Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today.
by Guy Hewitt
The resignation of Alexandra Ankrah, the most senior Black employee in the Home Office team responsible for the Windrush compensation scheme, reinforced what many already knew; despite assertions to the contrary, racism and discrimination are alive and well in Britain’s immigration administration.
The Guardian newspaper in the UK reported that non-white staff members working on the Windrush Lessons Learned review were interviewed by a civil service equality, diversity and inclusion officer after making allegations of racial discrimination.
Ms Ankrah’s departure and subsequent revelations also confirmed what many feared, that the Windrush compensation scheme was, by design, built to fail. And if anyone can guarantee its demise, it’s Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, whose breaches of the ministerial code of conduct suggest a peculiar resilience against cries of foul play.
Beyond the Home Secretary’s shortcoming and the Conservative Party’s entrenched xenophobia, there is a collective failing of the British system of government when it comes to prejudice against Black people.
At the 2001 UN Conference against Racism, a Labour government resisted admitting Britain’s ‘guilt’ in the slave trade or affirming that slavery was a crime against humanity.
As an active part of the effort to address the Windrush scandal, I have come to appreciate it is not the West Indian diaspora, Black British politicians, or even Caribbean governments that stood alongside the victims, but The Guardian and Amelia Gentleman. They almost single handedly led the charge and continue to fight for justice.
Britain’s inability to confront its racist history reflects a ‘Vichy syndrome,’ that is, France’s struggle with coming-to-terms with les années noires between 1940 and 1944.
Charles de Gaulle developed the myth that the French were overwhelmingly patriotic and they themselves liberated the country. It was a myth designed to unify a people, not tell the truth.
Britons have similarly deluded themselves that Empire and colonisation were benevolent, a system of “benign tutelage” founded on humanitarian compassion for colonised subjects – protecting ‘lesser’ races and peoples while advancing their ‘civility’ and ‘development’.
The reality is quite different as Britain dominated the slave trade and became the economic superpower only through its dominance of slave plantation economies.
Narratives of abolition are often reduced to the misleading story of virtuous white benefactors bestowing freedom upon Black people (32 images of William Wilberforce are in the UK’s National Portrait Gallery).
Eric Williams, historian of slavery in the Caribbean and the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, argued in “Capitalism and Slavery” that abolition was largely a consequence of its economic redundancy.
Other West Indian historians have documented the fact that through rebellion enslaved Black people were agents of their own liberation.
This is not just a relic of history. The British government recently sought to suggest that the Black Lives Matter protests were a reaction to prejudice in America, including the deliberate and symbolic toppling of the statue of slaver Edward Colston in Bristol.
Matt Hancock, the health secretary, told Sky News that, “This is all based in response to events in America rather than here…”
When asked whether he thought Britain was racist, he asserted, “I don’t…” And as if to affirm her lack of cultural sensitivity, Priti Patel condemned the tearing down of Colston’s statue, referring to it as ‘utterly disgraceful’ and ‘sheer vandalism’.
Most recently, The Guardian newspaper reported that the English curriculum “systematically omits the contribution of black British history in favour of a dominant white, Eurocentric curriculum which fails to reflect the UK’s multi-ethnic society.”
Prince Harry has emerged as a recent ally of the accurate telling of British history, warts and all. In a recent British GQ interview, he underscored the need for people to educate themselves to be anti-racist and highlighted the importance of those in power to be aware of personal and systemic biases.
Guy Hewitt was High Commissioner for Barbados to the United Kingdom from 2014 to 2018.
