Janet McKay-Williams watched ITV’s Post Office drama earlier this month with a rising sense of fury, instantly aware of the parallels between her family’s experience and the difficulties suffered by the post office operators. McKay-Williams has been fighting for justice for people affected by the Windrush scandal ever since her husband, Anthony Bryan, who had been living entirely legally in the UK since arriving here aged eight in 1965, was sacked from his job, arrested, wrongly held in an immigration detention centre for five weeks and booked on a plane back to Jamaica, a country he hadn’t visited in more than 50 years.
The parallels between the Post Office scandal and Windrush are stark. Both are systemic injustices that were ignored for years, despite victims’ persistent attempts to get politicians to pay attention. In both cases there were people who lost their jobs, their homes, were wrongly imprisoned, and some who were driven to suicide. Paula Vennells received a CBE for her work at the Post Office; one of the Home Office civil servants who helped design the “hostile environment” policies that saw thousands of people misclassified as illegal immigrants was made a knight commander of the order of Bath by Theresa May. Both scandals exploded into public consciousness unexpectedly, triggering sudden and startlingly effusive declarations of contrition from politicians and officials who, just days earlier, had exhibited zero interest in either matter.
McKay-Williams, a respite carer for children with disabilities, is still wrestling with the Home Office over compensation and was taken aback to hear Rishi Sunak promise upfront payments of £75,000 to 555 Post Office staff who took legal action against the Post Office. On the face of it, their problems seemed to be getting resolved with enviable speed. But she has two pieces of wise, battle-hardened advice for the post office operators who are now caught in the floodlights of political attention: one, make sure you achieve something before this issue goes out of the headlines; two, never give up, or people risk ending up with up nothing.
Her advice will also resonate with Hillsborough campaigners, already familiar with Westminster’s stop-start approach to delivering justice, and politicians’ tendency to jolt into action only when campaigners’ fury becomes too shaming to disregard.
London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, said he hoped ITV would now commission a Windrush drama to expose the full scale of the Home Office’s actions to new audiences. Those people who were wrongly categorised as immigration offenders and who are still waiting for compensation would welcome the same outpouring of public sympathy that might come from a thoughtful drama that engages 9 million viewers over four hours. A good drama would, in passing, educate people in Britain’s recent but forgotten colonial history, the collapse of its empire and the introduction of increasingly racist immigration legislation throughout the second half of the 20th century. It would also showcase how civil servants simply forgot there were tens of thousands of people living here legally but without documentation, and how May’s hostile environment policies meant officials started demanding they produce impossible-to-provide proof of their right to be here.
There is no shortage of material. While reporting on the Home Office’s mistakes, I’ve met pensioners wrongly imprisoned or deported to islands on the other side of the world they hadn’t travelled to since they were children, much-loved teachers and teaching assistants summarily sacked, ambulance drivers made homeless, cancer patients denied treatment, families torn apart.
It would be a mistake to imagine that the historical aspects of this story are well understood. When Wendy Williams, the official commissioned to investigate the Home Office’s mistakes, published her findings, she noted: “The Windrush scandal was in part able to happen because of the public’s and officials’ poor understanding of Britain’s colonial history.”
There have already been several inspired but shorter dramas aimed at bringing the experiences of those caught out by the Home Office’s Windrush mess to new audiences. The BBC’s Sitting in Limbo won a Bafta for its powerful dramatisation of Janet and Anthony’s difficulties with the Home Office. Lenny Henry’s hilarious and heartbreaking play August in England showcased a life spiralling into chaos as deportation letters rained down on the stage. A musical was written about the hostile environment (featuring dancing civil servants and a singing David Cameron happily belting out a showstopper on the need to cut net migration), and would have been staged if it hadn’t been for Covid; bits of On Hostile Ground by Charlotte Westenra and Juliet Gilkes Romero can be seen online, and the whole production should really have a West End transfer. Barbara Walker’s moving portraits of people whose lives were ruined by the scandal were shortlisted for the Turner prize and are now on show at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne.
The sobering lesson from Windrush is that art and drama can spark flashes of public outrage, but it tends to be quite fleeting, and politicians’ enthusiasm for action swiftly wanes once attention moves elsewhere. It’s up to reporters to continue highlighting the gap between the promises made and what’s actually been delivered. In the case of Windrush, that gap remains strikingly wide.
About 15,000 undocumented people have been given paperwork by the Home Office since the scandal, proving that they have (and always had) the right to live here. Officials initially expected that a similar number might claim for compensation, and anticipated paying out somewhere upwards of £200mn. Some progress has been made. So far, the scheme has paid out £75m for 2,000 claims (it is emblematic of the opaque scheme that officials have never been able to say how many individuals have received compensation – talking instead, confusingly, about claims).
But the scheme remains slow and bafflingly complex, demanding sophisticated actuarial skills to complete application forms successfully; no legal aid is available for advice. There is anger that the scheme was handed to the Home Office to administer – the same department that created the problem, then ignored it, repeatedly denied the problem existed, and then told reporters there was nothing much to worry about, is now responsible for deciding who to compensate and by how much.
In the wake of the scandal, successive home secretaries have promised comprehensive cultural reform of the Home Office. Priti Patel said she wanted to create a “fair, humane, compassionate and outward-looking” department; no one could accuse her of succeeding. Last year, Suella Braverman disbanded the Windrush “transformation team”, which was working to implement the promised (and not wholly delivered) post-Windrush reforms. James Cleverly has not felt the need to mention the legacy of the scandal since taking on the role of home secretary last November. It’s an issue the government would like everyone to believe has been resolved.
Many affected by the Home Office’s mistakes are, like Janet McKay-Williams, exhausted by the continuing battle to secure justice. At least 44 people are known to have died after submitting compensation claims, still waiting for payments. At this stage, more useful than further public outrage would be the efficient delivery of promises already made.
• Amelia Gentleman is a reporter and author of The Windrush Betrayal, Exposing the Hostile Environment
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
