In June 1948, the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury carrying around five hundred passengers from the Caribbean. They had come at the invitation of the British government, which needed workers to rebuild a country exhausted and depleted by war. They staffed the newly formed NHS, drove the buses, built the infrastructure of postwar Britain. They came as British subjects, with the legal right to be here. They built lives, raised families, paid taxes and contributed to every corner of British culture for decades. Earlier this year, it emerged that the British state had been systematically treating them as illegal immigrants.
The scandal that has unfolded over these past months is not an accident or an oversight. It is the product of deliberate policy. The “hostile environment” — a phrase introduced by Theresa May during her time as Home Secretary and retained as government policy — was designed, in her own words, to make conditions so uncomfortable for undocumented migrants that they would leave of their own accord. The problem is that many of the people caught in its machinery were not undocumented migrants. They were British. They had simply never been issued formal paperwork proving what everyone around them had always known — that they belonged here. When the Home Office destroyed thousands of landing cards in 2010, it removed the last paper trail many of them had.
What followed was a bureaucratic cruelty of remarkable scope. People who had lived and worked in Britain for forty or fifty years were denied NHS treatment, lost their jobs and homes, had their benefits stopped and in at least eighty-three confirmed cases were deported to countries they had not lived in since childhood, or in some cases had never known as adults. An unknown but likely far larger number remain affected. Some died before receiving any acknowledgement that an injustice had been done to them.
Home Secretary Amber Rudd resigned in April after it emerged she had misled Parliament over deportation targets. Theresa May apologised to Caribbean heads of government. A compensation scheme has been announced. None of this undoes what was done, and there is every reason to be sceptical that the underlying machinery has changed. The hostile environment policy, and the ideology that produced it, remains intact.
At Dancing Turtle, this story is not abstract to us. The music and culture we have championed including dub and reggae, the intertwining of Caribbean and British musical traditions — is inseparable from the Windrush generation and their children. The communities that built On-U Sound, that shaped the east London music scenes that gave rise to Asian Dub Foundation, that transformed British culture from the inside — these are the same communities that the Home Office has been trying to remove. Britain’s musical identity in the second half of the twentieth century was built in significant part by people the state this year declared it had never properly wanted here.
That contradiction is worth sitting with.
