Windrush

Ellie Reeves Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

Thank you for the warning, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is an honour to follow a former member of the Anti-Nazi League. I have always thought that the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) was a bit of a closet pinko; she obviously needs to be looked into by the Conservative Chief Whip. I should like to congratulate my right hon. and hon. Friends on bringing a proper level of scrutiny to bear on this issue, including the shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), and the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper).

In particular, I want to congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), who really kick-started this and brought the issue out into the public spotlight. I should like to point out that his predecessor was Bernie Grant, who was a friend of mine. He came here from Guyana—it was British Guyana when he was there—with his head held high, proud of where he came from and proud of where he was going. That is the whole point about this scandal. People like Bernie are now being threatened with deportation. I say “people like Bernie” because he cannot be threatened with deportation; sadly, he passed away some years ago.

I am dealing with between 30 and 40 cases in my constituency. I have a big Windrush community. As a proportion, I am dealing with a very large number of cases. These are people who have been threatened with deportation, and I will give two brief examples. The first is a woman, and she is a classic Windrush baby case. She came to Britain as a baby in the 1960s, and she cannot remember Jamaica, which is where she was born. She has a broad east London accent, and it is pretty obvious that she is as quintessentially British and a Londoner as anyone else, yet when she went to apply for a passport for the first time in her life, having brought up a family and worked here for all these years, she was told not only that she could not have a passport but that she was going to be deported back to Jamaica. As she said, it is a country that she cannot remember.

[Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[John Cryer]

I can’t really say no, can I?

[Ellie Reeves]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. A constituent of mine who came to Britain as a child in 1972 was recently detained upon his return from Jamaica after visiting his father, who has dementia. He told me about his humiliation and that he has had no recourse to public funds since then. He now cannot visit his father again for fear of being detained. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is a travesty and that my constituent, along with his, should be afforded the same rights as every other British citizen without further delay?

[John Cryer]

Of course, I agree.

My second example is more unusual and involves a woman who came from Jamaica when she was a baby. She was abandoned by her parents and grew up in a nunnery, which—Members can tell what is coming—was closed down and demolished after she left, and its records were lost. Again, this is somebody with a broad east London accent. She is quintessentially British and has the right to stay here, but she was told, after she had been through all that, “We’re going to deport you.” That is the sort of culture that we are dealing with at the Home Office, and I suspect that it goes across Government, which I will come to in a minute.