Florence Eshalomi

I pay tribute to my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), for her powerful introduction to the debate. She referenced areas of her constituency that I know like the back of my hand, because they are where I grew up. Growing up in Brixton, there were things that I recognised from an early age. I recognised that the place was special and unique. I recognised that in the midst of all the chaos, it seemed to work well. I recognised that it embraced so many people from so many different communities. I think about people with my heritage, from Nigeria, mixing and interacting with the Irish, Portuguese, West Indian, Spanish, Latin American and white community. All those different communities are mixing in the melting pot that we know and love as Brixton. It was really important, and such a testament, to see Windrush Square unveiled in the heart of Brixton. It is a place that gives so many people a sense of belonging and somewhere to commemorate and celebrate our vital Windrush community. Sunday’s Windrush Day is another chance for us to celebrate and recognise the contributions of the Windrush generation to our communities, and to the whole of our country, as my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Harpreet Uppal) just said. Last year, I had the honour of welcoming the now Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary to the Windrush celebrations in Oval in my constituency, not too far from here. At that event, my hon. Friends the Members for Dulwich and West Norwood, and for Clapham and Brixton Hill (Bell Ribeiro-Addy)—my other constituency neighbour—and I met the pioneers of the Windrush generation who had built the communities that I grew up in around Brixton. These communities gave us the strength and resilience to face challenges, and a belief that we could make change when we worked together. Windrush Day is a source of pride in the communities that have been built through that hard work and determination. As much as Windrush Day is a celebration, we must not lose sight of the challenges that this generation have gone through. Too often, these communities have been built in the hard fire of adversity, and nothing represents that more than the Windrush scandal. It saw many members of the Windrush generation, people who had been in this country for decades, being denied the most basic rights. This led to people losing their home and their job, and even being denied medical treatment. Can you imagine the scandal? Some of them must have known that their grandmother or grandfather had worked in those same hospitals. At least 83 people ended up being wrongly deported from this country that they called home. Disgracefully, as we have heard, many of those who were victims of the scandal are still waiting to receive compensation. The Independent reported last year that at least 50 people had died waiting for compensation. Following this Windrush debate, the Government must work to speed up the compensation scheme, as I know my hon. Friend the Minister is doing. They must reach out to people who understandably do not feel comfortable engaging with the Government and the Home Office. I urge the Government to ensure that the Windrush victims have the right legal support, so that they feel able to get the money that they deserve. The Windrush scandal did not have its roots in the 2010s. It started in the discrimination and racism that the Windrush generation experienced when they first arrived in the UK. It started when some of them arrived by train at Waterloo station in my constituency. The station is home to the national Windrush monument, which was unveiled on 22 June 2022 by Prince William and Catherine. The statue depicts a man, a woman and a young child, with their suitcases, in their Sunday best. That is what the Windrush generation did: they dressed up in their Sunday best to come to this country to help serve it. The statue was designed by Basil Watson. I urge Members who have not visited it to do so. On the side of the statue there is a poem by Professor Laura Serrant entitled “You called...and we came”, reliving that call to action—the call to duty that many of the Windrush generation rightly answered. I want to mention the Mary Seacole statue. I think back to early June 2017, when I was pacing up and down the maternity ward of St Thomas’ hospital, trying to get my son to come out. He was almost two weeks overdue. Looking down from the eighth floor and seeing that statue of Mary Seacole, I thought about the many women from the Windrush generation who had committed so many hard years to working for our NHS. Through the 12-year Mary Seacole appeal, members of the community raised vital funds to ensure that the statue was erected. It was formally opened by another great pioneer and child of the Windrush: Baroness Floella Benjamin, who sits in the other place. Another statue in my constituency is the “Bronze Woman” at Stockwell war memorial, just by the roundabout. According to records, it is the first statute depicting a black woman. It was erected in 2008, and I had the honour of attending the unveiling, as a councillor. It depicts a woman holding a child in the air. It shows the power of the Windrush, which runs through my constituency and many others. As hon. Members have highlighted, we cannot again make the same mistakes that happened during the Windrush scandal. While we have made progress, we know that racism has not completely disappeared from our society. We need to ask ourselves how it can be right that we still see health and race inequalities in our NHS, and how it can be right that some of our black and minority ethnic communities continue to live in bad-quality accommodation. We must not treat the Windrush scandal in isolation, and we must not, as a Government, make the same decisions in our policymaking that led to the Windrush scandal in the first place. I urge the Government to be extremely careful when they carry out their review of citizenship later this year. We must not put arbitrary barriers in the way of those arriving in our country. We must not say to people who work day in, day out, as our nurses and our carers—jobs that essentially keep this country going—that they have less of a right to become a citizen. Doing that will entrench further inequalities in our country. It will deny people who pay taxes and help run our public services a say in how those services are run. That cannot be the aim of this Government, and we must never introduce hostile policies like those that led to the Windrush scandal in the first place.