The Home Office has been forced to publish a 52-page report on the history of UK immigration policy that was created as a primer for staff in the wake of the Windrush scandal.
The Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal takes a damning – but engagingly written – look at the ways the country has sought to restrict rights to live and work in England, Wales and Scotland over the centuries.
It was produced in response to one of the recommendations in Wendy Williams' 2020 lessons-learned review on the scandal, which saw members of the Windrush generation denied access to public services, housing and jobs. Some were wrongly deported despite having the right to live and work in the UK.
Williams said the Home Office needed to ensure all existing and new staff "learn about the history of the UK and its relationship with the rest of the world, including Britain’s colonial history, the history of inward and outward migration and the history of black Britons".
While the document has been available internally at the Home Office since 2022, the department resisted attempts for it to be made publicly available, including rejecting repeated Freedom of Information Act requests and pressure from Labour MP Diane Abbott.
Earlier this month, a First Tier Tribunal judge ordered the document's publication, quoting George Orwell's memorable lines from 1984: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
The Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal starts its analysis in Roman times, charting periods of intense focus on immigration and other times when authorities took a more relaxed approach. The report lays much of the blame for the Windrush scandal on essentially racist measures introduced to restrict the ability of Commonwealth citizens to move to the UK in the years since the second world war.
Its verdict on the Home Office's postwar work – in parallel with the start of the Windrush generation arrivals that began in 1948 – pulls no punches.
The report says the Windrush scandal was "caused by a failure to recognise that changes in immigration and citizenship law in Britain since 1948 had affected black people in the UK differently than they had other racial and ethnic groups".
"As a result," it says, "the experiences of Britain’s black communities of the Home Office, of the law, and of life in the UK have been fundamentally different from those of white communities."
The report states: "Major immigration legislation in 1962, 1968 and 1971 was designed to reduce the proportion of people living in the United Kingdom who did not have white skin."
It goes on to describe the relationship between the Home Office and organisations set up to deal with race relations as "dysfunctional" in the second half of the 20th century.
"The work of various governmental bodies in combatting discrimination in the UK was separate from the task given to the Home Office to reduce immigration," it says. "This led to a paradoxical situation in which immigration policy assumed that too many immigrants from a minority-ethnic background were bad for society, but race-relations policy promoted the idea of racial equality."
'The British Empire depended on racist ideology to function'
The report says understanding the experiences of the Windrush generation is "impossible" without understanding how the UK's colonial past had shaped thinking in government over the previous century.
"The British Empire depended on racist ideology in order to function, which in turn produced legislation aimed at keeping racial and ethnic groups apart," it says. "These ideas were, by the end of the 19th century, beginning to find their way back to the British mainland."
The report references growing concerns about the arrival of citizens of the British Empire, dating back to before the first world war – and proposals to deal with the situation. They included plans floated in 1910 by then-home secretary Winston Churchill for a "miniature offshore Ellis Island facility" where refugee claims would be processed. The idea was subsequently deemed "unworkable".
The 1925 Coloured Seamen Order was "designed to reinstate a racialised economic hierarchy within an imperial system which no longer needed its black subjects as soldiers, and now did not want them as workers", the report says.
The order was an effort to protect the jobs of white workers and was renewed twice until "the UK government badly needed black imperial subjects" to fight in the second world war.
However, the report says the 1925 order set a precedent by drawing a theoretical dividing line between white British people and black imperial subjects that "would reappear periodically throughout the 20th century".
Windrush arrivals 'not wanted'
The report says that while a narrative has "grown up" around the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 and subsequent ships bringing workers from the British Caribbean to help rebuild the "mother country", it is "not true" to state that the UK government or the Home Office wanted it to happen.
It says that a "coordinated campaign" was launched across the civil service to discourage a repeat of Windrush. "The Colonial Office launched a publicity offensive to warn prospective migrants about the challenges they would face in the UK, and withheld passports from those deemed unlikely to have the financial resources for the journey," the report says.
It goes on to detail ways that successive legislation – including the 1962 and I968 Commonwealth Immigrants Acts, the 1971 Immigration Act and the 1981 British Nationality Act – chipped away at the ability of predominantly non-white Commonwealth citizens to relocate to the UK.
While it says that the 1962 act had sought to use a voucher system to "reduce immigration from non-white countries", the 1968 act was "openly devised to discriminate on the basis of ethnic and racial ancestry".
The report says the 1971 act put a "definitive stop" to the right of any citizens of former British colonies to enter, live and work in Britain. It says the legislation's effect was "to change the law to say that not only were the Windrush generation no longer British, but also that they had never been British".
It adds that the 1981 act abolished all previous categories of British citizenship – including the kind that the rights of the Windrush generation were dependent on. The act gave members of the Windrush generation living in the UK a five-year amnesty to register as "Commonwealth citizens" or lose their right to UK citizenship, making their continued presence in the UK dependent on documentation they did not possess.
The report says the Home Office "spent too little time and money" informing the people affected by the abolition of their previous citizenship status about the impact of the measure – and what they needed to do to protect themselves.
"The Home Office assumed that because the Windrush generation were still entitled to live and work in Britain, nothing had changed, but in fact the framework within which this entitlement was contained had changed, and registration was required to acknowledge that fact," it says.
"In the case of the Windrush Scandal, the ‘hostile environment’ policies implemented in the 2010s did not consider properly the people whose lives and heritage have been defined by the events described in this report."
Earlier this month, migration minister Seema Malhotra was asked how much money the Home Office had spent trying to block publication of the report over the course of the past four years.
In a written answer to parliament, Malhotra said the department did not know the total legal fees that had been incurred, but expected the final cost to be "in the region of £22,000-£22,500".
"There was no awarding of costs in the First Tier Tribunal judgment that the department must disclose the Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal report," she said. "The only other costs incurred were Home Office officials’ time."
Fellow labour MP Dame Siobhain McDonagh had specifically asked for the "cost to the public purse", including both legal fees and other related costs.