A damning report confirms that Liverpool families were "brutally ripped apart" by the "racist and coercive" actions of the British government, according to a city MP.
Riverside MP Kim Johnson was speaking today after a government confirmed that Chinese seamen were forcibly deported, many of them away from their wives from Liverpool after the Second World War. Ms Johnson has been campaigning for the truth to be revealed about the scandal and for a full apology to the families affected.
Today, a Home Office report confirmed that Chinese seamen in Liverpool were targeted with Deportation Orders, threats and coercion to force them out of the country and away from their spouses and families. Some of the men were snatched from the streets of Liverpool, often in the dead of night. Many of them had helped with the Allied war effort.
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Until July 1946, a marriage to a British-born woman that had taken place during the war did not provide foreign men with a route to settlement in the UK, the report states. It adds: "Chinese seamen were targeted for repatriation because their presence in Liverpool was seen at the time as disruptive because there was pressure to man ships for war operations in the Far East, and because this supported shipping companies’ ability to maintain a pool of cheap labour."
The report adds that Deportation orders were used in a small number of cases to enforce the repatriation of Chinese sailors, but that other forms of coercion, including threats of deportation and lack of employment, were applied to persuade seamen to depart.
The report adds: "Loss and destruction of records make it very difficult to make definitive findings on the overall numbers or individual identities of married men repatriated, whether voluntarily or as a result of coercion. However, there is evidence from contemporary official and media sources that some married men were required to depart.
"No effort was made to allow those married men already repatriated, who wished to do so, to return to Liverpool after the policy was changed in July 1946 to make wartime marriages grounds for settlement in the UK."
Ms Johnson, whose efforts in Parliament pushed for the report to be compiled, said it painted a 'damning picture' of the British treatment of Chinese seafarers in Liverpool with 'families brutally ripped apart' despite their service to our country during the war.
She added: "It leaves no doubt that the Chinese community received racist and coercive treatment at the hands of the state, where White foreign nationals were treated with far more compassion and respect. These events are a stain on our history and unfortunately there are still many parallels with the way minoritised and migrant workers are treated in our country today.
"The report finally debunks the myth parroted by successive British governments that these repatriations were all voluntary. The conspiracy between the state and the shipping companies to maintain a cheap pool of Labour along racial lines is in many ways the story of empire, and the story of Liverpool."
Ms Johnson continued: "This investigation and recognition would not have come about without the decades of campaigning by the children of the Chinese seafarers, and I pay tribute to their strength, resilience and determination in their fight for truth and justice.
While I’m proud that we’ve done everything we can to find out the truth of what happened, my heart breaks for the families who still have no closure because the records no longer exist. It’s frustrating that we’ve still fallen short of a formal apology, both by the government and the Labour Party, and I will continue to push for one from both."
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