Windrush, Labour and the Convenient Forgetting of History

The real story of Windrush is not one of open-armed welcome. It is one of unease, delay and a desperate wish in Whitehall that the whole thing would quietly go away.

When The Labour Rosette, the Labour Party’s internal newsletter, landed this month, it carried a glowing article by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

It was timed for Black History Month and written with warmth and conscience, celebrating the Windrush generation and their role in building modern Britain.

Mahmood spoke of gratitude, pride, unity and justice. She wrote that those who came on the HMT Empire Windrush “helped a Labour Government build a New Jerusalem from the ashes of the Second World War.”

It was uplifting, polished, and politically neat.

But it was also wrong.

Because the real story of Windrush is not one of open-armed welcome. It is one of unease, delay and a desperate wish in Whitehall that the whole thing would quietly go away.

The inconvenient truth: Labour didn’t welcome the Windrush. It panicked.

June 1948.

Clement Attlee was Prime Minister. James Chuter-Ede was Home Secretary. Arthur Creech-Jones ran the Colonial Office. George Isaacs headed Labour and Employment.

When the HMT Empire Windrush was spotted en route to Tilbury Docks carrying more than 800 passengers from the Caribbean, the response in government was not celebration. It was alarm.

Creech-Jones wrote to Cabinet warning that the Government was “opposed to this migration” and would take “all possible steps to discourage it.” Plans were even drawn up to divert the ship to East Africa to use its passengers on the doomed Groundnuts Scheme.

On the day the ship docked, eleven Labour MPs wrote to Attlee warning that “an influx of coloured people” might “cause discord and unhappiness.”

Attlee tried to reassure them it was a one-off and that he did not expect any large influx to follow.

The Minister of Labour, George Isaacs, told Parliament he hoped “no encouragement will be given to others” to follow the example of the Windrush.

Behind the scenes, the Home and Colonial Offices moved to make sure it never happened again. Ticket prices from the Caribbean were raised, passport approvals tightened, and officials sent to warn potential travellers that there were “no jobs” and “no housing” waiting for them.

Chuter-Ede, for his part, preferred white European workers from the so-called European Voluntary Workers scheme, whom he regarded as more “socially compatible”.

So when the Rosette says the Windrush generation helped a Labour Government rebuild the nation, it leaves out the part where that same Government tried to stop them coming. They did help rebuild Britain, but they did so despite Labour’s discomfort, not because of its welcome.

Ladywood, the West Midlands and the Caribbean heartbeat

This history matters even more here in the Midlands, where the Windrush story is not a national abstraction but a lived local legacy.

The Rosette’s author represents Birmingham Ladywood, a constituency of around 142,000 people at the city’s diverse heart. Across Birmingham, about 44,700 residents identify as of Caribbean heritage, roughly four percent of the city’s population. The West Midlands as a whole now has an ethnically diverse population exceeding fifty percent.

These are the descendants of the original Windrush generation, the men and women who staffed hospitals, drove buses, built homes and shaped the character of Birmingham itself. They have faced decades of quiet discrimination and have endured it with quiet dignity.

So when a party newsletter romanticises Windrush as a Labour success story, it is not just a distortion of history. It is tone-deaf to the Midlands communities still living with the consequences of that historic ambivalence.

Seventy-five years on, the same delays echo on

The modern Windrush scandal did not fall from a clear blue sky in 2018. It was the result of decades of neglect, with roots reaching straight back to the political discomfort of 1948.

The scandal broke under Theresa May’s Conservative Government, and it was May herself, as Home Secretary, who laid its foundations with the “Hostile Environment” policy of 2012. That policy sought to make life unlivable for undocumented migrants and ended up trapping British citizens who had lived here legally for decades.

Her successor, Amber Rudd, presided over the early fallout in 2018, resigning once the full scale of the damage became clear. The policy wrecked lives. People who had arrived as children lost jobs, homes and healthcare. Some were detained or deported. Some died abroad.

The average age of victims was about sixty-two. Seven years later, many are now in their eighties and still waiting for justice.

The Windrush Compensation Scheme, launched in 2019, was supposed to put things right. Yet by March 2024 only around eighty-three million pounds had been paid across roughly 2,300 claims, from nearly 10,000 applications. Thousands have been told they have “zero entitlement”. Hundreds have died before receiving anything.

Even after a year of Labour in office, the delays persist. The same bureaucratic caution, the same slow machinery, the same half-comforting reassurances. The language has changed, but the habit of delay remains.

From “discourage and defer” to “review and process”

It is easy to trace the lineage.

In 1948 the instruction was “discourage and defer”.

In 2025 it is “review and process”.

The sentiment is unchanged.

In the forties, officials worried about too many arrivals from the Caribbean.

Now they worry about too many claims from their descendants.

The bureaucratic reflex of caution survives every political generation.

A Midlands reality check

If The Rosette wants to celebrate contribution, it must also confront consequence.

Because here in Birmingham, the Caribbean community remains one of the city’s great moral anchors and one of its most quietly under-recognised. The same families who built the city and kept it running through austerity, underfunding and pandemic strain are still fighting for what is owed.

To ignore that is not renewal. It is repetition.

The real test

It is easy to publish a party newsletter filled with noble sentiment. It is much harder to clear the backlog, fix the scheme and deliver compensation in full before any more victims die waiting.

So here is the test that every government should face: when will it be finished?

When will the Windrush Compensation Scheme be completed, and when will every living victim receive their full payment?

The Home Office knows the figures. The Treasury knows the total. The families know the pain. What they do not know — what nobody has yet had the courage to declare — is the date when justice will finally be done.

Until that date is named and honoured, all the talk of “New Jerusalems” and “the difference a Labour Government makes” will ring hollow — not only in Westminster, but on the streets of Ladywood, Handsworth and Smethwick, where Windrush’s legacy still lives and breathes.

Britain owes a debt that no amount of party spin can rewrite.

Windrush built the foundations of modern Birmingham and much of Britain beyond it.

It deserves truth, not myth.

And it deserves justice, not delay.

midlandsGRIT — where memory, history and politics are stripped of their polish and shown in the raw light they deserve.