity.
[00:00:29] In part one, in case you missed it, we talked about the debate and recent referendum in Italy on who has the right to Italian citizenship.
[00:00:38] In part three, the next episode, we’ll talk about the battle between Malta and the European Union over the right to sell citizenship.
[00:00:48] And in today’s episode, we are going to talk about a recent scandal in the UK, a scandal involving tens of thousands of people who thought they were British, had no reason to doubt they were British citizens, but then the government told them they weren’t.
[00:01:05] So, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:11] You may well have heard the expression “the sun never sets on the British Empire”.
[00:01:17] At its peak, in 1920, the British Empire contained 35.5 million square kilometres of territory, 26% of all land on Earth, an area 170 times larger than the size of Great Britain itself.
[00:01:36] For better or for worse, at various points from the 16th century onwards, from the Caribbean to West Africa, the Middle East to Australia and the Pacific, the Union Jack flew high and the local population were subjects of a British monarch.
[00:01:54] One of the many things that this meant was that, in theory at least, these subjects shared a common legal status under the Crown, with the right to move and work across the Empire, including Britain itself.
[00:02:10] In practice, moving from one British colony to another was much more difficult.
[00:02:16] First, there was the simple fact that it was incredibly expensive. Someone from Jamaica or India or Myanmar couldn’t decide one day, “I think I’ll try out life in Edinburgh”; the cost of simply getting there would mean they couldn’t even entertain the idea.
[00:02:35] Second, racial prejudice and discrimination often blocked their path. There were restrictions on free movement, including permissions or taxes to leave a country.
[00:02:47] And even if someone made it to Britain, especially if they were not white, they were often met with hostility, from landlords refusing to rent them rooms to employers turning them away.
[00:03:00] This meant that for the vast majority of the existence of the British Empire, free movement within it, and a shared identity of “Britishness”, was really a mirage, a nice idea in theory but in practice it was something enjoyed by a tiny fraction of the 400 or so million people that were part of it.
[00:03:24] This started to change after the Second World War.
[00:03:28] Britain, the so-called “Mother country”, had lost half a million people during the war, had been badly bombed during the Blitz, and was in desperate need of rebuilding.
[00:03:42] The answer was right in front of it, or rather, it was in its many overseas territories.
[00:03:49] In 1948, Britain passed a new law creating a new status — Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies — which confirmed that people born in British colonies were legally recognised as British subjects. This meant that, at least in theory, the British Prime Minister and a farmer in rural Pakistan or Jamaica were equals in terms of their right to hold British citizenship and live and work in Britain.
[00:04:22] And so, in June of 1948, a ship called the HMT Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks, just east of London.
[00:04:34] On board were 1,027 passengers, mostly from Jamaica, coming to Britain to take up work and help rebuild a country still recovering from the devastation of the Second World War.
[00:04:48] This arrival is often seen as the symbolic beginning of what came to be known as the Windrush generation, named after the ship itself, the HMT Empire Windrush.
[00:05:01] In the years that followed, tens of thousands more people arrived from the Caribbean, from countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and others.
[00:05:13] Many came in response to advertisements encouraging Commonwealth citizens to come and work in Britain, particularly in sectors where there were severe labour shortages: public transport, manufacturing, construction, and the newly created National Health Service.
[00:05:31] And of course, they came not necessarily out of charity or some patriotic sense of the need to rebuild Britain; they came seeking a better life, for themselves, and for their children.
[00:05:45] It’s worth stressing that these people were not coming as “immigrants” in the way we might understand that term today.
[00:05:53] Legally, they were British subjects, citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies. Many travelled on British passports, and under the law at that time, they had every right to live and work in Britain.
[00:06:07] That being said, the welcome they received was often far from warm.
[00:06:13] Many faced open hostility, discrimination, and racism. Landlords would refuse to rent to them, employers would turn them away, and finding decent housing or stable work could be a daily struggle.
[00:06:28] There was a famous picture taken of a sign in a window which read, “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs.”
[00:06:37] Nevertheless, over time, many of those who arrived settled and built lives and communities in Britain.
[00:06:45] Britain became home, these people, this “Windrush generation”, contributed to British society in countless ways: working in hospitals, driving buses, building homes, raising families, and leaving their mark on British culture through music, food, and traditions from the Caribbean.
[00:07:06] And this wasn’t a small number of people. Between 1948 and 1970, an estimated half a million people travelled from the Caribbean to live and work in Britain.
[00:07:19] And this was combined with millions of other immigrants from other countries, often former British colonies.
[00:07:27] By 1971, the foreign-born population of the United Kingdom reached more than 3 million, 6.4% of the total population.
[00:07:38] To state the obvious, this was a big change, and during this time, public attitudes towards immigration started to shift.
[00:07:48] Pressure built, particularly from parts of the British public and certain politicians, to limit further immigration from the Commonwealth, from former colonies that still maintained close links to Britain.
[00:08:02] This culminated with the Immigration Act in 1971, which introduced the idea of Indefinite Leave to Remain, essentially granting permanent residency to people already in Britain, but making it clear that future immigration would be subject to stricter control.
[00:08:23] For many of those who had already settled, this legal shift didn’t affect their daily lives at the time in the slightest. They were already living and working in Britain, some had been doing so for 20-plus years, and, perfectly understandably, they assumed they had every right to continue doing so.
[00:08:44] But crucially, many never received formal documentation to prove their legal status.
[00:08:51] They had arrived legally, under the law at that time, and furthermore, there was nothing requiring them to register or carry proof of their right to be in the country.
[00:09:03] They worked, paid their taxes, bought houses, voted in elections, had children, and then grandchildren, and were able to live and exist like any other British citizen.
[00:09:16] Then, in 2012, everything changed.
[00:09:21] The British government, under Conservative leadership, started to roll out a new policy it called its “hostile environment policy”, which promised to clamp down on people who were living illegally in the United Kingdom.
[00:09:37] This was all in response to an election pledge to reduce immigration and win over voters from parties like UKIP, which had an even harsher anti-immigration stance.
[00:09:50] The Home Office, which is the British department responsible for internal affairs–stuff like immigration, passports, public safety, and so on–it started to do things like send trucks around areas with high immigrant populations with big signs on telling people that if they are in the country illegally, they will be deported.
[00:10:13] But it wasn’t just about making illegal immigrants feel uncomfortable in Britain; the government also introduced a series of new rules that made it harder for anyone without clear documentation to live and work in the country.
[00:10:29] Landlords were required to check the immigration status of tenants before renting to them.
[00:10:35] Banks had to verify a customer's immigration status before opening an account.
[00:10:41] Employers had to confirm that someone had the legal right to work in the country.
[00:10:47] Even access to healthcare was restricted if someone couldn’t prove their legal status.
[00:10:54] Essentially, if you didn’t have the legal right to be in the country, you were cut off from most major services. Your ability to exist comfortably, or even exist at all, was made an awful lot harder.
[00:11:09] For those living in the country illegally, it was a hostile environment indeed.
[00:11:16] Now, this policy enjoyed relatively high public support at the time. After all, its intended target was illegal immigrants, people who didn’t have a legal right to be in the country.
[00:11:31] And the vast majority of immigrants in the UK, both then and now, are not illegal immigrants; they are legal immigrants. They have clear documentation: a passport or a residence permit.
[00:11:46] So when these new rules came in, they might have been a bit annoying because you’d have to go and make a photocopy or update your documents, but they were little more than a formality.
[00:11:59] For many members of the Windrush generation, however, who had arrived legally decades earlier but had never been issued formal papers, or had any inclination that they would ever need them, these rules suddenly became a huge problem.
[00:12:16] People who had lived in Britain for fifty or sixty years were now being asked to prove that they had the right to be there.
[00:12:25] And many…couldn’t.
[00:12:28] This “hostile environment” policy was incredibly hostile indeed. People were asked to provide documents such as payslips, utility bills, or job contracts for every single year they'd been in the country.
[00:12:45] Perfectly understandably, many people couldn’t do this; they had thrown away electricity bills from 1963 and hadn’t bothered to keep their bank statements from 1981. So they didn’t have any form of official documentation proving that they'd been in the country.
[00:13:05] To make matters worse, it turned out that in 2010, two years before the “hostile environment” policy came into place, in the name of digitalisation and efficiency, the Home Office had destroyed thousands of landing cards, the paper cards with the names and dates of people who arrived in the UK.
[00:13:27] This was part of a supposedly routine clean-up of public records, but for many, it was the last remaining piece of evidence that they had come to the UK legally, and therefore had every right to be there.
[00:13:43] And without the right documents, people found themselves considered to be illegal immigrants, unwitting victims of this “hostile environment” policy.
[00:13:54] They were unable to work, unable to rent homes or even evicted from their home, denied access to healthcare or benefits, unable to open bank accounts, or even threatened with deportation.
[00:14:09] Some people were detained and held in immigration centres.
[00:14:14] A few were wrongly deported to countries they had never been to, despite having spent their entire adult lives in Britain.
[00:14:23] The scandal eventually came to public attention in 2017 and 2018, when newspapers, campaigners, and lawyers began to highlight case after case of people being mistreated.
[00:14:38] One widely reported case was that of a lady called Paulette Wilson.
[00:14:44] She had arrived in Britain from Jamaica as a 10-year-old in 1968, worked for decades in Britain, raised a family, was a mother and a grandmother, and even worked in the House of Commons canteen, cooking for prime ministers and members of parliament.
[00:15:04] In 2016, nearly fifty years after arriving in Britain, a letter popped through her door informing her that she'd broken the law, and she had been found to be living in the country illegally.
[00:15:20] She was told that she needed to pack her bags and return to her “home country” of Jamaica.
[00:15:28] But Jamaica wasn’t “home”; she left as a 10-year-old and had never been back.
[00:15:35] And to underline, she had come to the UK completely legally, and up until that moment, she had no idea that she was anything other than a British citizen.
[00:15:46] She was taken away in a van to an immigration centre where she was held for a week. She was about to be put on a plane and sent to Jamaica, and were it not for a last-minute intervention from her MP, her Member of Parliament, she would have been deported from Britain.
[00:16:06] And she was far from the only case.
[00:16:09] As more stories emerged, public anger grew.
[00:16:13] The government was accused of failing to properly document people’s legal rights, of creating impossible demands for proof, and of targeting people who had every reason to believe they were British citizens.
[00:16:28] And given that the vast majority of those affected were of Black Caribbean heritage, there were also questions raised about structural racism.
[00:16:39] The political fallout was swift.
[00:16:42] Amber Rudd, who was then the Home Secretary, resigned in 2018 after admitting that the Home Office had set internal targets for deportations.
[00:16:54] Theresa May, who was Home Secretary when the policy was introduced but had since been made Prime Minister, issued a public apology.
[00:17:03] The government created what it called the Windrush Compensation Scheme to try to compensate those affected.
[00:17:12] But this too has been heavily criticised.
[00:17:16] There were long delays in processing cases, the application process was complicated, and even if they were deemed entitled to compensation, they often received far less than they expected.
[00:17:30] People got payouts of a few hundred or a few thousand pounds, which might not sound so bad, but are trivial when you consider the fact that they were unable to work or claim unemployment benefits while their cases were being investigated.
[00:17:46] Some died before receiving any payment at all.
[00:17:51] For many observers, the Windrush scandal became not just a question of administrative failure or bureaucratic mistakes, but something much deeper: a reflection of how Britain struggles with questions of citizenship, identity, and its colonial past.
[00:18:10] Because at the heart of this scandal is a simple question: what does it mean to be British, or indeed from any country?
[00:18:20] I am British–I have British citizenship through both my parents–but I have lived in Britain for a much lower percentage of my life compared to many of the victims of the Windrush scandal.
[00:18:34] My kids have never lived in Britain, and unless they do, they will probably never consider themselves British, yet they have British passports.
[00:18:46] But people like Paulette Wilson never considered herself to be anything other than British, nobody who knew her would have said she was anything other than British, yet she found that her government, or at least what she had considered to be her government, decided she was not.
[00:19:05] Fortunately, the mistreatment was so great, and the number of people affected so large, that this scandal did not go unnoticed, and the wrongs have at least been partially righted.
[00:19:20] The scandal is an uncomfortable reminder that even in a country with long-established legal traditions like Britain, the gap between who you feel you are and who the law says you are can sometimes be dangerously wide.
[00:19:38] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on The Windrush Scandal.
[00:19:43] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:47] As a quick reminder, this is part two of a three-part mini-series on the theme of citizenship and identity.
[00:19:55] In part one, the last episode, we talked about the question of what makes an Italian.
[00:20:01] And next up, in part three, we will talk about a different way to become a citizen: by paying a fat chunk of money, and one small country’s battle with the EU for the right to continue doing so.
[00:20:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:20:21] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our three-part mini-series on the theme of citizenship and identity.
[00:00:29] In part one, in case you missed it, we talked about the debate and recent referendum in Italy on who has the right to Italian citizenship.
[00:00:38] In part three, the next episode, we’ll talk about the battle between Malta and the European Union over the right to sell citizenship.
[00:00:48] And in today’s episode, we are going to talk about a recent scandal in the UK, a scandal involving tens of thousands of people who thought they were British, had no reason to doubt they were British citizens, but then the government told them they weren’t.
[00:01:05] So, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:11] You may well have heard the expression “the sun never sets on the British Empire”.
[00:01:17] At its peak, in 1920, the British Empire contained 35.5 million square kilometres of territory, 26% of all land on Earth, an area 170 times larger than the size of Great Britain itself.
[00:01:36] For better or for worse, at various points from the 16th century onwards, from the Caribbean to West Africa, the Middle East to Australia and the Pacific, the Union Jack flew high and the local population were subjects of a British monarch.
[00:01:54] One of the many things that this meant was that, in theory at least, these subjects shared a common legal status under the Crown, with the right to move and work across the Empire, including Britain itself.
[00:02:10] In practice, moving from one British colony to another was much more difficult.
[00:02:16] First, there was the simple fact that it was incredibly expensive. Someone from Jamaica or India or Myanmar couldn’t decide one day, “I think I’ll try out life in Edinburgh”; the cost of simply getting there would mean they couldn’t even entertain the idea.
[00:02:35] Second, racial prejudice and discrimination often blocked their path. There were restrictions on free movement, including permissions or taxes to leave a country.
[00:02:47] And even if someone made it to Britain, especially if they were not white, they were often met with hostility, from landlords refusing to rent them rooms to employers turning them away.
[00:03:00] This meant that for the vast majority of the existence of the British Empire, free movement within it, and a shared identity of “Britishness”, was really a mirage, a nice idea in theory but in practice it was something enjoyed by a tiny fraction of the 400 or so million people that were part of it.
[00:03:24] This started to change after the Second World War.
[00:03:28] Britain, the so-called “Mother country”, had lost half a million people during the war, had been badly bombed during the Blitz, and was in desperate need of rebuilding.
[00:03:42] The answer was right in front of it, or rather, it was in its many overseas territories.
[00:03:49] In 1948, Britain passed a new law creating a new status — Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies — which confirmed that people born in British colonies were legally recognised as British subjects. This meant that, at least in theory, the British Prime Minister and a farmer in rural Pakistan or Jamaica were equals in terms of their right to hold British citizenship and live and work in Britain.
[00:04:22] And so, in June of 1948, a ship called the HMT Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks, just east of London.
[00:04:34] On board were 1,027 passengers, mostly from Jamaica, coming to Britain to take up work and help rebuild a country still recovering from the devastation of the Second World War.
[00:04:48] This arrival is often seen as the symbolic beginning of what came to be known as the Windrush generation, named after the ship itself, the HMT Empire Windrush.
[00:05:01] In the years that followed, tens of thousands more people arrived from the Caribbean, from countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and others.
[00:05:13] Many came in response to advertisements encouraging Commonwealth citizens to come and work in Britain, particularly in sectors where there were severe labour shortages: public transport, manufacturing, construction, and the newly created National Health Service.
[00:05:31] And of course, they came not necessarily out of charity or some patriotic sense of the need to rebuild Britain; they came seeking a better life, for themselves, and for their children.
[00:05:45] It’s worth stressing that these people were not coming as “immigrants” in the way we might understand that term today.
[00:05:53] Legally, they were British subjects, citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies. Many travelled on British passports, and under the law at that time, they had every right to live and work in Britain.
[00:06:07] That being said, the welcome they received was often far from warm.
[00:06:13] Many faced open hostility, discrimination, and racism. Landlords would refuse to rent to them, employers would turn them away, and finding decent housing or stable work could be a daily struggle.
[00:06:28] There was a famous picture taken of a sign in a window which read, “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs.”
[00:06:37] Nevertheless, over time, many of those who arrived settled and built lives and communities in Britain.
[00:06:45] Britain became home, these people, this “Windrush generation”, contributed to British society in countless ways: working in hospitals, driving buses, building homes, raising families, and leaving their mark on British culture through music, food, and traditions from the Caribbean.
[00:07:06] And this wasn’t a small number of people. Between 1948 and 1970, an estimated half a million people travelled from the Caribbean to live and work in Britain.
[00:07:19] And this was combined with millions of other immigrants from other countries, often former British colonies.
[00:07:27] By 1971, the foreign-born population of the United Kingdom reached more than 3 million, 6.4% of the total population.
[00:07:38] To state the obvious, this was a big change, and during this time, public attitudes towards immigration started to shift.
[00:07:48] Pressure built, particularly from parts of the British public and certain politicians, to limit further immigration from the Commonwealth, from former colonies that still maintained close links to Britain.
[00:08:02] This culminated with the Immigration Act in 1971, which introduced the idea of Indefinite Leave to Remain, essentially granting permanent residency to people already in Britain, but making it clear that future immigration would be subject to stricter control.
[00:08:23] For many of those who had already settled, this legal shift didn’t affect their daily lives at the time in the slightest. They were already living and working in Britain, some had been doing so for 20-plus years, and, perfectly understandably, they assumed they had every right to continue doing so.
[00:08:44] But crucially, many never received formal documentation to prove their legal status.
[00:08:51] They had arrived legally, under the law at that time, and furthermore, there was nothing requiring them to register or carry proof of their right to be in the country.
[00:09:03] They worked, paid their taxes, bought houses, voted in elections, had children, and then grandchildren, and were able to live and exist like any other British citizen.
[00:09:16] Then, in 2012, everything changed.
[00:09:21] The British government, under Conservative leadership, started to roll out a new policy it called its “hostile environment policy”, which promised to clamp down on people who were living illegally in the United Kingdom.
[00:09:37] This was all in response to an election pledge to reduce immigration and win over voters from parties like UKIP, which had an even harsher anti-immigration stance.
[00:09:50] The Home Office, which is the British department responsible for internal affairs–stuff like immigration, passports, public safety, and so on–it started to do things like send trucks around areas with high immigrant populations with big signs on telling people that if they are in the country illegally, they will be deported.
[00:10:13] But it wasn’t just about making illegal immigrants feel uncomfortable in Britain; the government also introduced a series of new rules that made it harder for anyone without clear documentation to live and work in the country.
[00:10:29] Landlords were required to check the immigration status of tenants before renting to them.
[00:10:35] Banks had to verify a customer's immigration status before opening an account.
[00:10:41] Employers had to confirm that someone had the legal right to work in the country.
[00:10:47] Even access to healthcare was restricted if someone couldn’t prove their legal status.
[00:10:54] Essentially, if you didn’t have the legal right to be in the country, you were cut off from most major services. Your ability to exist comfortably, or even exist at all, was made an awful lot harder.
[00:11:09] For those living in the country illegally, it was a hostile environment indeed.
[00:11:16] Now, this policy enjoyed relatively high public support at the time. After all, its intended target was illegal immigrants, people who didn’t have a legal right to be in the country.
[00:11:31] And the vast majority of immigrants in the UK, both then and now, are not illegal immigrants; they are legal immigrants. They have clear documentation: a passport or a residence permit.
[00:11:46] So when these new rules came in, they might have been a bit annoying because you’d have to go and make a photocopy or update your documents, but they were little more than a formality.
[00:11:59] For many members of the Windrush generation, however, who had arrived legally decades earlier but had never been issued formal papers, or had any inclination that they would ever need them, these rules suddenly became a huge problem.
[00:12:16] People who had lived in Britain for fifty or sixty years were now being asked to prove that they had the right to be there.
[00:12:25] And many…couldn’t.
[00:12:28] This “hostile environment” policy was incredibly hostile indeed. People were asked to provide documents such as payslips, utility bills, or job contracts for every single year they'd been in the country.
[00:12:45] Perfectly understandably, many people couldn’t do this; they had thrown away electricity bills from 1963 and hadn’t bothered to keep their bank statements from 1981. So they didn’t have any form of official documentation proving that they'd been in the country.
[00:13:05] To make matters worse, it turned out that in 2010, two years before the “hostile environment” policy came into place, in the name of digitalisation and efficiency, the Home Office had destroyed thousands of landing cards, the paper cards with the names and dates of people who arrived in the UK.
[00:13:27] This was part of a supposedly routine clean-up of public records, but for many, it was the last remaining piece of evidence that they had come to the UK legally, and therefore had every right to be there.
[00:13:43] And without the right documents, people found themselves considered to be illegal immigrants, unwitting victims of this “hostile environment” policy.
[00:13:54] They were unable to work, unable to rent homes or even evicted from their home, denied access to healthcare or benefits, unable to open bank accounts, or even threatened with deportation.
[00:14:09] Some people were detained and held in immigration centres.
[00:14:14] A few were wrongly deported to countries they had never been to, despite having spent their entire adult lives in Britain.
[00:14:23] The scandal eventually came to public attention in 2017 and 2018, when newspapers, campaigners, and lawyers began to highlight case after case of people being mistreated.
[00:14:38] One widely reported case was that of a lady called Paulette Wilson.
[00:14:44] She had arrived in Britain from Jamaica as a 10-year-old in 1968, worked for decades in Britain, raised a family, was a mother and a grandmother, and even worked in the House of Commons canteen, cooking for prime ministers and members of parliament.
[00:15:04] In 2016, nearly fifty years after arriving in Britain, a letter popped through her door informing her that she'd broken the law, and she had been found to be living in the country illegally.
[00:15:20] She was told that she needed to pack her bags and return to her “home country” of Jamaica.
[00:15:28] But Jamaica wasn’t “home”; she left as a 10-year-old and had never been back.
[00:15:35] And to underline, she had come to the UK completely legally, and up until that moment, she had no idea that she was anything other than a British citizen.
[00:15:46] She was taken away in a van to an immigration centre where she was held for a week. She was about to be put on a plane and sent to Jamaica, and were it not for a last-minute intervention from her MP, her Member of Parliament, she would have been deported from Britain.
[00:16:06] And she was far from the only case.
[00:16:09] As more stories emerged, public anger grew.
[00:16:13] The government was accused of failing to properly document people’s legal rights, of creating impossible demands for proof, and of targeting people who had every reason to believe they were British citizens.
[00:16:28] And given that the vast majority of those affected were of Black Caribbean heritage, there were also questions raised about structural racism.
[00:16:39] The political fallout was swift.
[00:16:42] Amber Rudd, who was then the Home Secretary, resigned in 2018 after admitting that the Home Office had set internal targets for deportations.
[00:16:54] Theresa May, who was Home Secretary when the policy was introduced but had since been made Prime Minister, issued a public apology.
[00:17:03] The government created what it called the Windrush Compensation Scheme to try to compensate those affected.
[00:17:12] But this too has been heavily criticised.
[00:17:16] There were long delays in processing cases, the application process was complicated, and even if they were deemed entitled to compensation, they often received far less than they expected.
[00:17:30] People got payouts of a few hundred or a few thousand pounds, which might not sound so bad, but are trivial when you consider the fact that they were unable to work or claim unemployment benefits while their cases were being investigated.
[00:17:46] Some died before receiving any payment at all.
[00:17:51] For many observers, the Windrush scandal became not just a question of administrative failure or bureaucratic mistakes, but something much deeper: a reflection of how Britain struggles with questions of citizenship, identity, and its colonial past.
[00:18:10] Because at the heart of this scandal is a simple question: what does it mean to be British, or indeed from any country?
[00:18:20] I am British–I have British citizenship through both my parents–but I have lived in Britain for a much lower percentage of my life compared to many of the victims of the Windrush scandal.
[00:18:34] My kids have never lived in Britain, and unless they do, they will probably never consider themselves British, yet they have British passports.
[00:18:46] But people like Paulette Wilson never considered herself to be anything other than British, nobody who knew her would have said she was anything other than British, yet she found that her government, or at least what she had considered to be her government, decided she was not.
[00:19:05] Fortunately, the mistreatment was so great, and the number of people affected so large, that this scandal did not go unnoticed, and the wrongs have at least been partially righted.
[00:19:20] The scandal is an uncomfortable reminder that even in a country with long-established legal traditions like Britain, the gap between who you feel you are and who the law says you are can sometimes be dangerously wide.
[00:19:38] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on The Windrush Scandal.
[00:19:43] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:47] As a quick reminder, this is part two of a three-part mini-series on the theme of citizenship and identity.
[00:19:55] In part one, the last episode, we talked about the question of what makes an Italian.
[00:20:01] And next up, in part three, we will talk about a different way to become a citizen: by paying a fat chunk of money, and one small country’s battle with the EU for the right to continue doing so.
[00:20:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:20:21] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our three-part mini-series on the theme of citizenship and identity.
[00:00:29] In part one, in case you missed it, we talked about the debate and recent referendum in Italy on who has the right to Italian citizenship.
[00:00:38] In part three, the next episode, we’ll talk about the battle between Malta and the European Union over the right to sell citizenship.
[00:00:48] And in today’s episode, we are going to talk about a recent scandal in the UK, a scandal involving tens of thousands of people who thought they were British, had no reason to doubt they were British citizens, but then the government told them they weren’t.
[00:01:05] So, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:11] You may well have heard the expression “the sun never sets on the British Empire”.
[00:01:17] At its peak, in 1920, the British Empire contained 35.5 million square kilometres of territory, 26% of all land on Earth, an area 170 times larger than the size of Great Britain itself.
[00:01:36] For better or for worse, at various points from the 16th century onwards, from the Caribbean to West Africa, the Middle East to Australia and the Pacific, the Union Jack flew high and the local population were subjects of a British monarch.
[00:01:54] One of the many things that this meant was that, in theory at least, these subjects shared a common legal status under the Crown, with the right to move and work across the Empire, including Britain itself.
[00:02:10] In practice, moving from one British colony to another was much more difficult.
[00:02:16] First, there was the simple fact that it was incredibly expensive. Someone from Jamaica or India or Myanmar couldn’t decide one day, “I think I’ll try out life in Edinburgh”; the cost of simply getting there would mean they couldn’t even entertain the idea.
[00:02:35] Second, racial prejudice and discrimination often blocked their path. There were restrictions on free movement, including permissions or taxes to leave a country.
[00:02:47] And even if someone made it to Britain, especially if they were not white, they were often met with hostility, from landlords refusing to rent them rooms to employers turning them away.
[00:03:00] This meant that for the vast majority of the existence of the British Empire, free movement within it, and a shared identity of “Britishness”, was really a mirage, a nice idea in theory but in practice it was something enjoyed by a tiny fraction of the 400 or so million people that were part of it.
[00:03:24] This started to change after the Second World War.
[00:03:28] Britain, the so-called “Mother country”, had lost half a million people during the war, had been badly bombed during the Blitz, and was in desperate need of rebuilding.
[00:03:42] The answer was right in front of it, or rather, it was in its many overseas territories.
[00:03:49] In 1948, Britain passed a new law creating a new status — Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies — which confirmed that people born in British colonies were legally recognised as British subjects. This meant that, at least in theory, the British Prime Minister and a farmer in rural Pakistan or Jamaica were equals in terms of their right to hold British citizenship and live and work in Britain.
[00:04:22] And so, in June of 1948, a ship called the HMT Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks, just east of London.
[00:04:34] On board were 1,027 passengers, mostly from Jamaica, coming to Britain to take up work and help rebuild a country still recovering from the devastation of the Second World War.
[00:04:48] This arrival is often seen as the symbolic beginning of what came to be known as the Windrush generation, named after the ship itself, the HMT Empire Windrush.
[00:05:01] In the years that followed, tens of thousands more people arrived from the Caribbean, from countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and others.
[00:05:13] Many came in response to advertisements encouraging Commonwealth citizens to come and work in Britain, particularly in sectors where there were severe labour shortages: public transport, manufacturing, construction, and the newly created National Health Service.
[00:05:31] And of course, they came not necessarily out of charity or some patriotic sense of the need to rebuild Britain; they came seeking a better life, for themselves, and for their children.
[00:05:45] It’s worth stressing that these people were not coming as “immigrants” in the way we might understand that term today.
[00:05:53] Legally, they were British subjects, citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies. Many travelled on British passports, and under the law at that time, they had every right to live and work in Britain.
[00:06:07] That being said, the welcome they received was often far from warm.
[00:06:13] Many faced open hostility, discrimination, and racism. Landlords would refuse to rent to them, employers would turn them away, and finding decent housing or stable work could be a daily struggle.
[00:06:28] There was a famous picture taken of a sign in a window which read, “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs.”
[00:06:37] Nevertheless, over time, many of those who arrived settled and built lives and communities in Britain.
[00:06:45] Britain became home, these people, this “Windrush generation”, contributed to British society in countless ways: working in hospitals, driving buses, building homes, raising families, and leaving their mark on British culture through music, food, and traditions from the Caribbean.
[00:07:06] And this wasn’t a small number of people. Between 1948 and 1970, an estimated half a million people travelled from the Caribbean to live and work in Britain.
[00:07:19] And this was combined with millions of other immigrants from other countries, often former British colonies.
[00:07:27] By 1971, the foreign-born population of the United Kingdom reached more than 3 million, 6.4% of the total population.
[00:07:38] To state the obvious, this was a big change, and during this time, public attitudes towards immigration started to shift.
[00:07:48] Pressure built, particularly from parts of the British public and certain politicians, to limit further immigration from the Commonwealth, from former colonies that still maintained close links to Britain.
[00:08:02] This culminated with the Immigration Act in 1971, which introduced the idea of Indefinite Leave to Remain, essentially granting permanent residency to people already in Britain, but making it clear that future immigration would be subject to stricter control.
[00:08:23] For many of those who had already settled, this legal shift didn’t affect their daily lives at the time in the slightest. They were already living and working in Britain, some had been doing so for 20-plus years, and, perfectly understandably, they assumed they had every right to continue doing so.
[00:08:44] But crucially, many never received formal documentation to prove their legal status.
[00:08:51] They had arrived legally, under the law at that time, and furthermore, there was nothing requiring them to register or carry proof of their right to be in the country.
[00:09:03] They worked, paid their taxes, bought houses, voted in elections, had children, and then grandchildren, and were able to live and exist like any other British citizen.
[00:09:16] Then, in 2012, everything changed.
[00:09:21] The British government, under Conservative leadership, started to roll out a new policy it called its “hostile environment policy”, which promised to clamp down on people who were living illegally in the United Kingdom.
[00:09:37] This was all in response to an election pledge to reduce immigration and win over voters from parties like UKIP, which had an even harsher anti-immigration stance.
[00:09:50] The Home Office, which is the British department responsible for internal affairs–stuff like immigration, passports, public safety, and so on–it started to do things like send trucks around areas with high immigrant populations with big signs on telling people that if they are in the country illegally, they will be deported.
[00:10:13] But it wasn’t just about making illegal immigrants feel uncomfortable in Britain; the government also introduced a series of new rules that made it harder for anyone without clear documentation to live and work in the country.
[00:10:29] Landlords were required to check the immigration status of tenants before renting to them.
[00:10:35] Banks had to verify a customer's immigration status before opening an account.
[00:10:41] Employers had to confirm that someone had the legal right to work in the country.
[00:10:47] Even access to healthcare was restricted if someone couldn’t prove their legal status.
[00:10:54] Essentially, if you didn’t have the legal right to be in the country, you were cut off from most major services. Your ability to exist comfortably, or even exist at all, was made an awful lot harder.
[00:11:09] For those living in the country illegally, it was a hostile environment indeed.
[00:11:16] Now, this policy enjoyed relatively high public support at the time. After all, its intended target was illegal immigrants, people who didn’t have a legal right to be in the country.
[00:11:31] And the vast majority of immigrants in the UK, both then and now, are not illegal immigrants; they are legal immigrants. They have clear documentation: a passport or a residence permit.
[00:11:46] So when these new rules came in, they might have been a bit annoying because you’d have to go and make a photocopy or update your documents, but they were little more than a formality.
[00:11:59] For many members of the Windrush generation, however, who had arrived legally decades earlier but had never been issued formal papers, or had any inclination that they would ever need them, these rules suddenly became a huge problem.
[00:12:16] People who had lived in Britain for fifty or sixty years were now being asked to prove that they had the right to be there.
[00:12:25] And many…couldn’t.
[00:12:28] This “hostile environment” policy was incredibly hostile indeed. People were asked to provide documents such as payslips, utility bills, or job contracts for every single year they'd been in the country.
[00:12:45] Perfectly understandably, many people couldn’t do this; they had thrown away electricity bills from 1963 and hadn’t bothered to keep their bank statements from 1981. So they didn’t have any form of official documentation proving that they'd been in the country.
[00:13:05] To make matters worse, it turned out that in 2010, two years before the “hostile environment” policy came into place, in the name of digitalisation and efficiency, the Home Office had destroyed thousands of landing cards, the paper cards with the names and dates of people who arrived in the UK.
[00:13:27] This was part of a supposedly routine clean-up of public records, but for many, it was the last remaining piece of evidence that they had come to the UK legally, and therefore had every right to be there.
[00:13:43] And without the right documents, people found themselves considered to be illegal immigrants, unwitting victims of this “hostile environment” policy.
[00:13:54] They were unable to work, unable to rent homes or even evicted from their home, denied access to healthcare or benefits, unable to open bank accounts, or even threatened with deportation.
[00:14:09] Some people were detained and held in immigration centres.
[00:14:14] A few were wrongly deported to countries they had never been to, despite having spent their entire adult lives in Britain.
[00:14:23] The scandal eventually came to public attention in 2017 and 2018, when newspapers, campaigners, and lawyers began to highlight case after case of people being mistreated.
[00:14:38] One widely reported case was that of a lady called Paulette Wilson.
[00:14:44] She had arrived in Britain from Jamaica as a 10-year-old in 1968, worked for decades in Britain, raised a family, was a mother and a grandmother, and even worked in the House of Commons canteen, cooking for prime ministers and members of parliament.
[00:15:04] In 2016, nearly fifty years after arriving in Britain, a letter popped through her door informing her that she'd broken the law, and she had been found to be living in the country illegally.
[00:15:20] She was told that she needed to pack her bags and return to her “home country” of Jamaica.
[00:15:28] But Jamaica wasn’t “home”; she left as a 10-year-old and had never been back.
[00:15:35] And to underline, she had come to the UK completely legally, and up until that moment, she had no idea that she was anything other than a British citizen.
[00:15:46] She was taken away in a van to an immigration centre where she was held for a week. She was about to be put on a plane and sent to Jamaica, and were it not for a last-minute intervention from her MP, her Member of Parliament, she would have been deported from Britain.
[00:16:06] And she was far from the only case.
[00:16:09] As more stories emerged, public anger grew.
[00:16:13] The government was accused of failing to properly document people’s legal rights, of creating impossible demands for proof, and of targeting people who had every reason to believe they were British citizens.
[00:16:28] And given that the vast majority of those affected were of Black Caribbean heritage, there were also questions raised about structural racism.
[00:16:39] The political fallout was swift.
[00:16:42] Amber Rudd, who was then the Home Secretary, resigned in 2018 after admitting that the Home Office had set internal targets for deportations.
[00:16:54] Theresa May, who was Home Secretary when the policy was introduced but had since been made Prime Minister, issued a public apology.
[00:17:03] The government created what it called the Windrush Compensation Scheme to try to compensate those affected.
[00:17:12] But this too has been heavily criticised.
[00:17:16] There were long delays in processing cases, the application process was complicated, and even if they were deemed entitled to compensation, they often received far less than they expected.
[00:17:30] People got payouts of a few hundred or a few thousand pounds, which might not sound so bad, but are trivial when you consider the fact that they were unable to work or claim unemployment benefits while their cases were being investigated.
[00:17:46] Some died before receiving any payment at all.
[00:17:51] For many observers, the Windrush scandal became not just a question of administrative failure or bureaucratic mistakes, but something much deeper: a reflection of how Britain struggles with questions of citizenship, identity, and its colonial past.
[00:18:10] Because at the heart of this scandal is a simple question: what does it mean to be British, or indeed from any country?
[00:18:20] I am British–I have British citizenship through both my parents–but I have lived in Britain for a much lower percentage of my life compared to many of the victims of the Windrush scandal.
[00:18:34] My kids have never lived in Britain, and unless they do, they will probably never consider themselves British, yet they have British passports.
[00:18:46] But people like Paulette Wilson never considered herself to be anything other than British, nobody who knew her would have said she was anything other than British, yet she found that her government, or at least what she had considered to be her government, decided she was not.
[00:19:05] Fortunately, the mistreatment was so great, and the number of people affected so large, that this scandal did not go unnoticed, and the wrongs have at least been partially righted.
[00:19:20] The scandal is an uncomfortable reminder that even in a country with long-established legal traditions like Britain, the gap between who you feel you are and who the law says you are can sometimes be dangerously wide.
[00:19:38] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on The Windrush Scandal.
[00:19:43] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:47] As a quick reminder, this is part two of a three-part mini-series on the theme of citizenship and identity.
[00:19:55] In part one, the last episode, we talked about the question of what makes an Italian.
[00:20:01] And next up, in part three, we will talk about a different way to become a citizen: by paying a fat chunk of money, and one small country’s battle with the EU for the right to continue doing so.
[00:20:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:20:21] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
