Kevin Foster, the Conservative MP for Torbay and UK Government Minster for Immigration, visited Cardiff’s Butetown Community Centre this month to talk to Windrush elders, but was met with tough questioning over the government’s handling of the issue and anger at ‘partygate.’
By Ben Jones
The “Windrush Generation” refers to the many of thousands of people, families and children who made the journey from Caribbean nations to Britain from 1948 until 1971, often to work in key jobs following the Second World War.
Those who came before 1971 were given indefinite leave to remain in Britain. Several decades later, however, it was revealed that a number of those who had landed in Britain, and lived and worked in the country ever since, were being persecuted, arrested, fined, detained and some even wrongly deported, in a major scandal which unfolded in 2017.
Their treatment highlighted the racist nature of the ‘hostile environment,’ a term coined by the previous UK Home Secretary Theresa May in her brutal drive to clamp down on immigration.
Despite promising to compensate victims and rectify the situation, many from the Windrush community still feel abandoned, leading to the recent resignation of two members of the UK Government’s Windrush working group in protest.
It is against this backdrop that the UK Government have been eager to change the narrative, so sought to arrange a visit to Butetown Community Centre following the work they have been doing with members of the Windrush generation. Things didn’t go as smoothly as they’d hoped, however.
“They said he was an illegal immigrant, he was sent to Jamaica.”
The Tory MP Kevin Foster, who holds the Windrush brief under Home Secretary Priti Patel, was due to visit the Butetown Community Centre in April, but cancelled at the last minute. In his place, the Home Office sent Monmouthshire Tory MP David Davies, who’s track record on immigration includes calling for child asylum seekers to receive forced dental examinations to check their age.
Davies received tough questioning from Windrush community members, who expressed anger at the UK government’s lack of action. David Foster rescheduled for mid May.
Local civil rights activist, lawyer and chair of the Butetown Community Centre, Hilary Brown, hosted the event, which invited members of the local Butetown community with ties to the Windrush Generation, to meet with the MP, to directly air their questions and concerns.
In her opening speech, Brown paid tribute to the “Windrush elders, our Windrush heroes and heroines,” but said they had made the journey “only to encounter “hardships, isolation, discrimination and devastation at a time when there was no legislation in place to protect them.”
After a short speech by Foster, in which he tried to touch on the history of the movement, and the leaps that had been made since, the floor opened to questions.
One impassioned resident brought into question Foster’s earlier statement, in which – referring to his life-long passion for history – he spoke of how shocked he was that churches across the country once used to ban Black men, women and children from attending.
“You said that you were shocked. I have two children, and they wouldn’t be shocked. I was born here, they were born here. This is still happening,” the woman said.
“I’m still not hearing from you what choices are being made now. Sure, make the system that you’ve got in place easier, but to actually make the system fair and humane? The pain that people are feeling, and the fear that people are feeling at the moment is palpable.”
Another audience member repeatedly asked if people from the Windrush generation were still being deported. The man spoke of the ‘horror stories’ people were put through by Foster’s party in Government.
“I know of one particular family,” he told the MP. “The grandfather was stopped because he was speeding in the car. The police checked his papers…, obviously, he didn’t have his passport or anything because he came as a child on his parent’s passport. They then said he was an illegal immigrant, he was sent to Jamaica…but all his money, his house, everything he’s worked for all his life is here, all his contribution to society. And there were lots and lots of cases like this.”
Foster said that this kind of treatment has been consigned to the past, but the MP is a strident supporter of the current clampdown on asylum seekers seeking safety in Britain.
“Your Prime Minister seems to be getting away with a lot of things.”
Kevin Foster works under Home Secretary Priti Patel as an advisor, and recently, in an op-ed written for The Sun, made public his support for her policies on immigration, focussing on her most recent – the ‘Migration and Economic Development Partnership with Rwanda’ – a plan which would deport asylum seekers attempting to enter the United Kingdom and sending them instead to to be detained in Rwanda.
The plans were even condemned by the Archbishop of Canterbury as ‘ungodly’ and a group of activists recently ambushed Patel at a Tory Party dinner event, slamming the policy as ‘racist’ and ‘inhumane’ to the Home Secretary herself. Foster, however, has called them a “welcome change.”
Earlier this year, in a now-deleted tweet that the MP made following the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Foster also suggested that those fleeing the country could apply for Work Visas as a way into the United Kingdom.
The Home Office Under-Secretary was quizzed by a voice.wales reporter on how the UK Government could win over the trust of the Windrush Generation whilst working under a leader who had previously made a series a racist comments.
Foster tried to dismiss Johnson’s comments by saying that he wasn’t there “to get into political commentary,” to which one community member replied, “your Prime Minister seems to be getting away with a lot of things.”
Foster tried to deflect again by saying: “we can talk about curries and gates and beers all day.”
But one audience member, Steve who was from the Windrush generation, followed up by grilling the MP on the ‘partygate’ scandal and widespread government rule breaking during lockdown that has shattered Boris Johnson’s administration.
“So what you’re telling me now,” he said, “is if I go down the road and break the rules, I could say I didn’t know they were there, because Boris Johnson did this so it means I can get away with it?”
After the event, voice.wales spoke to Ioni, part of the surviving Windrush Generation.
Ioni dismissed efforts made to repair relations between those affected and the UK Government: “a lot of these events are just lip service,” she said. “You’ve got Starmer, Boris, I don’t listen to any of them.”
“This country sent for people from Jamaica and other places,” she continued. “And they came here with their trade. Engineers, electricians. Some built roads, and they got nothing for it. The job was to build this country because there was nothing here after the war.”
“And when they went to find a home? A sign by the window. No dogs. No blacks. No Irish. Things have changed, but it’s still going on. It isn’t going away. Some are still suffering from it 70 years on.”
