Windrush: 70th Anniversary

Kevin Foster Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

I apologise that I was not here for the opening of my hon. Friend’s remarks due to Parliamentary Private Secretary duties. Does he agree that there is also the entrepreneurial spirit that many brought from the Indian subcontinent? For example, I opened the National Federation of Retail Newsagents conference in Torquay on Monday, and we see the impact in that industry, in particular, of the many entrepreneurial people who came to this country from the Commonwealth.

[Tom Tugendhat]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He will not know this, but I was a beneficiary of that entrepreneurial spirit. When I was learning to be a journalist, one of the papers that I worked for was Eastern Eye, a newspaper that was started by a couple of brothers in their bedroom, as it were, and is now an important voice for a major community in our country.

We are focusing on the Windrush gift to the United Kingdom, but there is a much wider gift here—a gift to the world of those people. Just as our own people, whether they come from these islands 1,000 years ago or come from these islands 10 years ago, have demonstrated the drive and energy to transform this part of the world, the connections around the world have also been transformed. This is where I think we have to focus now as a people, because too many countries today are looking inwards. Too many are seeing the borders, whether they be land or sea. They are seeing those borders as boundaries, and of course, they are not. Those borders are merely the front door to the rest; the front door to the other; the front door to our friends.

That is what we must start thinking about today as we change our relationship with our European friends, and as we change the way in which we interact around the world. We should be looking at the Windrush generation, and, of course, at all the generations, whether they are, like mine, emerging from a broken central Europe, or, like others, emerging from the heat, the sun and the light of the tropical climates from which so many came. Wherever they came from, we need to remember that the links that now tie this House of Commons, this people and these islands to the rest of the world are in no way a drag, but are, in a very fundamental sense, an enrichment.

This must be our new strategy. This must be our new approach: not just looking at the past, but looking at the future. If we can use these links of history, blood and understanding, reinvigorate them, and transform them again into the links that we all want to see—links of enterprise, energy, trade and culture—we shall have an extraordinary future for ourselves, built on a legacy that we all share, built on an enterprise that we all share, and built, fundamentally, on the memory that we are one people, one United Kingdom, and together we have a glorious future.