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The death of Paulette Wilson reminds us of the shameful injustices against the Windrush generation
Paulette Wilson, the Windrush campaigner who died last week aged just 64, played an essential role in exposing one of the worst injustices inflicted by the British state in recent years. Wilson was the first member of the Windrush generation who bravely went public with her plight to the Guardian in 2017. Her story shocked the country – as someone who had moved to Britain from Jamaica aged 10, she had lived and worked legally here for decades. Despite that, she had her benefits withdrawn and was wrongfully arrested, detained at Yarl’s Wood and almost deported to a country she had not lived in for 50 years. Her story paved the way for others to come forward with equally dreadful accounts. Wilson has since campaigned tirelessly for justice; just last month, she and other campaigners presented a petition with more than 130,000 signatures to Downing Street calling for the full implementation of the independent Windrush review.
What happened to the Windrush generation is an indelible and ugly stain on this country; one of the most dreadful examples of the institutional racism we like to think of as long banished but that still lingers everywhere from police stop and search, to the over-representation of black young people in young offender institutions, to the high unemployment rates among young black men. As a direct result of Theresa May’s hostile environment policy, members of the Windrush generation, who had been actively encouraged to come to the UK from the Caribbean Commonwealth to take up public service jobs, including in the NHS, have wrongfully lost jobs they had had for decades, been denied NHS treatment for life-threatening conditions and been detained then deported to countries they had not visited for decades. Continue reading...