Posts Tagged ‘undocumented migrants’

Windrush & Climate – 2018

Sunday, September 8th, 2024

Windrush & Climate – On Saturday 8th September 2018 after photographing a protest against the continuing hounding of Windrush generation migrants to the UK in Brixton I went to a Climate Change protest outside Tate Modern.


Justice for Windrush descendants – Brixton

Windrush & Climate - 2018

A rally and march hosted by Movement for Justice called for the Windrush scheme to be widened to include all families and descendants of the Windrush Generation and for an end to the racist hostile environment for all immigrants.

Windrush & Climate - 2018

The Windrush scandal first came to public attention in 2017 and 2018 when we heard that hundreds of migrants including those who had been urged to come and help Britain rebuild after the Second World War and who were then given the right to live and work in this country permanently where being hounded by the Home Office and some had already been deported.

Windrush & Climate - 2018

Much of the information came from the work of Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman publishing the experiences of these people. The Home Office in 2012 under Theresa May had introduced a ‘Hostile Environment’ law which required people to produce at least one official document from every year they had lived in the UK to prove they had the right to stay here.

Windrush & Climate - 2018

Many were of course unable to do this, and the Home Office itself had destroyed many of the official records which would have proved their case. Many were declared to be ‘undocumented migrants’ (or as the politicians and press racistly and inaccurately labelled them, ‘illegal immigrants’.

They “began to lose their access to housing, healthcare, bank accounts and driving licenses. Many were placed in immigration detention, prevented from travelling abroad and threatened with forcible removal, while others were deported to countries they hadn’t seen since they were children.

The government promised to correct the matter and in May 2018 the then Home Secretary Saji Javid set up a ‘Windrush Lessons Learned Review’ under Wendy Williams. When published in 2020 it showed that the Windrush scandal was the deliberate and inevitable result of Tory government policies.

Home Secretary Priti Patel then said she accepted the reports recommendations but in 2023 Suella Braverman decided to ditch three of of them. In June 2024 the High Court ruled that her actions in abandoning the promise to establish a migrants’ commssioner and to increase the powers of the independent chief examiner of borders and immigration was unlawful.

The scandal continues, and the replacement by 2025 of physical residence permits by digital e-visas for the roughly half a million non-EU immigrants with leave to remain in the UK seems almost certain to generate a similar scandal.

After a rally in Windrush Square which included Eulalee, a Jamaican grandmother who has been fighting for 17 years to stay in the UK with her Windrush generation husband, daughter and grandchildren as well as others affected by the scandal there was a march around the centre of Brixton, with several stops for short speeches in the more crowded parts.

Eulalee and Michael Groce on the march

Also on the march was Michael Groce, poet, community worker and Green Party candidate as councillor in Brixton, holds a poster ‘Yes, It’s Racist’. The 1985 Brixton riots began after police shot and seriously wounded his mother, putting her in hospital for a year. Later they paid her over £500,000 in damages without admitting any liability.

On the railway bridge across Brixton Road was the graffitied message ‘CLAPHAM THAT WAY YOU 2D FLAT WHITE TEPID COLONIALIST WANKER”, with Brixton gentrification now taking away much of the unique character of the area where many who arrived on the Empire Windrush in 1948 settled after having been initially housed in a giant wartime underground shelter on Clapham Common.

After marching around the centre of Brixton spreading their message with megaphones and posters the campaigners returned for a further rally in Windrush Square.

More at Justice for Windrush descendants.


Worldwide Rise For Climate – Tate Modern

Climate Reality, a global and diverse group of activists, community leaders, organisers, scientists, storytellers and others united to act over global warming was supported by the UK Campaign Against Climate Change, Fossil Free UK and the Green Party in one of thousands of rallies around the world demanding urgent action by government leaders to leaders commit to a fossil free world that works for all of us.

They called for people to take personal actions to reduce their own contribution to climate change but more importantly to join together to press for action at local, national and international level.

In particular they called for the government to end its support for fracking and for local authorities to divest from fracking and fossil fuels.

Worldwide Rise For Climate


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Against Austerity, Cleaners Flash Mob, EDL & Falun Dafa – 2016

Tuesday, July 16th, 2024

Against Austerity, Cleaners Flash Mob, EDL & Falun Dafa: The main event on Saturday 16th July 2016 was a well-attended march and rally against austerity and racism following the Brexit referendum, but on the way there I came across a Falun Dafa march, and while people were marching manged to cover a ‘Flash Mob’ by cleaners and a small protest by the far-right EDL.


End Austerity, No to Racism, Tories Out!

Against Austerity, Cleaners Flash Mob, EDL & Falun Dafa

The People’s Assembly and Stand Up To Racism had organised an emergency demonstration following the Brexit referendum against austerity and racism and calling for the Tories to be defeated at a General Election.

Against Austerity, Cleaners Flash Mob, EDL & Falun Dafa

The protest assembled outside the BBC in the hope that they might for once notice and report on a large protest in London, but as usual they ignored it. It also showed huge popular support for then Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn – who only failed to defeat Theresa May the following year because of sabotage by Labour party officials and the right wing of the party.

Against Austerity, Cleaners Flash Mob, EDL & Falun Dafa

Immigration had been a major issue in the Brexit referendum, exploited by the Leave campaign and this had resulted in an upsurge in racism and hate attacks. Brexit did result in lowering migration from the EU and since 2017 the number of those born in the EU living in Britain has slowly but slightly declined. But this has been more than matched by an increase of around a million in those born in non-EU countries.

Against Austerity, Cleaners Flash Mob, EDL & Falun Dafa

Of course we need these people who fill many useful jobs here and pay taxes. We also need those who work in the shadow economy, estimated in total to be around 10% of the total economy. Although this is often said to be important in attracting undocumented migrants to the UK, our shadow economy is significantly smaller than the average for developed nations, and at a level around half that of Italy, Greece and Spain and a little below Germany and France according to free-market ‘think tank’ the Institute for Economic Affairs.

The UK had been one of the leaders in the establishment of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948, and in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) adopted by the Council of Europe, signed in 1950 which came into force in 1953, with a court to enforce it. Many felt that the Tory government’s proposal in 2022 to repeal the Human Rights Act 1998 and replace it by a Bill of Rights was reprehensible. Liz Truss’s one good thing was to stop its progress and in June 2023 Rishi Sunak’s Justice Secretary Alex Chalk confirmed it had been dropped.

As the end of the march left down Regent Street I rushed off to photograph a breakaway group from the march who had left to take part in a flash mob. Following that I trotted along Oxford Street to Park Lane where I photographed a short march by a few EDL supporters before rushing to the tube to make my way to the People’s Assembly and Stand Up To Racist rally in Parliament Square.

The Fire Brigades Union had brought their fire engine to the square to provide a platform for the speakers at the rally chaired by rally chaired by Romayne Phoenix of the People’s Assembly and Sabby Dhalu from Stand Up to Racism.

Islington councillor Michelline Safi Ngongo brought a message of support from Jeremy Corbyn. Other speakers included Green Party London Assembly member Caroline Russell, Weyman Bennett from Stand Up to Racism, Lindsey German of Stop the War, Sam Fairbairn the National Secretary of the People’s Assembly, Zita Holbourne of BARAC and PCS, Rob Williams of the NSSN, NUS Vice President (Further Education) Shakira Martin and Antonia Bright from Movement for Justice who brought an asylum seeker with her to speak.

More on My London Diary:
Peoples Assembly/Stand Up to Racism rally
End Austerity, No to Racism, Tories Out


Falun Dafa march against Chinese repression – Regent St

Practitioners of Falun Dafa (also known as Falun Gong), an advanced Buddhist practice of moral rectitude, meditation and exercise founded by Mr Li Hongzhi in 1992, marched through London to protest the continuing torture and repression they have experience in China since 1999.

More at Falun Dafa march against Chinese repression


Cleaners Flash Mob at CBRE London HQ – Marylebone

When the People’s Assembly / Stand Up To Racism march set off, a small group of striking cleaners from 100 Wood St and supporters left to stage a flash mob protest at the nearby HQ Offices of CBRE in Henrietta Place. The United Voices of the World strike at Wood St for the living wage and reinstatement of sacked workers was then in its 38th day.

More at Cleaners Flash Mob at CBRE London HQ


EDL march and rally – Hyde Park

Less than a hundred EDL supporters had turned up at Marble Arch to march a few yards down Park Lane and then into Hyde Park for a rally. A few anti-fascists who had turned up to oppose them had mainly left to join the People’s Assembly-Stand Up to Racism march by the time I arrived.

More at EDL march and rally


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Strangers Into Citizens 2007

Friday, May 7th, 2021

One of the great failures of British politicians in my lifetime has been over immigration. Since Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in Birmingham in April 1968, both major parties have engaged in a desperate contest to show they are tougher on immigration than the other.

Immigration as we moved from Empire to Commonwealth wasn’t just a moral issue of living up to the promises the country had long made to its overseas subjects – but had failed to live up to. It was also a matter of economic and social need, for workers, nurses, bus conductors, doctors and more to keep the United Kingdom running. By the 1960s, a third of junior doctors were from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and in 1963 Enoch Powell, then minister of health launched a campaign which recruited a further 18,000 doctors from India and Pakistan.

Immigration controls had of course begun earlier, but the 1962 Conservative Commonwealth Immigrants Act began a new series of anti-immigration measures. Labour followed this with their 1968 Act, a panic measure to restrict the arrival here of Kenyan Asians. The 1971 Immigration Act and further legislation restricted even restricted the numbers of foreign nurses – who the NHS was and is still very reliant on.

On and on the politicians have gone, increasing the restrictions and playing the numbers game promoted by racists rather than adopting a positive approach and stressing the great advantages that immigrants have brought to this country. While in the Tory party attitudes have largely been driven by straight-forward racism and the residues of imperialism, Labour’s policies seem more cynical and solely based on middle-class electoral assumptions about working-class racism.

Of course there are working-class racists. But there is also working class solidarity that crosses any lines of race, and which could have been fostered by the Labour Party and the trade unions. Instead they have left the field largely open to the likes of the EDL and the lies of the right-wing press. In this and other ways Labour has not lost the working class, but abandoned it.

The vicious and racist policies imposed in recent years by Theresa May against migrants, particularly those here without official permission but also those with every right to be here but without a huge archive of paperwork by which to prove this – the Windrush generation have met with opposition from some mainly on the left in Labour, but they built on the policies of the New Labour government before here.

Labour have abstained rather than voted against so much discriminatory legislation, and their opposition to Priti Patel’s draconian bill which aims to criminalise Roma, Gypsy and Traveller lifestyles and increase the surveillance powers of immigration officers as well as introducing new ‘diversionary cautions’ against migrants to allow police to force them to leave the country has at best been half-hearted.

Of course there are exceptions. Honourable men and women in both parties who have argued against racist policies, and MPs who have voted with their consciences rather than follow the party line – and sometimes lost the party whip. And of course those in some of the smaller parties and outside parliament, particularly various religious leaders, some of whom took a leading role in the Strangers into Citizens March and Rally on May 7th 2007 which called for all those who have worked (and paid their taxes) here for more than four years to be given a two year work permit, after which if they get suitable work and character references they would be given indefinite leave to remain.

Although this still would not change our terrible mistreatment of those who arrive seeking asylum, it did seem a pragmatic solution to a major problem which governments have found intractable. But as the organisers of the event and many of the speakers insisted, it needed to be part of a wider package of fair treatment for those applying for asylum or immigration. But the political parties were not listening and seem only able to think of more and more restrictive, racist and authoritarian policies which drive us further into becoming a police state.

http://mylondondiary.co.uk/2007/05/may.htm


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