Contribution
It is always a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis). History is written by the person holding the pen. That does not necessarily mean that it is the history of what happened at the time; it is told through a specific lens. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) for instigating this important debate on Windrush.
My Brent East constituency is one of the most diverse constituencies in Europe. On that point, as this is the first time I have spoken in the Chamber today, I send my condolences to everyone affected by the plane crash in India, as many of my constituents have been. Ultimately, what affects one, affects us all.
The Windrush ship brought people from Jamaica, Trinidad, St Lucia, Grenada and Barbados. As my hon. Friend the Member for Clapham and Brixton Hill (Bell Ribeiro-Addy) said, many served in the British armed forces in world war two, so they were owed something by their mother country.
I will talk a bit about my mum. My hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi) talked about people coming over in their Sunday best. If we look at those pictures, we can see how crisp and sharp their suits were, with shirts that were sparkling white. They were proud—so proud. We had our playing out clothes, our school clothes, and our church clothes, and never the three did meet. We were taught an inherent sense of pride in ourselves. We were not allowed to eat on the street, because that would give the impression that we did not have food at home. We were not allowed to carry clothes in a plastic bag, because they called that a scandal bag in Jamaica, so we had to have a proper cloth bag. We were taught so much.
We washed every day, which might seem like a weird thing to say now, but my parents would tell me that they had only washed once a week because they had to go to a wash house. We had to wash every single day. We also washed our meat and our chicken before we seasoned it—and the seasoning was more than salt and pepper; salt and pepper were an accompaniment. What was brought from the Caribbean is more than some people appreciate, because it is now taken for granted.
When we went to other West Indian people’s homes, we would find lots of things in common, like hand crocheted doilies on the chairs and on the table. My mum used to crochet little ducks and dip them in dye so they had little red beaks. It was so inventive. Nowadays, we would pay a fortune for that skill. All our clothes were bespoke; I would be embarrassed that my mum made my clothes, but now I would love my mum to make my clothes to measure. Now I have grown up, I realise that the things that we were taught to be almost ashamed of when we came here were actually very special—very unique and grand.
The reason we would find the same picture frame in West Indian people’s homes is that there was only one photographer who would take pictures of black people and frame them. Pictures of weddings kind of looked the same then, because there was only one place that would do that for the West Indian community. That is how West Indian people were treated in a place that they called the motherland.
The Windrush scandal was about not just the loss of employment, the loss of access to benefits, homelessness and the loss of access to housing, or the loss of access to healthcare and education. As my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Riverside (Kim Johnson) said, the system was deliberately structured to make sure that black people did not progress by labelling them as educationally subnormal—to stop their ability to work and earn. It stopped people buying their house or sending their child to college, which a lot of West Indian people had done.
The reason only 2,000 people have claimed is that there is a lot of shame that comes with that; the West Indian community is a very proud community. That is why we have to instil Labour values from a Labour Government in how we readdress what has happened to the Windrush generation. It has been an absolute scandal. Around 50,000-plus people have been affected by this issue, and some will die. Some have died, and some will die before they see justice. We must speed up progress.
The scheme was not a light-touch design, as the then Government said it was. It was something like 45 pages, and although they said that people did not need a lawyer, they did because it was so complex. I am ashamed that not one Back-Bench Member of His Majesty’s Opposition has come to this debate. This is not a niche debate; this is a debate about hundreds of thousands of people who came to this country to rebuild it, who were invited here, and Opposition Members have not even had the decency to come here and contribute—and they are the cause of the scandal and injustice.
I will end as I began. Martin Luther King said that what affects one affects us all, because that is the interrelated structure of society. We are all intertwined in life’s journey, and as racism is increasing in some parts of the country and people are trying to divide us, I hope that we remember—on Jo Cox day—that we have more in common.