Contribution
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. This is a question of trust and a question of basic fairness. There cannot be any excuse for a lack of clarity across compensation schemes dealing with similar structural injustices for which the state is responsible.
There is more work to do to ensure that such a scandal can never happen again. This means reflecting on the causes of the Windrush scandal in future policy and legislative decisions. For example, we must make sure that the introduction of e-visas allows no scope for anyone who is legitimately in the UK to be wrongly denied their status because they cannot access a document online.
It also means ensuring that we understand our own past. The Government have commissioned Professor Becky Francis to undertake the curriculum and assessment review, and I hope she will be thinking about how subjects such as history and geography can be taught through the prism of an accurate understanding of our past, so that through a prism of migration to our country, whether, like me, people come from a town with a Viking name and a Norman church or whether their family arrived in the UK in more recent times, they can locate their own story in our history and understand that there is no us and them. We are a nation that has always been formed and sustained by people who have come from overseas to make their home on these islands.
And it means resourcing properly the organisations that are the custodians of history, including the National Windrush Museum, and the Black Cultural Archives in my constituency. The BCA was established in 1981 by Len Garrison, who had come to the UK from Jamaica as a child in 1954 and became a great educationalist in our city. The BCA has an extensive archive documenting the history of black people in the UK, from the African-Roman emperor stationed at Hadrian’s wall, Septimius Severus, to black Georgians, the Windrush generation and much, much more. It is a national resource that is critical to our understanding as a society and vital for the sense of place and belonging for many black British people. The BCA needs stable core funding from the Government commensurate with its national role to enable it to do the work of outreach and interpretation, and to secure it for the long term. I mention very briefly the important and ambitious campaign led by Patrick Vernon to retrieve the anchor of the Empire Windrush from its current resting place in the Mediterranean sea, so that it can be restored as a memorial and as a tool for the education of younger generations.
In preparing for this debate, I have been in touch with many people who have campaigned and continue to campaign for Windrush justice. They have differing views about the role of celebration on Windrush Day. I know there are some who are concerned that celebration undermines the fight for justice and that they cannot celebrate until justice has been done, and I understand that perspective, but there are others who passionately believe that assertively celebrating the Windrush generation and all they have contributed and achieved, giving visibility to the community, is a part of the fight for justice. That celebration sustains their campaigning and it is also important for health and wellbeing. I am looking forward to joining the Brixton Immortals Domino club celebrations on Saturday and the Big Caribbean Lunch on Sunday, organised by Ros Griffiths, both to be held on Windrush Square in my constituency.
Finally, I want to consider the wider importance of fully addressing the Windrush scandal and all its implications. As my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) highlighted, the Windrush scandal happened as a consequence of structural injustices and it happened as a consequence of our history. Windrush must not be compartmentalised, because if we do that we cannot be sure that such a scandal will not be repeated. I mentioned the extraordinary role of members of the Windrush generation and their descendants in our NHS, which continues to this day. Our NHS today, in King’s College hospital in my constituency, is also sustained by nurses from the Philippines and south India, who were asked to come by our hospitals because we needed their skills in our healthcare system. We cannot rest until we are sure that they, or any other group, will not face the horrific injustice of discrimination based on racism and ignorance that is embedded in law and policy.
I welcome very much the personal commitment of my hon. Friend the Minister to Windrush justice. I was pleased to attend the Windrush summit last week at the Home Office. It is a credit to the approach my hon. Friend has taken and the work she has done that so many people who have campaigned for Windrush justice felt able to attend an event in the Department that had done them such wrong. I know that many of the attendees would not have thought that possible just a few months ago. I welcome the Minister’s commitment to implementing all the recommendations of Wendy Williams’ lessons learned review and the imminent appointment of a Windrush commissioner. I thank her for all the work she is doing to listen, engage and take meaningful steps to restore trust and confidence. I know that she understands that there is much more still to do, and I look forward to continuing to work with her on behalf of my constituents to secure the depth and breadth of the change we need.