Speaker 1: Anthony Williams has been living in the UK since he
Speaker 1: was about seven years old. He came over with his
Speaker 1: parents in the seventies from Jamaica, a former British colony.
Speaker 1: He went straight from school to the British Army, serving
Speaker 1: for thirteen years and now lives in Birmingham. But he
Speaker 1: lost his job as a janitor because he couldn't prove
Speaker 1: he was a citizen. To make matters worse, he didn't
Speaker 1: qualify for unemployment benefits either, and that's when it all
Speaker 1: hit the fan that always be entitled to maybe benefits
Speaker 1: because I was not any system that was pure confusion.
Speaker 1: And that's truly Anthony wasn't the only person experiencing this
Speaker 1: rude awakening. There's a name for the thousands of black
Speaker 1: people in Britain who, like Anthony, suddenly and for the
Speaker 1: first time, found their citizenship status in question. They're part
Speaker 1: of a group called the wind Rush generation. The Empire
Speaker 1: wind Rush was a ship that in brought hundreds of people,
Speaker 1: mostly black, from British colonies in the Caribbean to help
Speaker 1: rebuild the United Kingdom after World War Two. From that
Speaker 1: point on, the UK saw a wave of arrivals from
Speaker 1: the islands that would last over the next twenty five years.
Speaker 1: The earliest arrivals came over as citizens of the British Empire,
Speaker 1: and those who came later were granted all the rights
Speaker 1: provided to anyone born in the UK. But in a
Speaker 1: surge of immigration from Europe and criticism that the government
Speaker 1: was losing its grip on its borders resulted in a
Speaker 1: broad crackdown on what the government called illegal migrants. That
Speaker 1: made things complicated for people like Anthony who had never
Speaker 1: been considered illegal migrants before, but who also didn't have
Speaker 1: the paperwork to prove their right to be in the country.
Speaker 1: Many lost access to jobs, education, health care. Some were
Speaker 1: even deported. It is of Barbados or someone and actually
Speaker 1: makes it something to chea may. Regardless, whatever problem that
Speaker 1: seemed to be, a lot of people gained. Deporting back
Speaker 1: to our countries who have been in UK was the problem. Then,
Speaker 1: after public outcry over the mistreatment of the wind Rush generation,
Speaker 1: something remarkable happened. The wind Rush generation helped to build
Speaker 1: the country that we are today. And I want to
Speaker 1: dispel any impression that my government is in some sense
Speaker 1: clamping down on kind of world citizens, particularly those in
Speaker 1: the Caribbean who worked a life here. The Home Secretary
Speaker 1: apologized to her commons yesterday for any anxiety calls, and
Speaker 1: I want to apologize to you today. Prime Minister Theresa
Speaker 1: May herself in the UK government apologized and set aside
Speaker 1: what they called compensation for the harm cast. Only a
Speaker 1: handful of governments have ever done this. It's a big deal.
Speaker 1: But making amends for past injustices is that such an
Speaker 1: easy feat? That's something Alexandra Anger, who headed the wind
Speaker 1: Rush compensation policy, would soon find out. I thought that
Speaker 1: this was a real opportunity, having myself worked in the
Speaker 1: area of truth and reconciliation. But little did I know
Speaker 1: that really wasn't the plan. It is the scandal which
Speaker 1: shamed Britain. Thousands from the so called wind Rush generation
Speaker 1: who came here legally were then told they were here illegally.
Speaker 1: The data shows that the median white family has ten
Speaker 1: times more wealth than the average black family. Economists often
Speaker 1: point to the absence of African American generational wealth. It
Speaker 1: is inhumane and cruel for so many of that wind
Speaker 1: Druss generation to have suffered so long. It's much easier
Speaker 1: to integrate a lunch content than it is to guarantee
Speaker 1: an annual income. For instance, to get rid of positive
Speaker 1: hundreds of Black Britons were failed who after decades were
Speaker 1: British but not British enough. Welcome back to the paycheck.
Speaker 1: I'm Jackie Simmons and I'm Rebecca Greenfield. In our last
Speaker 1: episode we talked about the movement to pay reparations in
Speaker 1: the United States. The money would go to descendants of
Speaker 1: people who were enslaved to acknowledge the harm done, and
Speaker 1: a knock on effect is that it helps close the
Speaker 1: racial wealth gap. Last week, the House advanced a bill
Speaker 1: that would study reparations for descendants of slaves, but any
Speaker 1: payments to black people still face a major uphill battle.
Speaker 1: There are other countries that have given cash payments to
Speaker 1: populations for persecution andcluding our friends just across the Atlantic,
Speaker 1: the UK is in the midst of what it calls
Speaker 1: a compensation scheme to pay back members of the wind
Speaker 1: Rush generation. The story of wind Rush might sound like
Speaker 1: an immigration story, but it's also a story about black
Speaker 1: economic inequality in the UK. Around four of the UK
Speaker 1: population is non white, and in London of residents are
Speaker 1: ethnic minorities. Many of those people immigrated from former British colonies,
Speaker 1: some of them descendants of slaves, and when they came
Speaker 1: to the UK they faced discrimination in where they could
Speaker 1: live and what jobs they could have. They also faced
Speaker 1: outright violence based on their race, much like in the US.
Speaker 1: Some of that historic discrimination manifests in a vast racial
Speaker 1: wealth gap today. A recent report found white British households
Speaker 1: have nine times the median total wealth of a family
Speaker 1: headed by someone from a black African background, and more
Speaker 1: than twice the proportion of black people live in low
Speaker 1: income households than white people. But the wind Rush compensation
Speaker 1: scheme wasn't set up to address any of that. The
Speaker 1: government has approached it more like fixing a bureaucratic error,
Speaker 1: which is partly why it's less of a model and
Speaker 1: more of a cautionary tale. Olivia Carnte Hulu, a reporter
Speaker 1: in Bloomberg's London bureau, has more m Let's go back
Speaker 1: to Anthony Williams. He's the man you heard about at
Speaker 1: the start of the show. Things were fine for him
Speaker 1: until shortly after he started a job as a head
Speaker 1: janitor in two thousand and thirteen. He was then told
Speaker 1: he was no longer employable and he didn't have the
Speaker 1: right to work in the UK. A year earlier, Thereason May,
Speaker 1: who at that time was Home Secretary and leading the
Speaker 1: government's new immigration strategy, brought in what would become known
Speaker 1: as the Hostile Environment. She introduced a series of new
Speaker 1: measures which included requiring landlords, the National Health Service, charities
Speaker 1: and other organizations to carry out ID checks. The government
Speaker 1: also starts a communication drive across London, telling people who
Speaker 1: they called illegal immigrants to go home or face being
Speaker 1: arrested and detained. The aim was to make the UK
Speaker 1: a really harsh place to live for undocumented migrants. We
Speaker 1: want to ensure that only legal migrants have access to
Speaker 1: the labor market, free health services, housing, bank accounts and
Speaker 1: driving licenses. And it is not just about making the
Speaker 1: UK a more hostile place for illegal migrants. It is
Speaker 1: also about fairness. The national if you like narrative was around.
Speaker 1: We've got to show that if you don't have the
Speaker 1: right to be here, we're gonna make it really hostile
Speaker 1: so you leave. Unfortunately, people who had the absolute right
Speaker 1: to be here, who had come from the Commonwealth, often
Speaker 1: of their parents. They were being told, if you can't
Speaker 1: prove you've got the right to be here. We're going
Speaker 1: to take away your access to your job, to healthcare,
Speaker 1: to education. And this was shocking because you know, there'd
Speaker 1: always been this idea that if you'd come from the Commonwealth,
Speaker 1: you just had the right to be here. You you
Speaker 1: didn't need to prove the right to be here. That's
Speaker 1: Alexandra Anchor from the Windress Compensation scheme. She's worked as
Speaker 1: a barrister and an expert on restorative justice. Alexandra's not
Speaker 1: from the Windress generation herself, but the father's from Garnet
Speaker 1: and she knew someone whose parent was a fellow ger
Speaker 1: name who was caught up in the scandal. Anthony, who
Speaker 1: never needs any paperwork before found out he was lacking
Speaker 1: crucial proof of his right to work, which made it
Speaker 1: impossible for him to get a job. And what he
Speaker 1: saw in newspapers about the government's new immigration strategy scared him.
Speaker 1: How people get picked up on the streets. The van
Speaker 1: had been around with a massive sign saying if you're
Speaker 1: here illegally, pack three bags, we were coming to get you.
Speaker 1: That kind of stuff and put really frightened people. So,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, some people are on the ground.
Speaker 1: The money was sure. I mean, come the winter, Tom,
Speaker 1: I did the stupid things like I just turned my
Speaker 1: fridge off. It is that cold in the flat. Anthony's
Speaker 1: limbo lasted five years. During that time, he couldn't access healthcare.
Speaker 1: He was unable to get treatment when he had a
Speaker 1: serious gum infection and lost most of his teeth. I
Speaker 1: was confused. I think that was going on, and I
Speaker 1: believe that was I was the only person exactly too.
Speaker 1: I didn't have no one to talk to about it, really,
Speaker 1: because it's not I don't I don't want to talk
Speaker 1: about because of my past being that being in the army,
Speaker 1: and now I'm being treated in this way and it's
Speaker 1: a it's actually hurting my pride of it. They really
Speaker 1: have to really nderstand why this is a story about
Speaker 1: racial dynamics in the UK. We have to go back
Speaker 1: a few centuries well before, when the Empire wind Rust
Speaker 1: sailed into the Tilbury Docks in the east of England,
Speaker 1: carrying hundreds of people to help the country rebuild. I
Speaker 1: talked to my colleague from City Lab Brenon Mock, who's
Speaker 1: written about the history of afric Caribbeans in the UK
Speaker 1: and about how the wind Dress generation fits in Hey Brenon, Hey, Olivia.
Speaker 1: So I wrote about this last year for Bloomberg City
Speaker 1: lab and it's important to understand that the United Kingdom
Speaker 1: colonized many of the Caribbean islands in the sixteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: and in the centuries that followed, they'd go on to
Speaker 1: form a key part of the Empire's trade network. The
Speaker 1: colonies took millions of black people from Africa to work
Speaker 1: on sugar plantations in London's Financial District, became the center
Speaker 1: of an economic system built on Caribbean slavery. When slavery
Speaker 1: ended across the British Empire in the eighteen thirties, white
Speaker 1: elites and governors stopped investing in infrastructure, education, and business
Speaker 1: development on these islands. So to achieve some semblance of
Speaker 1: economic mobility, the newly freed Afro Caribbeans traveled to other
Speaker 1: parts of the British Empire and also the Americans to
Speaker 1: earn money, much of which they sent back to their families.
Speaker 1: World War Two is a massive turning point for Britain
Speaker 1: and its relationship with its Caribbean colonies. Thousands of people
Speaker 1: from the islands joined the armed forces as British subjects
Speaker 1: and When the fighting was over, many of them traveled
Speaker 1: to Britain to help rebuild the nation they felt a
Speaker 1: sense of loyalty to, and this is where we're beginning
Speaker 1: our story of the wind Rush generation. Many of their
Speaker 1: ancestors were enslaved and their children were considered subjects of
Speaker 1: the British Empire and its colonies, so many of them
Speaker 1: weren't really immigrants, at least not those first arrivals. Yet
Speaker 1: the new Afro Caribbean arrivals experienced both over in casual racism,
Speaker 1: they were harassed and because white people refused to work
Speaker 1: alongside them, they were denied jobs. The day the Empire,
Speaker 1: when Russia arrived in England, a group of lawmakers wrote
Speaker 1: to the Prime Minister warning about the consequences of what
Speaker 1: they call quote an influx of colored people. Today, some
Speaker 1: people are proud of the UK's imperial history, when at
Speaker 1: one point it held power over around quarter of the
Speaker 1: world's population. Othersly the period is one of huge economic
Speaker 1: exploitation and human suffering, which was the starting point for
Speaker 1: gaping and equality, not just within the UK but across
Speaker 1: the globe. And then there's thads who see the truth
Speaker 1: that somewhere in between the two. One thing is clear.
Speaker 1: Over the years, Black communities in Britain have registered their
Speaker 1: anger with what they see is continued unequal treatment. When
Speaker 1: the US police officer murdered George Floyd last year, there
Speaker 1: was an outpouring of grief for the discrimination that black
Speaker 1: people have experienced in the UK that explodes into a
Speaker 1: series of protests like the ones we saw in the US.
Speaker 1: Much of that frustration was targeted at how the wind
Speaker 1: Dress generation has been treated. There's been a lot of
Speaker 1: soul searching since then. Financial heavyweights in the City of
Speaker 1: London have begun to apologize for the roles they played
Speaker 1: in financing and profiting from the slave trade. The wind
Speaker 1: Dress compensation scheme was established before the George Floyd protests.
Speaker 1: It was never about trying to address these wider issues
Speaker 1: and apologizing for racism and slavery. It's about making amends
Speaker 1: for a series of errors. The most significant of those
Speaker 1: mistakes took place in the nineteen seventies, about a decade
Speaker 1: after the majority of British colonies became independent. There was
Speaker 1: a growing feeling within the government but also across the
Speaker 1: country that too many people were coming to live in
Speaker 1: Britain so they introduced legislation to make it harder for
Speaker 1: people to get to the UK. One of those laws
Speaker 1: decided that everyone who arrived in the country from the
Speaker 1: former empire before nineteen seventy three could stay, but authorities
Speaker 1: kept no official record of everyone that they gave that
Speaker 1: permission to. There was no paperwork or any kind of identification,
Speaker 1: in what has since been called a profound institutional failure
Speaker 1: by an independent review. Then in two thousand and ten,
Speaker 1: the Home Office, the ministry in charge of Domestic Affairs,
Speaker 1: destroyed the immigrants landing cards. It says that decision was
Speaker 1: for data protection reasons and they didn't think the information
Speaker 1: on the cars was that important. The Black Caribbean British
Speaker 1: residents were left with absolutely no way of proving their
Speaker 1: right to live in the country, and they had never
Speaker 1: needed that until the hostile environment policies were introduced. We'll
Speaker 1: probably never know how many members of the win Dress
Speaker 1: generation got caught up in this policy. It's safe to
Speaker 1: say thousands. The compensation scheme that the UK government came
Speaker 1: up with aimed to right the wrongs of the scandal,
Speaker 1: paying what they described as quote eligible individuals who did
Speaker 1: not have the right documentation to prove their status in
Speaker 1: the UK and suffered adverse effects on their life as
Speaker 1: a result. To achieve this, they've break down all the
Speaker 1: way someone could have been effecting, from losing their job
Speaker 1: to the general impact on their life and use public
Speaker 1: funds to pay for it. I felt really optimistic at
Speaker 1: the beginning, feeling this was an opportunity to go and help.
Speaker 1: That's Alexandra Anchor again. She wants to be involved because
Speaker 1: she knew someone wrongly caught up in the hostile environment
Speaker 1: and understood the price they paid. But as soon as
Speaker 1: the scheme was set up, it was plagued with difficulties.
Speaker 1: Payments were delayed and capped at a level that didn't
Speaker 1: even come close to compensating people who'd been unable to
Speaker 1: work for years. In fact, it was about a full
Speaker 1: year after Anthony applied for compensation that he got an offer.
Speaker 1: It was thousand seven d the synthetics power. That's a
Speaker 1: five years of misery, five years of lost employment, five
Speaker 1: of the years of loss of access to any kind
Speaker 1: of medical treatment. I started laughing at first. I thought
Speaker 1: they're winding me up. Just under nineteen pounds. It didn't
Speaker 1: come close to compensating Anthony for the years he hadn't worked,
Speaker 1: and he wasn't alone. The project faced an absolute avalanche
Speaker 1: of criticism. Part of the payments focused on loss of employment,
Speaker 1: but they were kept at the loss of a year's salary.
Speaker 1: Many people, like Anthony had been out to work for
Speaker 1: five times as long. For others, the compensation was so
Speaker 1: delayed that they died before receiving anything, and some people
Speaker 1: question why the Home Office was even running the scheme
Speaker 1: at all when the whole mess was their fault in
Speaker 1: the first place. There are a number of problems with
Speaker 1: the compensation scheme, and it's the obvious one is that
Speaker 1: the scheme itself lacks independence. The Hostile Environment Policy was
Speaker 1: a policy that was implemented by the UK government, so
Speaker 1: there is a bit of a case of the government
Speaker 1: marking its own homework. He's a top London City lawyer
Speaker 1: who's worked on compensation schemes across Britain, including a case
Speaker 1: of one of the country's biggest football clubs involving a
Speaker 1: sexual abuse scandal. He's also studied other cases from around
Speaker 1: the world. He says that all the best attempts to
Speaker 1: write past wrongs have been efficient transparent, their timely and
Speaker 1: used experts. The win Dress compensation scheme hasn't always hit
Speaker 1: those markers. In October two hundred and twenty six individuals
Speaker 1: had been paid a total of two million, one hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty five thousand pounds, give or take. I mean
Speaker 1: it doesn't take a great mathematician to work out that
Speaker 1: that means that each person received on average less than
Speaker 1: ten thousand pounds. Meanwhile, Alexandra, working with the team put
Speaker 1: together to get the compensation projects up and running, started
Speaker 1: seeing cracks appear in the whole process. There was kind
Speaker 1: of chaos. It was a team that had been assembled
Speaker 1: that short notice, and it meant we had a mixture
Speaker 1: of people. We had people with good hearts and they
Speaker 1: were skilled and expert, but we also have people who
Speaker 1: were actually part of the system and they were very
Speaker 1: much part of the problem. A public debate emerged about
Speaker 1: the nature of the entire scandal and why it happens
Speaker 1: in the first place. Had the Winter Generation been mistreated
Speaker 1: because they were black? Was it really just a mistake?
Speaker 1: The reality is complicated. It was easier for some people
Speaker 1: to see it as a bureaucratic error, and that was
Speaker 1: a way to deal with the legacies of racism in
Speaker 1: this country. There were some who refused to see this
Speaker 1: as an issue that engaged with race or race discrimination,
Speaker 1: and invariably, though those people who had been harmed were black,
Speaker 1: they refused to see this as anything other than as
Speaker 1: an error, a mistake that didn't engage race, and wanted
Speaker 1: to look at it with a color blindness. About a
Speaker 1: year after Alexandra joined the team, she found her situation untenable.
Speaker 1: Every aspect of it was wanting, from lack of communications,
Speaker 1: the very poor effort around outreach, the continual failure to
Speaker 1: respond to community concern and criticism, and it really also
Speaker 1: reflects that the Home Office doesn't really employ that many
Speaker 1: senior black people. So you know, you have an organization
Speaker 1: with thirty tho plus staff, but in senior leadership roles
Speaker 1: you'll have less than ten black staff. The attitudes of
Speaker 1: some staff were within addictive and disgraceful, and so all
Speaker 1: of those things told me it was time to go.
Speaker 1: Alexandra resigned and ended up leaving the Home Office altogether
Speaker 1: in August last year. The scheme would go on to
Speaker 1: receive so much criticism that in December twenty twenty, just
Speaker 1: over a year after it launched, the Home Office announced
Speaker 1: it was overhauling the payment, which included raising the maximum
Speaker 1: payment anyone could receive for the impact on their life
Speaker 1: by ten times, and those changes were applied retrospectively. When
Speaker 1: we call in touch with the government, a spokesperson told
Speaker 1: us we launched the win Dress compensation scheme to ensure
Speaker 1: those so badly let down get the compensation they deserve.
Speaker 1: They also said since April two nineteen, they've offered almost
Speaker 1: eighteen million pounds, but is it even possible to fairly
Speaker 1: compensate someone for these past injustices. Anthony since been offered
Speaker 1: a substantially higher figure than the eighteen and a half
Speaker 1: thousand pounds than he was going to get the fulled
Speaker 1: but that doesn't change what's happened to him. I lost
Speaker 1: lost of my confidence. Really, I'm not out going anymore.
Speaker 1: I'm not I don't trust I don't really trust people
Speaker 1: that much anymore. And there are at some point now
Speaker 1: where I do regret to join in the army in
Speaker 1: some ways, you know, because I gave them. I gave
Speaker 1: them thirteen years and they were thirty years with the
Speaker 1: best years of my life. And what they're doing to me.
Speaker 1: Now there are many others still fighting the payments they
Speaker 1: were offered or who haven't received anything, And all these
Speaker 1: years later, there are still people to stay waiting for
Speaker 1: their documents to be soughted out. When you ask Alexandra
Speaker 1: about her role in the program and her decision to leave,
Speaker 1: she looks back with mixed feelings. My father thought, in
Speaker 1: the war for this country. I've got a brother who's
Speaker 1: seen active service, but there were veterans who had got
Speaker 1: caught up in wind rush as well. So how do
Speaker 1: I then look my children in the face and tell
Speaker 1: them be proud of your country. Your countries got you
Speaker 1: if we have wind rush. So until we resolve wind rush,
Speaker 1: until we resolve our nation's hurt, you know, we don't
Speaker 1: move forward together as a nation. So how did it
Speaker 1: make me feel? It made me feel wretched that I
Speaker 1: had failed, because the cost of failure in successive generations
Speaker 1: could be very great, and I don't want that on
Speaker 1: my conscience. Last month, the UK released a report it
Speaker 1: commissioned on racial inequality. It tried to answer tough questions
Speaker 1: about why inequality between white people and ethnic minorities persist.
Speaker 1: It found that the UK has entered a new era
Speaker 1: of participation for ethnic minority who should, and I quote,
Speaker 1: examine the extent individuals and their communities could help themselves
Speaker 1: through their own agency, rather than wait for invisible external
Speaker 1: forces to assemble to do the job. This week, a
Speaker 1: group of United Nations experts rejected and condemned that report, stating,
Speaker 1: and again this is verbatim, it is stunning to read
Speaker 1: a report on race and ethnicity that repackages racist tropes
Speaker 1: and stereotypes into fact, twisting data and missupplying statistics. Next week,
Speaker 1: on the season finale of The Paycheck, we explore what
Speaker 1: it might look like to really dig into America's racist
Speaker 1: past and a tone for it. Mississippi sent two people
Speaker 1: to the US capital. One is Jefferson Davis, who used
Speaker 1: to be the president of the Confederacy when it's seceeded
Speaker 1: from the Union. And then the second is James C. George,
Speaker 1: was a U. S Senator, colonel and the Confederate Army
Speaker 1: during the Civil War and also my great great great grandfather.
Speaker 1: Also he owned many slaves. Thanks for listening to The Paycheck.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please rate, review, and subscribe
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was hosted by Me,
Speaker 1: Rebecca Greenfield, Amy Jackie Simmons. Today's episode was edited by
Speaker 1: Caroline Alexander and Rebecca Greenfield. It was reported by Olivia
Speaker 1: connote A Hulu and Brenton Mock. This episode was produced
Speaker 1: by Lindsay Cradowell. We also had production help from Magnus
Speaker 1: Hendrickson and editing help from Francesca Levi, Rakheeta Soluja, Janet Paskin,
Speaker 1: and Jackie Simmons. Our original music is by Leo Sidron.
Speaker 1: Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. We'll see you
Speaker 1: next time.