Windrush

Sunday was brunch with my friend Sophie and dinner with Eddis and two of her friends. Monday was helping David and Stuart move to Craigavon, followed by a long visit with Ann O’Dwyer. By the time I got home Monday night, I had a wicked sore throat and went to bed--couldn’t sleep all night my throat was so sore. I think I’ve been a bit too social since I’ve been home, trying to get caught up with too many people too quickly.

One of Eddis’s friends talked about her travels in Uzbekistan and Latin America. She’s a geologist and her professional interests have taken her all over the world. Ann’s son is in Zambia at the moment, so she filled me in on how he’s getting on. Maybe because Northern Ireland is so small, people get out and see a lot of the world. Ann was born in what was Rhodesia, where her father worked for the British imperial government. So that’s another reason the Northern Irish are global citizens--they were loyal servants of the British empire and the Commonwealth.

One of the big stories in the media now is how the descendants of immigrants from the British West Indies are being treated. Their parents came after WW2 on a ship called the Windrush (I think there were other ships, but this is being called the Windrush scandal). The parents were recruited to work as nurses and labourers and generally fill gaps in the post war British workforce. Children who came in the 1950s are now losing their apartments, jobs, and access to health care because they don’t have the right documents. If they never got a passport--if you never travel, why would you?--they have to produce four documents for every year since they came proving they lived here. Impossible. Some are being deported to places they haven’t seen for 40 or 50 years. Even though they’ve worked and paid taxes in Britain their whole adult lives. It’s madness.

The Tories have come in for a drubbing over this. One retired man was denied care for his cancer because he couldn’t produce a passport. Another man died suddenly months after losing his job then trying to collect documents to prove his residence for the past 30 or 40 years. His mother worked as a nurse for the NHS her whole career.

I can’t imagine how betrayed and confused people feel who rightly identify as British but are now being told they are Jamaican or Bermudian.
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