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Windrush, kings and queens and a Black emperor
OCTOBER'S London Freelance Branch meeting took place during Black History Month. We heard from journalist, author, broadcaster and LFB member Marc Wadsworth (@marcwads).
A former Chair of the NUJ's Black Members' Council, Marc is proud to have been part of the Labour Party Black Sections movement that back in the 1980s successfully "agitated" to put Black History Month "in the calendar for October, deliberately after the TUC Congress and party conferences." (See here for a short biography of Marc.)
Marc Wadsworth - joining via Zoom - speaks to the face-to-face element of the hybrid LFB meeting. Branch Vice-Chair Deborah Hobson (right, seated at table) presides.
Why do we have so much curriculum time for "kings and queens of England" in history taught in our schools, asked Marc, when school students of Black heritage don't study their own history? Marc mentioned the "Black emperor" Septimus Severus a Roman Emperor who was from Libya, and who in 208 AD came to the Roman province of Britannia and strengthened the empire's defences on Hadrian's Wall: "Black people were in Britain before the 'English' arrived."
Marc called for reparations for "looted baubles... worth billions" plundered from what became the colonies of the British Empire, some of which ended up as part of the Crown Jewels and royal collections, including some "hidden away from the public" in vaults. He added that "even Black royalists" were " appalled by racism experienced by the first contemporary Royal of Colour," Meghan Markle.
Shapurji Saklatvala, "Comrade Sak", the first Labour MP of colour, is the subject of a book by Marc. This year is the centenary of Comrade Sak's election to Parliament. This MP for Battersea North was "a stalwart of the trade union movement". He was imprisoned after speakking in support of striking miners during the General Strike of 1926. His speech was "considered seditious".
It was almost 70 years before another MP of colour was elected, when four Black MPS "made history" by taking their seats in 1987: Diane Abbott, Bernie Grant, Paul Boateng and Keith Vaz. They became MPs in a parliament that was at the time "all white".
The UK's first-ever acknowledged Black Asian Minority Ethic MP from any party was Dababhai Naoroji - who took Finsbury Central as a Liberal in 1892. Anglo-Indian David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre was elected an MP in 1841 but was removed less than a year later, following an election bribery scandal.
Marc's late Jamaican father, who was in the RAF as ground crew during World War Two, was among "tens of thousands" of other Caribbean volunteers.
Windrush
After the war, Marc's father returned to the UK on the passenger ship Empire Windrush, on which many people from the Caribbean arrived to settle in the postwar UK. They became known as "the Windrush generation". Next year sees the 75th anniversary of the arrival in Britain of the historic steamship and its almost 500 passengers, "mainly ex-servicemen". It docked at Tilbury on 22 June 1948.
A recent visit by Marc to the war graves of "Black and other Commonwealth soldiers" who died in the First World War and who were buried at Étaples, in the Calais area of Northern France, was an experience he described as "humbling." There are more than 11,000 such Commonwealth war graves, Marc said, and "many relatives don't know they are there." There were many ex-servicemen on the Windrush. For more of this story Marc recommends the documentary Divided by Race, United by War and Peace that he made with fellow LFB member Deborah Hobson.
Jamaica was "at the time still ruled by the British... there was grinding poverty and unemployment in Jamaica," so Marc's father "paid his fare for a one-way ticket to rebuild Britain". With other returning war veterans he encountered a society in which signs advertising rooms to rent bore the infamous words "No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish" - discrimination that was legal right up until the 1960s. Later came the then Home Secretary Theresa May's "go home" immigration vans, finally scrapped in 2013.
Noting that Labour's immigration policies have often not been much better, Marc reminded us of former Labour leader Ed Miliband's immigration mugs - on which the Party promised "controls on immigration" despite the fact that Ralph Miliband, Ed's own father, arrived in the UK as a refugee. But the "hostile environment" for migrants to Britain, introduced May, continues, he said.
Changes to immigration laws meant that from 2017 many Black people from the Windrush generation - including those who had arrived in the UK as children on their parents' passports - found themselves treated as illegal immigrants. They had no evidence to show they had the right to live in the UK, since they'd previously had no need for such evidence.
The recently unveiled National Windrush Monument at Waterloo Station
In what became known as the Windrush scandal, there were "Caribbean-born cancer victims denied treatment... some died". Some people were deported to Jamaica and elsewhere, "escorted by security guards... onto a flight to a country they'd left as children". Amelia Gentleman of the Guardian exposed it. The scandal "cost Amber Rudd her jo" - she was Home Secretary in 2018 at the time it broke and it was revealed that she had known of targets for the removal of immigrants.
Since then there has been "a trickle" of the promised government compensation for lost jobs, for the deportations, for the medical care that was denied and for the financial hardship endured by victims of the Windrush scandal. "Some people died in Jamaica" after being deported there or or being frozen out of the UK. "Those people clearly won't be getting any compensation."
Then, as part of then Prime Minister Alexander de Pfeffel Boris Johnson's attempt to respond to the Black Lives Matter movement, came last year's widely-condemned Sewell Report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. This seemed to claim that institutional racism didn't really exist in the UK. The report's chair, Dr Tony Sewell, is reportedly being rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords.
Now there are widely-condemned government plans to deport refugees to Rwanda. King Charles has reportedly described these as "appalling". But, said Wadsworth, "let's see if he does anything to stop that happening."
Marc brought the sad news that ex-LFB member Beulah Ainley, who served on the NUJ Black Members' Council, had died just before the day of the meeting. Beulah was "always positive... she would want us to be cheerful."
Marc identified some recent developments that cheered him up. First he mentioned a "resurgence" in "the resistance movement.". He cited the recent successful strike by the NUJ at Reach - whose picket line he'd been on. Then there were the widespread protests around the murders of Sarah Everard and of Chris Kaba - the latter an unarmed Black man shot dead by a police officer in Clapham. And there was the human chain in support of Julian Assange around Parliament that he joined the previous weekend.
In closing, Marc said that "solidarity is the cornerstone of trade unionism." We are, he felt, living in "exciting times" and he had "reasons to be cheerful".
Questions
Jenny Vaughan, a member of the NUJ Freelance Industrial Council, reminded us of the "travesty of the glorification of Empire" particularly in Kenya, where she once lived. "Colonialism did some horrendous things." And to this day, Jenny said, "people wrongly believe that the Mau Mau [properly the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, a guerrilla movement resisting British colonialism] killed hundreds of white people - which they didn't."
Jonathan Kempster, who writes on museums and art galleries, reports that decolonisation is now a cornerstone of UK museums. He alerted members to the Museum Association's Decolonising Museums campaign.
LFB Membership Secretary Phil Sutcliffe asked Marc: "doing the work you do, can you make a decent living?" Marc "like many members has a pension" and there is some money coming in from The Amazing Life of Olaudah Equiano, the Radio 4 documentary that he made earlier this year in collaboration with LFB vice-chair Deborah Hobson. "It's tough, but it's possible."