The Home Office has reluctantly published a fascinating independent review of the racism underpinning immigration legislation, focussing on the period 1950 to 1981. The report is described as “an accessible explainer on how race and immigration policy came to be so closely entwined in the political history of the UK”. I will look at the decision of the tribunal that forced this disclosure in more detail in a post tomorrow, so stay tuned for that.

Background

On 19 March 2020, Wendy Williams’ report “Windrush Lessons Learned Review” was published. Recommendation 6 a) was that:

The Home Office should devise, implement and review a comprehensive learning and development programme which makes sure all its 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. This programme should be developed in partnership with academic experts in historical migration and should include the findings of this review, and its ethnographic research, to understand the impact of the department’s decisions” colonial history, the history of inward and outward migration and the history of black Britons’.

The tribunal set out more background as follows:

In the same year the Home Office announced that its Race Action Programme Team had commissioned an independent historian (with the support of Home Office staff and using the resources of the National Archives) to write a historical guide to the roots of the Windrush Scandal for Home Office staff – “The Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal”. This was intended to be used as a resource to improve understanding of the historical development of immigration policy at the Home Office in the context of the role of race in the British Empire. The historical guide was separate from the learning programme on migration. The Historical Roots Report was published on the Home Office Windrush intranet learning site in 2021 and remained there at the time of the April submission. It had been leaked to the Guardian which had prompted a number of FOI requests.

The report

The executive summary of the report includes the following:

Gradually, the politics of race and immigration became intertwined with one another to the extent that during the period 1950-1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK. The complex history of the British Empire explains why race and racism as political and social issues developed as they did in the UK; the actions of postwar governments explain the state of play in the twenty-first century – of which the deep-rooted racism of the Windrush Scandal is a symptom.

These are the general themes, but there are also more specific lessons to be learned from an investigation of the historical roots of the Windrush Scandal. These are as follows:

1. 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, 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.

2. 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.

3. The relationship between the Home Office and organisations set up to deal with race relations was dysfunctional in the second half of the twentieth 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. 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 report as a whole is well worth a read and you can also read Colin’s initial thoughts here.

Conclusion

For me, seeing everything pulled together like this reminds me of the “White Australia policy“, touched on briefly in this report. I think it would be really interesting to read a more detailed comparison of the two and to what extent both countries motivated or influenced each other (I am sure at least one such piece is out there somewhere).

Racism in immigration policy is not just a historical fact, it remains a major issue now (there are many, many other links I could have included). It is tempting to blame ministers alone, but they make decisions based on Home Office submissions, including this recent case where it was held that the decision to drop some of Wendy Williams’ other recommendations was indirectly discriminatory on the basis of race. The Home Office has had this report for the last two years, during which time they have battled to keep the rest of us from reading it. Have any lessons been learned?