April 22, 2021 • 25 mins
Reparations for slavery in the U.S. aren't happening any time soon. But there are other countries that have compensated populations for persecution. This week, the Pay Check heads to the U.K., which is in the midst of what it calls a "compensation scheme" to pay back Black residents known as The Windrush Generation. Olivia Konotey-Ahulu and Brentin Mock dig into why it's less of a model and more of a cautionary tale.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Anthony Williams has been living in the UK since he
was about seven years old. He came over with his
parents in the seventies from Jamaica, a former British colony.
He went straight from school to the British Army, serving
for thirteen years and now lives in Birmingham. But he
lost his job as a janitor because he couldn't prove
(00:26):
he was a citizen. To make matters worse, he didn't
qualify for unemployment benefits either, and that's when it all
hit the fan that always be entitled to maybe benefits
because I was not any system that was pure confusion.
And that's truly Anthony wasn't the only person experiencing this
(00:47):
rude awakening. There's a name for the thousands of black
people in Britain who, like Anthony, suddenly and for the
first time, found their citizenship status in question. They're part
of a group called the wind Rush generation. The Empire
wind Rush was a ship that in brought hundreds of people,
mostly black, from British colonies in the Caribbean to help
(01:09):
rebuild the United Kingdom after World War Two. From that
point on, the UK saw a wave of arrivals from
the islands that would last over the next twenty five years.
The earliest arrivals came over as citizens of the British Empire,
and those who came later were granted all the rights
provided to anyone born in the UK. But in a
(01:31):
surge of immigration from Europe and criticism that the government
was losing its grip on its borders resulted in a
broad crackdown on what the government called illegal migrants. That
made things complicated for people like Anthony who had never
been considered illegal migrants before, but who also didn't have
the paperwork to prove their right to be in the country.
(01:53):
Many lost access to jobs, education, health care. Some were
even deported. It is of Barbados or someone and actually
makes it something to chea may. Regardless, whatever problem that
seemed to be, a lot of people gained. Deporting back
to our countries who have been in UK was the problem. Then,
(02:17):
after public outcry over the mistreatment of the wind Rush generation,
something remarkable happened. The wind Rush generation helped to build
the country that we are today. And I want to
dispel any impression that my government is in some sense
clamping down on kind of world citizens, particularly those in
the Caribbean who worked a life here. The Home Secretary
(02:41):
apologized to her commons yesterday for any anxiety calls, and
I want to apologize to you today. Prime Minister Theresa
May herself in the UK government apologized and set aside
what they called compensation for the harm cast. Only a
handful of governments have ever done this. It's a big deal.
(03:03):
But making amends for past injustices is that such an
easy feat? That's something Alexandra Anger, who headed the wind
Rush compensation policy, would soon find out. I thought that
this was a real opportunity, having myself worked in the
area of truth and reconciliation. But little did I know
(03:25):
that really wasn't the plan. It is the scandal which
shamed Britain. Thousands from the so called wind Rush generation
who came here legally were then told they were here illegally.
The data shows that the median white family has ten
(03:47):
times more wealth than the average black family. Economists often
point to the absence of African American generational wealth. It
is inhumane and cruel for so many of that wind
Druss generation to have suffered so long. It's much easier
to integrate a lunch content than it is to guarantee
(04:08):
an annual income. For instance, to get rid of positive
hundreds of Black Britons were failed who after decades were
British but not British enough. Welcome back to the paycheck.
I'm Jackie Simmons and I'm Rebecca Greenfield. In our last
(04:29):
episode we talked about the movement to pay reparations in
the United States. The money would go to descendants of
people who were enslaved to acknowledge the harm done, and
a knock on effect is that it helps close the
racial wealth gap. Last week, the House advanced a bill
that would study reparations for descendants of slaves, but any
(04:50):
payments to black people still face a major uphill battle.
There are other countries that have given cash payments to
populations for persecution andcluding our friends just across the Atlantic,
the UK is in the midst of what it calls
a compensation scheme to pay back members of the wind
Rush generation. The story of wind Rush might sound like
(05:11):
an immigration story, but it's also a story about black
economic inequality in the UK. Around four of the UK
population is non white, and in London of residents are
ethnic minorities. Many of those people immigrated from former British colonies,
some of them descendants of slaves, and when they came
(05:34):
to the UK they faced discrimination in where they could
live and what jobs they could have. They also faced
outright violence based on their race, much like in the US.
Some of that historic discrimination manifests in a vast racial
wealth gap today. A recent report found white British households
(05:54):
have nine times the median total wealth of a family
headed by someone from a black African background, and more
than twice the proportion of black people live in low
income households than white people. But the wind Rush compensation
scheme wasn't set up to address any of that. The
government has approached it more like fixing a bureaucratic error,
(06:15):
which is partly why it's less of a model and
more of a cautionary tale. Olivia Carnte Hulu, a reporter
in Bloomberg's London bureau, has more m Let's go back
to Anthony Williams. He's the man you heard about at
the start of the show. Things were fine for him
(06:35):
until shortly after he started a job as a head
janitor in two thousand and thirteen. He was then told
he was no longer employable and he didn't have the
right to work in the UK. A year earlier, Thereason May,
who at that time was Home Secretary and leading the
government's new immigration strategy, brought in what would become known
as the Hostile Environment. She introduced a series of new
(06:57):
measures which included requiring landlords, the National Health Service, charities
and other organizations to carry out ID checks. The government
also starts a communication drive across London, telling people who
they called illegal immigrants to go home or face being
arrested and detained. The aim was to make the UK
a really harsh place to live for undocumented migrants. We
(07:20):
want to ensure that only legal migrants have access to
the labor market, free health services, housing, bank accounts and
driving licenses. And it is not just about making the
UK a more hostile place for illegal migrants. It is
also about fairness. The national if you like narrative was around.
We've got to show that if you don't have the
(07:42):
right to be here, we're gonna make it really hostile
so you leave. Unfortunately, people who had the absolute right
to be here, who had come from the Commonwealth, often
of their parents. They were being told, if you can't
prove you've got the right to be here. We're going
(08:04):
to take away your access to your job, to healthcare,
to education. And this was shocking because you know, there'd
always been this idea that if you'd come from the Commonwealth,
you just had the right to be here. You you
didn't need to prove the right to be here. That's
(08:26):
Alexandra Anchor from the Windress Compensation scheme. She's worked as
a barrister and an expert on restorative justice. Alexandra's not
from the Windress generation herself, but the father's from Garnet
and she knew someone whose parent was a fellow ger
name who was caught up in the scandal. Anthony, who
never needs any paperwork before found out he was lacking
(08:46):
crucial proof of his right to work, which made it
impossible for him to get a job. And what he
saw in newspapers about the government's new immigration strategy scared him.
How people get picked up on the streets. The van
had been around with a massive sign saying if you're
here illegally, pack three bags, we were coming to get you.
(09:07):
That kind of stuff and put really frightened people. So,
you know, I mean, some people are on the ground.
The money was sure. I mean, come the winter, Tom,
I did the stupid things like I just turned my
fridge off. It is that cold in the flat. Anthony's
limbo lasted five years. During that time, he couldn't access healthcare.
He was unable to get treatment when he had a
serious gum infection and lost most of his teeth. I
(09:29):
was confused. I think that was going on, and I
believe that was I was the only person exactly too.
I didn't have no one to talk to about it, really,
because it's not I don't I don't want to talk
about because of my past being that being in the army,
and now I'm being treated in this way and it's
a it's actually hurting my pride of it. They really
have to really nderstand why this is a story about
(10:01):
racial dynamics in the UK. We have to go back
a few centuries well before, when the Empire wind Rust
sailed into the Tilbury Docks in the east of England,
carrying hundreds of people to help the country rebuild. I
talked to my colleague from City Lab Brenon Mock, who's
written about the history of afric Caribbeans in the UK
and about how the wind Dress generation fits in Hey Brenon, Hey, Olivia.
(10:26):
So I wrote about this last year for Bloomberg City
lab and it's important to understand that the United Kingdom
colonized many of the Caribbean islands in the sixteen hundreds,
and in the centuries that followed, they'd go on to
form a key part of the Empire's trade network. The
colonies took millions of black people from Africa to work
on sugar plantations in London's Financial District, became the center
(10:50):
of an economic system built on Caribbean slavery. When slavery
ended across the British Empire in the eighteen thirties, white
elites and governors stopped investing in infrastructure, education, and business
development on these islands. So to achieve some semblance of
economic mobility, the newly freed Afro Caribbeans traveled to other
(11:11):
parts of the British Empire and also the Americans to
earn money, much of which they sent back to their families.
World War Two is a massive turning point for Britain
and its relationship with its Caribbean colonies. Thousands of people
from the islands joined the armed forces as British subjects
and When the fighting was over, many of them traveled
(11:31):
to Britain to help rebuild the nation they felt a
sense of loyalty to, and this is where we're beginning
our story of the wind Rush generation. Many of their
ancestors were enslaved and their children were considered subjects of
the British Empire and its colonies, so many of them
weren't really immigrants, at least not those first arrivals. Yet
(11:52):
the new Afro Caribbean arrivals experienced both over in casual racism,
they were harassed and because white people refused to work
alongside them, they were denied jobs. The day the Empire,
when Russia arrived in England, a group of lawmakers wrote
to the Prime Minister warning about the consequences of what
they call quote an influx of colored people. Today, some
(12:19):
people are proud of the UK's imperial history, when at
one point it held power over around quarter of the
world's population. Othersly the period is one of huge economic
exploitation and human suffering, which was the starting point for
gaping and equality, not just within the UK but across
the globe. And then there's thads who see the truth
that somewhere in between the two. One thing is clear.
(12:40):
Over the years, Black communities in Britain have registered their
anger with what they see is continued unequal treatment. When
the US police officer murdered George Floyd last year, there
was an outpouring of grief for the discrimination that black
people have experienced in the UK that explodes into a
series of protests like the ones we saw in the US.
Much of that frustration was targeted at how the wind
Dress generation has been treated. There's been a lot of
(13:04):
soul searching since then. Financial heavyweights in the City of
London have begun to apologize for the roles they played
in financing and profiting from the slave trade. The wind
Dress compensation scheme was established before the George Floyd protests.
It was never about trying to address these wider issues
and apologizing for racism and slavery. It's about making amends
for a series of errors. The most significant of those
(13:29):
mistakes took place in the nineteen seventies, about a decade
after the majority of British colonies became independent. There was
a growing feeling within the government but also across the
country that too many people were coming to live in
Britain so they introduced legislation to make it harder for
people to get to the UK. One of those laws
decided that everyone who arrived in the country from the
(13:51):
former empire before nineteen seventy three could stay, but authorities
kept no official record of everyone that they gave that
permission to. There was no paperwork or any kind of identification,
in what has since been called a profound institutional failure
by an independent review. Then in two thousand and ten,
(14:11):
the Home Office, the ministry in charge of Domestic Affairs,
destroyed the immigrants landing cards. It says that decision was
for data protection reasons and they didn't think the information
on the cars was that important. The Black Caribbean British
residents were left with absolutely no way of proving their
right to live in the country, and they had never
needed that until the hostile environment policies were introduced. We'll
(14:34):
probably never know how many members of the win Dress
generation got caught up in this policy. It's safe to
say thousands. The compensation scheme that the UK government came
up with aimed to right the wrongs of the scandal,
paying what they described as quote eligible individuals who did
not have the right documentation to prove their status in
(14:56):
the UK and suffered adverse effects on their life as
a result. To achieve this, they've break down all the
way someone could have been effecting, from losing their job
to the general impact on their life and use public
funds to pay for it. I felt really optimistic at
the beginning, feeling this was an opportunity to go and help.
(15:18):
That's Alexandra Anchor again. She wants to be involved because
she knew someone wrongly caught up in the hostile environment
and understood the price they paid. But as soon as
the scheme was set up, it was plagued with difficulties.
Payments were delayed and capped at a level that didn't
even come close to compensating people who'd been unable to
work for years. In fact, it was about a full
(15:40):
year after Anthony applied for compensation that he got an offer.
It was thousand seven d the synthetics power. That's a
five years of misery, five years of lost employment, five
of the years of loss of access to any kind
of medical treatment. I started laughing at first. I thought
(16:01):
they're winding me up. Just under nineteen pounds. It didn't
come close to compensating Anthony for the years he hadn't worked,
and he wasn't alone. The project faced an absolute avalanche
of criticism. Part of the payments focused on loss of employment,
but they were kept at the loss of a year's salary.
Many people, like Anthony had been out to work for
(16:23):
five times as long. For others, the compensation was so
delayed that they died before receiving anything, and some people
question why the Home Office was even running the scheme
at all when the whole mess was their fault in
the first place. There are a number of problems with
the compensation scheme, and it's the obvious one is that
the scheme itself lacks independence. The Hostile Environment Policy was
(16:45):
a policy that was implemented by the UK government, so
there is a bit of a case of the government
marking its own homework. He's a top London City lawyer
who's worked on compensation schemes across Britain, including a case
of one of the country's biggest football clubs involving a
sexual abuse scandal. He's also studied other cases from around
(17:07):
the world. He says that all the best attempts to
write past wrongs have been efficient transparent, their timely and
used experts. The win Dress compensation scheme hasn't always hit
those markers. In October two hundred and twenty six individuals
had been paid a total of two million, one hundred
(17:30):
and eighty five thousand pounds, give or take. I mean
it doesn't take a great mathematician to work out that
that means that each person received on average less than
ten thousand pounds. Meanwhile, Alexandra, working with the team put
together to get the compensation projects up and running, started
seeing cracks appear in the whole process. There was kind
(17:52):
of chaos. It was a team that had been assembled
that short notice, and it meant we had a mixture
of people. We had people with good hearts and they
were skilled and expert, but we also have people who
were actually part of the system and they were very
much part of the problem. A public debate emerged about
(18:23):
the nature of the entire scandal and why it happens
in the first place. Had the Winter Generation been mistreated
because they were black? Was it really just a mistake?
The reality is complicated. It was easier for some people
to see it as a bureaucratic error, and that was
a way to deal with the legacies of racism in
this country. There were some who refused to see this
(18:46):
as an issue that engaged with race or race discrimination,
and invariably, though those people who had been harmed were black,
they refused to see this as anything other than as
an error, a mistake that didn't engage race, and wanted
(19:06):
to look at it with a color blindness. About a
year after Alexandra joined the team, she found her situation untenable.
Every aspect of it was wanting, from lack of communications,
the very poor effort around outreach, the continual failure to
(19:30):
respond to community concern and criticism, and it really also
reflects that the Home Office doesn't really employ that many
senior black people. So you know, you have an organization
with thirty tho plus staff, but in senior leadership roles
(19:53):
you'll have less than ten black staff. The attitudes of
some staff were within addictive and disgraceful, and so all
of those things told me it was time to go.
Alexandra resigned and ended up leaving the Home Office altogether
in August last year. The scheme would go on to
(20:13):
receive so much criticism that in December twenty twenty, just
over a year after it launched, the Home Office announced
it was overhauling the payment, which included raising the maximum
payment anyone could receive for the impact on their life
by ten times, and those changes were applied retrospectively. When
we call in touch with the government, a spokesperson told
us we launched the win Dress compensation scheme to ensure
(20:36):
those so badly let down get the compensation they deserve.
They also said since April two nineteen, they've offered almost
eighteen million pounds, but is it even possible to fairly
compensate someone for these past injustices. Anthony since been offered
a substantially higher figure than the eighteen and a half
thousand pounds than he was going to get the fulled
(20:58):
but that doesn't change what's happened to him. I lost
lost of my confidence. Really, I'm not out going anymore.
I'm not I don't trust I don't really trust people
that much anymore. And there are at some point now
where I do regret to join in the army in
some ways, you know, because I gave them. I gave
them thirteen years and they were thirty years with the
best years of my life. And what they're doing to me.
(21:19):
Now there are many others still fighting the payments they
were offered or who haven't received anything, And all these
years later, there are still people to stay waiting for
their documents to be soughted out. When you ask Alexandra
about her role in the program and her decision to leave,
she looks back with mixed feelings. My father thought, in
(21:42):
the war for this country. I've got a brother who's
seen active service, but there were veterans who had got
caught up in wind rush as well. So how do
I then look my children in the face and tell
them be proud of your country. Your countries got you
if we have wind rush. So until we resolve wind rush,
(22:08):
until we resolve our nation's hurt, you know, we don't
move forward together as a nation. So how did it
make me feel? It made me feel wretched that I
had failed, because the cost of failure in successive generations
could be very great, and I don't want that on
(22:30):
my conscience. Last month, the UK released a report it
commissioned on racial inequality. It tried to answer tough questions
about why inequality between white people and ethnic minorities persist.
(22:55):
It found that the UK has entered a new era
of participation for ethnic minority who should, and I quote,
examine the extent individuals and their communities could help themselves
through their own agency, rather than wait for invisible external
forces to assemble to do the job. This week, a
(23:17):
group of United Nations experts rejected and condemned that report, stating,
and again this is verbatim, it is stunning to read
a report on race and ethnicity that repackages racist tropes
and stereotypes into fact, twisting data and missupplying statistics. Next week,
(23:39):
on the season finale of The Paycheck, we explore what
it might look like to really dig into America's racist
past and a tone for it. Mississippi sent two people
to the US capital. One is Jefferson Davis, who used
to be the president of the Confederacy when it's seceeded
from the Union. And then the second is James C. George,
(24:00):
was a U. S Senator, colonel and the Confederate Army
during the Civil War and also my great great great grandfather.
Also he owned many slaves. Thanks for listening to The Paycheck.
If you like the show, please rate, review, and subscribe
(24:22):
wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was hosted by Me,
Rebecca Greenfield, Amy Jackie Simmons. Today's episode was edited by
Caroline Alexander and Rebecca Greenfield. It was reported by Olivia
connote A Hulu and Brenton Mock. This episode was produced
by Lindsay Cradowell. We also had production help from Magnus
(24:42):
Hendrickson and editing help from Francesca Levi, Rakheeta Soluja, Janet Paskin,
and Jackie Simmons. Our original music is by Leo Sidron.
Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. We'll see you
next time.
Anthony Williams has been living in the UK since he
was about seven years old. He came over with his
parents in the seventies from Jamaica, a former British colony.
He went straight from school to the British Army, serving
for thirteen years and now lives in Birmingham. But he
lost his job as a janitor because he couldn't prove
(00:26):
he was a citizen. To make matters worse, he didn't
qualify for unemployment benefits either, and that's when it all
hit the fan that always be entitled to maybe benefits
because I was not any system that was pure confusion.
And that's truly Anthony wasn't the only person experiencing this
(00:47):
rude awakening. There's a name for the thousands of black
people in Britain who, like Anthony, suddenly and for the
first time, found their citizenship status in question. They're part
of a group called the wind Rush generation. The Empire
wind Rush was a ship that in brought hundreds of people,
mostly black, from British colonies in the Caribbean to help
(01:09):
rebuild the United Kingdom after World War Two. From that
point on, the UK saw a wave of arrivals from
the islands that would last over the next twenty five years.
The earliest arrivals came over as citizens of the British Empire,
and those who came later were granted all the rights
provided to anyone born in the UK. But in a
(01:31):
surge of immigration from Europe and criticism that the government
was losing its grip on its borders resulted in a
broad crackdown on what the government called illegal migrants. That
made things complicated for people like Anthony who had never
been considered illegal migrants before, but who also didn't have
the paperwork to prove their right to be in the country.
(01:53):
Many lost access to jobs, education, health care. Some were
even deported. It is of Barbados or someone and actually
makes it something to chea may. Regardless, whatever problem that
seemed to be, a lot of people gained. Deporting back
to our countries who have been in UK was the problem. Then,
(02:17):
after public outcry over the mistreatment of the wind Rush generation,
something remarkable happened. The wind Rush generation helped to build
the country that we are today. And I want to
dispel any impression that my government is in some sense
clamping down on kind of world citizens, particularly those in
the Caribbean who worked a life here. The Home Secretary
(02:41):
apologized to her commons yesterday for any anxiety calls, and
I want to apologize to you today. Prime Minister Theresa
May herself in the UK government apologized and set aside
what they called compensation for the harm cast. Only a
handful of governments have ever done this. It's a big deal.
(03:03):
But making amends for past injustices is that such an
easy feat? That's something Alexandra Anger, who headed the wind
Rush compensation policy, would soon find out. I thought that
this was a real opportunity, having myself worked in the
area of truth and reconciliation. But little did I know
(03:25):
that really wasn't the plan. It is the scandal which
shamed Britain. Thousands from the so called wind Rush generation
who came here legally were then told they were here illegally.
The data shows that the median white family has ten
(03:47):
times more wealth than the average black family. Economists often
point to the absence of African American generational wealth. It
is inhumane and cruel for so many of that wind
Druss generation to have suffered so long. It's much easier
to integrate a lunch content than it is to guarantee
(04:08):
an annual income. For instance, to get rid of positive
hundreds of Black Britons were failed who after decades were
British but not British enough. Welcome back to the paycheck.
I'm Jackie Simmons and I'm Rebecca Greenfield. In our last
(04:29):
episode we talked about the movement to pay reparations in
the United States. The money would go to descendants of
people who were enslaved to acknowledge the harm done, and
a knock on effect is that it helps close the
racial wealth gap. Last week, the House advanced a bill
that would study reparations for descendants of slaves, but any
(04:50):
payments to black people still face a major uphill battle.
There are other countries that have given cash payments to
populations for persecution andcluding our friends just across the Atlantic,
the UK is in the midst of what it calls
a compensation scheme to pay back members of the wind
Rush generation. The story of wind Rush might sound like
(05:11):
an immigration story, but it's also a story about black
economic inequality in the UK. Around four of the UK
population is non white, and in London of residents are
ethnic minorities. Many of those people immigrated from former British colonies,
some of them descendants of slaves, and when they came
(05:34):
to the UK they faced discrimination in where they could
live and what jobs they could have. They also faced
outright violence based on their race, much like in the US.
Some of that historic discrimination manifests in a vast racial
wealth gap today. A recent report found white British households
(05:54):
have nine times the median total wealth of a family
headed by someone from a black African background, and more
than twice the proportion of black people live in low
income households than white people. But the wind Rush compensation
scheme wasn't set up to address any of that. The
government has approached it more like fixing a bureaucratic error,
(06:15):
which is partly why it's less of a model and
more of a cautionary tale. Olivia Carnte Hulu, a reporter
in Bloomberg's London bureau, has more m Let's go back
to Anthony Williams. He's the man you heard about at
the start of the show. Things were fine for him
(06:35):
until shortly after he started a job as a head
janitor in two thousand and thirteen. He was then told
he was no longer employable and he didn't have the
right to work in the UK. A year earlier, Thereason May,
who at that time was Home Secretary and leading the
government's new immigration strategy, brought in what would become known
as the Hostile Environment. She introduced a series of new
(06:57):
measures which included requiring landlords, the National Health Service, charities
and other organizations to carry out ID checks. The government
also starts a communication drive across London, telling people who
they called illegal immigrants to go home or face being
arrested and detained. The aim was to make the UK
a really harsh place to live for undocumented migrants. We
(07:20):
want to ensure that only legal migrants have access to
the labor market, free health services, housing, bank accounts and
driving licenses. And it is not just about making the
UK a more hostile place for illegal migrants. It is
also about fairness. The national if you like narrative was around.
We've got to show that if you don't have the
(07:42):
right to be here, we're gonna make it really hostile
so you leave. Unfortunately, people who had the absolute right
to be here, who had come from the Commonwealth, often
of their parents. They were being told, if you can't
prove you've got the right to be here. We're going
(08:04):
to take away your access to your job, to healthcare,
to education. And this was shocking because you know, there'd
always been this idea that if you'd come from the Commonwealth,
you just had the right to be here. You you
didn't need to prove the right to be here. That's
(08:26):
Alexandra Anchor from the Windress Compensation scheme. She's worked as
a barrister and an expert on restorative justice. Alexandra's not
from the Windress generation herself, but the father's from Garnet
and she knew someone whose parent was a fellow ger
name who was caught up in the scandal. Anthony, who
never needs any paperwork before found out he was lacking
(08:46):
crucial proof of his right to work, which made it
impossible for him to get a job. And what he
saw in newspapers about the government's new immigration strategy scared him.
How people get picked up on the streets. The van
had been around with a massive sign saying if you're
here illegally, pack three bags, we were coming to get you.
(09:07):
That kind of stuff and put really frightened people. So,
you know, I mean, some people are on the ground.
The money was sure. I mean, come the winter, Tom,
I did the stupid things like I just turned my
fridge off. It is that cold in the flat. Anthony's
limbo lasted five years. During that time, he couldn't access healthcare.
He was unable to get treatment when he had a
serious gum infection and lost most of his teeth. I
(09:29):
was confused. I think that was going on, and I
believe that was I was the only person exactly too.
I didn't have no one to talk to about it, really,
because it's not I don't I don't want to talk
about because of my past being that being in the army,
and now I'm being treated in this way and it's
a it's actually hurting my pride of it. They really
have to really nderstand why this is a story about
(10:01):
racial dynamics in the UK. We have to go back
a few centuries well before, when the Empire wind Rust
sailed into the Tilbury Docks in the east of England,
carrying hundreds of people to help the country rebuild. I
talked to my colleague from City Lab Brenon Mock, who's
written about the history of afric Caribbeans in the UK
and about how the wind Dress generation fits in Hey Brenon, Hey, Olivia.
(10:26):
So I wrote about this last year for Bloomberg City
lab and it's important to understand that the United Kingdom
colonized many of the Caribbean islands in the sixteen hundreds,
and in the centuries that followed, they'd go on to
form a key part of the Empire's trade network. The
colonies took millions of black people from Africa to work
on sugar plantations in London's Financial District, became the center
(10:50):
of an economic system built on Caribbean slavery. When slavery
ended across the British Empire in the eighteen thirties, white
elites and governors stopped investing in infrastructure, education, and business
development on these islands. So to achieve some semblance of
economic mobility, the newly freed Afro Caribbeans traveled to other
(11:11):
parts of the British Empire and also the Americans to
earn money, much of which they sent back to their families.
World War Two is a massive turning point for Britain
and its relationship with its Caribbean colonies. Thousands of people
from the islands joined the armed forces as British subjects
and When the fighting was over, many of them traveled
(11:31):
to Britain to help rebuild the nation they felt a
sense of loyalty to, and this is where we're beginning
our story of the wind Rush generation. Many of their
ancestors were enslaved and their children were considered subjects of
the British Empire and its colonies, so many of them
weren't really immigrants, at least not those first arrivals. Yet
(11:52):
the new Afro Caribbean arrivals experienced both over in casual racism,
they were harassed and because white people refused to work
alongside them, they were denied jobs. The day the Empire,
when Russia arrived in England, a group of lawmakers wrote
to the Prime Minister warning about the consequences of what
they call quote an influx of colored people. Today, some
(12:19):
people are proud of the UK's imperial history, when at
one point it held power over around quarter of the
world's population. Othersly the period is one of huge economic
exploitation and human suffering, which was the starting point for
gaping and equality, not just within the UK but across
the globe. And then there's thads who see the truth
that somewhere in between the two. One thing is clear.
(12:40):
Over the years, Black communities in Britain have registered their
anger with what they see is continued unequal treatment. When
the US police officer murdered George Floyd last year, there
was an outpouring of grief for the discrimination that black
people have experienced in the UK that explodes into a
series of protests like the ones we saw in the US.
Much of that frustration was targeted at how the wind
Dress generation has been treated. There's been a lot of
(13:04):
soul searching since then. Financial heavyweights in the City of
London have begun to apologize for the roles they played
in financing and profiting from the slave trade. The wind
Dress compensation scheme was established before the George Floyd protests.
It was never about trying to address these wider issues
and apologizing for racism and slavery. It's about making amends
for a series of errors. The most significant of those
(13:29):
mistakes took place in the nineteen seventies, about a decade
after the majority of British colonies became independent. There was
a growing feeling within the government but also across the
country that too many people were coming to live in
Britain so they introduced legislation to make it harder for
people to get to the UK. One of those laws
decided that everyone who arrived in the country from the
(13:51):
former empire before nineteen seventy three could stay, but authorities
kept no official record of everyone that they gave that
permission to. There was no paperwork or any kind of identification,
in what has since been called a profound institutional failure
by an independent review. Then in two thousand and ten,
(14:11):
the Home Office, the ministry in charge of Domestic Affairs,
destroyed the immigrants landing cards. It says that decision was
for data protection reasons and they didn't think the information
on the cars was that important. The Black Caribbean British
residents were left with absolutely no way of proving their
right to live in the country, and they had never
needed that until the hostile environment policies were introduced. We'll
(14:34):
probably never know how many members of the win Dress
generation got caught up in this policy. It's safe to
say thousands. The compensation scheme that the UK government came
up with aimed to right the wrongs of the scandal,
paying what they described as quote eligible individuals who did
not have the right documentation to prove their status in
(14:56):
the UK and suffered adverse effects on their life as
a result. To achieve this, they've break down all the
way someone could have been effecting, from losing their job
to the general impact on their life and use public
funds to pay for it. I felt really optimistic at
the beginning, feeling this was an opportunity to go and help.
(15:18):
That's Alexandra Anchor again. She wants to be involved because
she knew someone wrongly caught up in the hostile environment
and understood the price they paid. But as soon as
the scheme was set up, it was plagued with difficulties.
Payments were delayed and capped at a level that didn't
even come close to compensating people who'd been unable to
work for years. In fact, it was about a full
(15:40):
year after Anthony applied for compensation that he got an offer.
It was thousand seven d the synthetics power. That's a
five years of misery, five years of lost employment, five
of the years of loss of access to any kind
of medical treatment. I started laughing at first. I thought
(16:01):
they're winding me up. Just under nineteen pounds. It didn't
come close to compensating Anthony for the years he hadn't worked,
and he wasn't alone. The project faced an absolute avalanche
of criticism. Part of the payments focused on loss of employment,
but they were kept at the loss of a year's salary.
Many people, like Anthony had been out to work for
(16:23):
five times as long. For others, the compensation was so
delayed that they died before receiving anything, and some people
question why the Home Office was even running the scheme
at all when the whole mess was their fault in
the first place. There are a number of problems with
the compensation scheme, and it's the obvious one is that
the scheme itself lacks independence. The Hostile Environment Policy was
(16:45):
a policy that was implemented by the UK government, so
there is a bit of a case of the government
marking its own homework. He's a top London City lawyer
who's worked on compensation schemes across Britain, including a case
of one of the country's biggest football clubs involving a
sexual abuse scandal. He's also studied other cases from around
(17:07):
the world. He says that all the best attempts to
write past wrongs have been efficient transparent, their timely and
used experts. The win Dress compensation scheme hasn't always hit
those markers. In October two hundred and twenty six individuals
had been paid a total of two million, one hundred
(17:30):
and eighty five thousand pounds, give or take. I mean
it doesn't take a great mathematician to work out that
that means that each person received on average less than
ten thousand pounds. Meanwhile, Alexandra, working with the team put
together to get the compensation projects up and running, started
seeing cracks appear in the whole process. There was kind
(17:52):
of chaos. It was a team that had been assembled
that short notice, and it meant we had a mixture
of people. We had people with good hearts and they
were skilled and expert, but we also have people who
were actually part of the system and they were very
much part of the problem. A public debate emerged about
(18:23):
the nature of the entire scandal and why it happens
in the first place. Had the Winter Generation been mistreated
because they were black? Was it really just a mistake?
The reality is complicated. It was easier for some people
to see it as a bureaucratic error, and that was
a way to deal with the legacies of racism in
this country. There were some who refused to see this
(18:46):
as an issue that engaged with race or race discrimination,
and invariably, though those people who had been harmed were black,
they refused to see this as anything other than as
an error, a mistake that didn't engage race, and wanted
(19:06):
to look at it with a color blindness. About a
year after Alexandra joined the team, she found her situation untenable.
Every aspect of it was wanting, from lack of communications,
the very poor effort around outreach, the continual failure to
(19:30):
respond to community concern and criticism, and it really also
reflects that the Home Office doesn't really employ that many
senior black people. So you know, you have an organization
with thirty tho plus staff, but in senior leadership roles
(19:53):
you'll have less than ten black staff. The attitudes of
some staff were within addictive and disgraceful, and so all
of those things told me it was time to go.
Alexandra resigned and ended up leaving the Home Office altogether
in August last year. The scheme would go on to
(20:13):
receive so much criticism that in December twenty twenty, just
over a year after it launched, the Home Office announced
it was overhauling the payment, which included raising the maximum
payment anyone could receive for the impact on their life
by ten times, and those changes were applied retrospectively. When
we call in touch with the government, a spokesperson told
us we launched the win Dress compensation scheme to ensure
(20:36):
those so badly let down get the compensation they deserve.
They also said since April two nineteen, they've offered almost
eighteen million pounds, but is it even possible to fairly
compensate someone for these past injustices. Anthony since been offered
a substantially higher figure than the eighteen and a half
thousand pounds than he was going to get the fulled
(20:58):
but that doesn't change what's happened to him. I lost
lost of my confidence. Really, I'm not out going anymore.
I'm not I don't trust I don't really trust people
that much anymore. And there are at some point now
where I do regret to join in the army in
some ways, you know, because I gave them. I gave
them thirteen years and they were thirty years with the
best years of my life. And what they're doing to me.
(21:19):
Now there are many others still fighting the payments they
were offered or who haven't received anything, And all these
years later, there are still people to stay waiting for
their documents to be soughted out. When you ask Alexandra
about her role in the program and her decision to leave,
she looks back with mixed feelings. My father thought, in
(21:42):
the war for this country. I've got a brother who's
seen active service, but there were veterans who had got
caught up in wind rush as well. So how do
I then look my children in the face and tell
them be proud of your country. Your countries got you
if we have wind rush. So until we resolve wind rush,
(22:08):
until we resolve our nation's hurt, you know, we don't
move forward together as a nation. So how did it
make me feel? It made me feel wretched that I
had failed, because the cost of failure in successive generations
could be very great, and I don't want that on
(22:30):
my conscience. Last month, the UK released a report it
commissioned on racial inequality. It tried to answer tough questions
about why inequality between white people and ethnic minorities persist.
(22:55):
It found that the UK has entered a new era
of participation for ethnic minority who should, and I quote,
examine the extent individuals and their communities could help themselves
through their own agency, rather than wait for invisible external
forces to assemble to do the job. This week, a
(23:17):
group of United Nations experts rejected and condemned that report, stating,
and again this is verbatim, it is stunning to read
a report on race and ethnicity that repackages racist tropes
and stereotypes into fact, twisting data and missupplying statistics. Next week,
(23:39):
on the season finale of The Paycheck, we explore what
it might look like to really dig into America's racist
past and a tone for it. Mississippi sent two people
to the US capital. One is Jefferson Davis, who used
to be the president of the Confederacy when it's seceeded
from the Union. And then the second is James C. George,
(24:00):
was a U. S Senator, colonel and the Confederate Army
during the Civil War and also my great great great grandfather.
Also he owned many slaves. Thanks for listening to The Paycheck.
If you like the show, please rate, review, and subscribe
(24:22):
wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was hosted by Me,
Rebecca Greenfield, Amy Jackie Simmons. Today's episode was edited by
Caroline Alexander and Rebecca Greenfield. It was reported by Olivia
connote A Hulu and Brenton Mock. This episode was produced
by Lindsay Cradowell. We also had production help from Magnus
(24:42):
Hendrickson and editing help from Francesca Levi, Rakheeta Soluja, Janet Paskin,
and Jackie Simmons. Our original music is by Leo Sidron.
Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. We'll see you
next time.
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