Category Archives: Society

Britain, Government, Politics, Society

The Windrush generation

BRITAIN

West Indian residents arrived in Britain after the Second World War.

Intro: The Windrush scandal has humiliated many of our citizens and is a bad stain on the UK

MANY immigrants from Commonwealth countries have lived in the UK for decades. A vast number of them have now been told by the Home Office that they are in the UK illegally and have been ordered to either prove their status or leave. British citizens welcomed here as children have been treated as mere numbers in a bureaucratic exercise flawed by the fact the British Government itself failed to retain the necessary records relating to the citizenship of many of these people. Most came from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1971. The first that many became aware of their questioned status was when they received official government letters informing them they were illegal immigrants. What an utter humiliating thing to happen to people who have every right to consider themselves British.

The fact that this bureaucratic mess isn’t scandal enough, the adjoining political response to it has been woeful and pitifully lacking. By the time Home Secretary Amber Rudd got to her feet in the House of Commons earlier this week, scores of British citizens had suffered the crass indignity of being treated as unwanted strangers in their home country. Labour MP David Lammy was quite right to describe this as a matter of national shame. The Home Secretary has promised the establishment of a task force in the Home Office which will help members of the Windrush generation, ensuring none lose access to public services and other entitlements. Given the way many have been treated this is the least they should expect.

It is impossible to consider the plight of the Windrush generation without considering that their race may have had something to do with the careless way their citizenship and naturalisation status was dealt with. It is perfectly reasonable to question that, if those affected had been white, any such problems would have arisen. Amber Rudd was right to offer an unreserved apology to those treated so disgracefully by a Home Office and Government that loses sight of individuals. She must, however, go much further.

Those who have suffered due to bureaucratic incompetence should have the right to claim compensation for the indignity and injury they have suffered. At the very minimum, anyone forced out of pocket because they had to hire legal counsel or apply again for citizenship should have all costs reimbursed. The Windrush scandal is a stain on the UK and the sooner it’s cleared up, the better.

 

THE Home Office couldn’t have made a more humiliating hash of dealing with the toxic row over the Windrush generation.

As soon as it became clear that Caribbean migrants who have lived, worked, paid taxes and raised families here for 50 years or more were being stripped of their residency rights, ministers should have acted immediately and without prevarication to address this cruel and inhumane injustice.

Instead, they stalled and vacillated, giving the impression of callous indifference to the plight of decent people who have lost their jobs, been denied state benefits and NHS care and even forced out of Britain. Access to UK bank accounts were also denied.

The utter fiasco continued as Amber Rudd and Immigration Minister Caroline Nokes admitted that many may already have been deported and, astonishingly, didn’t know how many, or who they were.

The Windrush generation from countries such as Jamaica were invited here to help post-war reconstruction and have hugely enriched our cultural life. To even consider deporting them – especially when countless foreign criminals are allowed to live here with impunity – is a grotesque betrayal.

 

UNDER the 1971 Immigration Act, all Commonwealth citizens already living in the UK were given indefinite leave to remain. But the Home Office did not keep records of those given to stay or issue any documents confirming this. Many people never applied for passports or became naturalised, so it became virtually impossible to prove that they were in the UK legally.

Changes to immigration law – introduced under Labour in 2006, then toughened by the Coalition in 2014 – was aimed primarily to weed out visa over-stayers.

Thousands of landing card slips recording the arrival of migrants, including those of the Windrush generation, were destroyed in 2010. It is these slips that would have proven important to establish citizenship. Instead, people would be sent a standard government letter which said: ‘We have searched our records, we can find no trace of you.’ Many were then deported.

David Lammy who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on race and community, said: ‘This reveals that the problems being faced by the Windrush generation are not down to one-off bureaucratic errors but as a direct result of systemic incompetence, callousness and cruelty.’

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Britain, Government, Legal, Scotland, Society

The ‘right to protect property’ and ‘bash a burglar’ laws

PROPERTY AND THE RIGHT OF SELF-DEFENCE

UK ministers toughened up the laws relating to the right of self-defence when protecting property five years ago. The so-called ‘bash a burglar’ laws were introduced to dispel doubts over the right to fight back against housebreakers in England and Wales.

In Scotland, however, something of a grey area still remains.

Legislation was introduced south of the Border in April 2013 backing the ‘householder defence’, which means a homeowner, or an occupier of a property can use ‘disproportionate force’ in the heat of the moment.

A 2016 High Court ruling upheld the guidance from the Crown Prosecution Service – England’s equivalent of Scotland’s Crown Office – stating: ‘You are not expected to make fine judgments over the level of force you use in the heat of the moment. So long as you only do what you honestly and instinctively believe is necessary in the heat of the moment, that would be the strongest evidence of you acting lawfully and in self-defence.

‘This is still the case if you use something to hand as a weapon.’

Acts of revenge, however, are outside the remit of the law.

But in Scotland, the law was not altered to give greater defensive rights to homeowners because Scottish ministers feared it would lead to a growing number of ‘have-a-go heroes’.

Under Scots law, any self-defence still must be deemed ‘proportionate and reasonable’.

A senior legal expert has said that, if accepted by a jury, self-defence would have the effect of a ‘complete defence’. An accused would be acquitted of the charge of murder or culpable homicide if self-defence was successfully established.

The closest thing in Scots law to the householder defence which exists south of the Border would be the concept of provocation.

Provocation is not a complete defence, but would have the effect of reducing a charge of murder to one of culpable homicide if successfully established.

 

A NATIONAL debate about a homeowner’s right to defend their property took place in 1999 when farmer Tony Martin blasted 16-year-old Fred Barras with a shotgun during a late-night raid at his remote Norfolk home.

Barras was hit in the back and died at the scene after escaping through a window. His accomplice, serial burglar Brendon Fearon, then 29, was also injured during the burglary at Emneth Hungate.

Bachelor Mr Martin, then 54, said he had been burgled at least ten times and had lost about £6,000 worth of furniture.

But he was given a life sentence after he was found guilty of murder by jury with a majority of ten to two.

Prosecutors claimed he lay in wait for the intruders and opened fire from close range. Mr Martin, who said he shot at the intruders in the dark after he was woken by the sound of a window being broken, later had his term cut on appeal to five years for manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He served three years in prison.

He has never returned to his home and now lives at a secret address. He is understood to have slept in his car on some occasions.

Mr Martin was arrested again in December 2015 after saying in an interview he still owned guns. No action was taken because all that was found was a faulty air gun which he held legally.

Fearon received a 20-month sentence. He has since been jailed for supplying heroin. He claimed to have been permanently disabled by Mr Martin but dropped a £15,000 civil claim when he was photographed walking and cycling.

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Arts, Books, Britain, History, Society

Book Review: Hearts And Minds

SUFFRAGISTS–SUFFRAGETTES

Smashed windows, lobbed bombs and underhand tactics. A fascinating new book in this 100th year of the suffragette movement casts new light on the bitter rivalry between the women who fought for the vote. The war between the sisters.

A USEFUL mnemonic for remembering the difference between suffragists and suffragettes is ‘Millicent: non-militant’.

Millicent Fawcett and her suffragist crowd were the peaceful ones who trundled around Britain in horse-drawn caravans, waved embroidered banners, dropped leaflets from hot-air balloons and used the art of gentle persuasion.

The suffragette Pankhurst and her troupe were the ones who went around smashing shop windows, bombing pillar-boxes and slashing paintings in the National Gallery.

Jane Robinson’s lively new book on the subject, published in this 100th anniversary year of the Representation of The People Act of 1918 – that, at last gave women the vote – is an excellent source of reading for fleshing out those spare bits of general knowledge.

Suffragists, Robinson tells us, were rude about suffragettes, calling them a “dictatorship movement of the sort that drives democracy out”. Suffragettes were rude and curt back, saying that suffragists were “staid, so willing to wait, so incorrigibly leisurely”.

The author of this book brings all these straight-backed Edwardian ladies to life, telling the story of the centrepiece of the suffragist movement: the Great Pilgrimage of 1913, in which thousands of suffragists walked all the way to London from far-flung corners of Britain for a mass rally of 50,000 in Hyde Park.

The aim was to drive the world’s attention (and that of stubborn prime minister Herbert Asquith) to the growing swell of opinion in favour of the women’s vote – and to prove women had the ability to turn the world upside down without violence.

 

THEIR peaceful protest proved to be the prototype for others, from the Jarrow march of 1936 to the Greenham Common peace camp of the 1980s.

Did the pilgrimage do any good? Well, trying to get Asquith to change his mind was like banging your head against a brick wall, and it would take a four-year World War to bring about the Act of Parliament for which the campaigners yearned.

But it was their suffragist training that gave women the confidence to step into men’s jobs when the war started; and by their war efforts in factories and hospitals they “worked out their own salvation”, as Asquith himself put it.

On a sunny morning in June 1913, the Great Pilgrimage began – the Watling Street Pilgrims setting off first, for their five-week walk from Carlisle.

It was thanks to a sensible piece of sartorial advice for the pilgrims – that skirt hems should be taken up four inches to prevent them getting caked in mud – that skirt lengths began their slow progression up the leg from that moment on.

Some pilgrims wore their smart new Burberry raincoats (“airy, light and porous … the ideal coat for the Pilgrimage”, according to Burberry’s own advertisement). Lady Rochdale, carrying her rolled umbrella, strode out side-by-side with Emily Murgatroyd, a weaver at a cotton mill since the age of ten. In those class-ridden days, this pilgrimage was the first coming-together of women from all walks of life – though the wealthier ones did enjoy the luxury of posting their dirty laundry home and picking up parcels of nice clean blouses en route.

The Land’s End Pilgrims started next, then the Great North Road Pilgrims, then the North Wales Pilgrims, and so on, until the Brighton and Kentish Pilgrims stepped out in the final week, all fixing their compasses on Hyde Park.

One of the less literate pilgrims spelled “suffrage” wrong in her diary – “sufferage”. Robinson coins this spelling mistake as a useful word to describe how some of them suffered for their cause. Vast swathes of the public couldn’t tell a ‘gist from a ‘gette, and classed them all as “pantomime villains” who deserved to be beaten up or pelted with rotten tomatoes, stones and rubbish.

In Birkenhead the Pilgrims were pelted with coal – not by disaffected men, but by women and children, reminding us that there was vociferous female as well as male “antis”, who believed that women should shut up and (as one poem went) be satisfied with “The right to brighten earthly homes / With pleasant smiles and gentle tones”.

To a woman, they picked themselves up, dusted themselves down, rearranged their sashes, and started all over again. They wore body armour in the form of pieces of cardboard which they moulded to the body in the bath and then allowed to dry, so they fitted snugly. The more “sufferage” they endured, the stronger their sense of sisterhood grew.

 

LUCKILY, there were just as many kind and supportive locals across the country who gave them hot baths, as well as crumpets for tea and beds for the night. By the day of the Hyde Park rally on July 26, the atmosphere in London was celebratory.

From the gates at all four corners of the park, thousands of pilgrims poured in. Seventy-eight speakers stood up on platforms, announcing that the “tide had turned”. An hour later, bugles sounded, and the resolution was proposed: “This meeting demands a Government measure for the enfranchisement of women.” It was passed unanimously.

A page later, Asquith’s pompously anticlimactic reply to the suffragists’ post-rally letter demanding that he take notice will have many readers banging their heads against a brick wall. “I feel bound to warn you,” he wrote, “that I do not see my way to add anything material to what I have lately said in the House of Commons as to the intentions and policy of the Government.” In other words, “Nice try, but no cigar.”

The suffragettes continued with their usual business of window-smashing and raiding Downing Street – all of which, the suffragists believed, did more harm than good to “the cause”, blackening the reputation of campaigners. Everyone was so busy smashing things up or not smashing things up that none of them noticed that “the war to end all wars” was creeping up behind them.

During that cataclysm of a war, women really proved their worth. By 1915, the slogans on their banners had changed to: “Shells Made by a Wife may Save a Husband’s Life”. And indeed they did.

Suffragists and suffragettes alike did astonishingly demanding war work, including running hospitals on the Western Front.

The great suffragist Katherine Harley – who had come up with the idea of the Great Pilgrimage – was killed in 1917 by a shell while caring for refugees in Serbia.

“We can’t give these suffragists and their militant sisters much in return,” Robinson writes, “except a promise to use the vote they fought so hard to win and, wherever it’s necessary, to keep on fighting.”

– Hearts And Minds by Jane Robinson is published by Doubleday for £20

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