The Comparison of the Windrush Scandal to EU Immigration Is A National Disgrace

The very act of attempting to latch onto the Windrush scandal in such a characteristically opportunistic and intellectually shallow manner by some members of the A8 migrant community in London betrays the implicit racism inherent in this attitude.

Colonial migration is a very poor comparator with A8 migration.

Colonial people had been part of the British empire for hundreds of years before they arrived.

Not by choice it is important to add.

The fact is they were already British and had been for some time.

Unfortunately - and often tragically - their blood had fertilised the soil of the UK economy.

This indeed was a fundamental part of the moral reasoning why Colonial people were invited to enter the UK in the middle part of the 20th Century. The 1971 Immigration Act was an immigration policy with a moral basis (albeit admittedly one borne from British guilt).

In contrast there is absolutely no prior economic nexus and very little historical one between the UK and, for example, Poland.

There was little mention of Poland in the UK until approximately 2003, as any British person of a certain age will verify.

And by contrast – in 2003 there was no indication by the British government that there was any moral basis for Poles to be allowed to settle in the UK.

In fact at the time of the accession of the A8 countries to the EU, the British government’s official estimate of the number of people from the Eastern Bloc nations who would settle in the UK was in the region of 5,000 to 13,000.

Let us consider that again.

The British government’s official estimate of the number of people from the Eastern Bloc nations who would settle in the UK was in the region of 5,000 to 13,000.

Quite whether this constituted a cynical and deliberate undercount by Blair’s Labour government is a matter which does demand some attention.

EU migrants in the UK need not fear “similar treatment” to Colonial immigrants in Britain people because the two situations are not in any way similar.

Colonial migrants had every right to enter a country that they and their parents before them and their parents before them had contributed to economically for generation after generation.

Needless to say I am putting the case in highly euphemistic terms.

However euphemism alone cannot make the parallel between Colonial immigration to the UK and Eastern European immigration any more compelling or convincing.

My own ancestry is not Caribbean (if you deem that, however erroneously, to be in any way relevant) but I simply must call a spade a spade.

There is very little, if any comparison, to be made here.

EU migrants did not come to the UK on the basis of shared history with Britain or because this country owed them a living but in most cases on the basis of greed and greed alone. I can understand that. We would all opt to make as much money as we could if given the choice. However exercising that choice does not then entitle you to evoke comparisons with slavery or the Jews in Nazi Germany (I would think Eastern Europe would choose to avoid that comparison for other reasons).

There might not be any more diplomatic or nice a way to make the point – but the history of slavery is not in any meaningful way comparable to the history of voluntary economic migration.

To pretend that the two are one and the same within the context of British immigration policy is deeply deeply insulting. In fact as far as matters of intellectual and moral integrity are concerned, this deliberate distortion of narrative reality eventually becomes as insulting to the Eastern European community in the UK as it is to the Jamaican one.

The arrival of EU migrants in such huge numbers effectively gave the UK government purported cause (or perhaps the excuse they wanted) to prioritise this flow of people from Eastern Europe at the expense of the subjects within the former Commonwealth Empire (the direct descendants of the people they enslaved not so very long ago). This in itself was not capable of moral justification anyway and should never have been allowed to happen.

The only plausible explanation, given the sheer scale of the brutality of British history, why anyone would attempt to argue that EU migrants are as entitled to settle in the UK as much as Commonwealth citizens (whatever the circumstances) is racism pure and simple – namely – if you really need me to spell it out – the implied knowledge that the UK should be allowing Europeans to settle in the country ahead of non-Europeans.

In fact even the call for similar treatment of A8 migrants to Commonwealth citizens is racist.

In the end we all (Poles, Ukranians, Arabs and Brazilians alike) need to remind ourselves from time to time of one basic fact (and it is I think you will find a basic fact) – without the British Empire’s ruthless, bloodthirsty and eternal exploitation of the Commonwealth, the UK would not have been so wealthy that people like us were desperate to come here in the first place.

The opportunity you were given to earn 10 times your native country’s average national wage was borne from the blood of those Black and Asian British people.

They have more right to be here than we do.

The deliberate neglect to account for this point in our discussions of British immigration is at best highly disingenuous and at worst frankly embarrassing.

This neglect does not arise from a lack of education on the subject. You do not need to be a Corporate Lawyer, an Oxbridge graduate or a member of Mensa to be able to work through the moral reasoning here. It is a matter of basic common sense.

It really is very simple:

The UK stole labour and resources from the subjects of the British Empire. They very often also stole their lives. The UK robbed the citizens of the Commonwealth blind. For centuries.

However much an A8 migrant might like to argue that they have contributed to the British Empire, the reality is that a) they came to the UK voluntarily, b) in order to make more money than they could in their homeland and c) if it really were not true that they had acquired a net benefit financially by being in the UK, they would not have stayed.

It is a leap too far to imagine (even of Polish people) that they came to the UK out of a sense of charity to British people, which now needs to be repaid in the same way the British debt to the Commonwealth does.

The very vast majority of nations which comprised the EU in 2004 exercised their legal right to impose temporary restrictions upon migrants’ access from the A8 countries upon their accession to the EU in 2004. The UK was one of three nations alongside Sweden and Ireland which did not.

If British EU immigration policy in 2004 really was structured around the repayment of a debt legitimately owing to Eastern Europe by the UK, answer this question.

When and how was this debt created?

Why did this debt apply specifically to the UK, Sweden and Ireland?

Next answer this question: if the argument that is being propounded in favour of A8 migrants in the wake of the Windrush scandal is based upon the notion of the terms of some form of social contract between the UK and the A8 nations being breached (pushing aside the rather key question as to what exactly the consideration was in that contract and whether the respective parties have given good consideration – an essential characteristic of a contract in UK law), what about the social contract between the UK and the Commonwealth?

Would it be legally defensible for the UK to flagrantly breach the terms of one social contract with Party A in order enter into another social contract with Party B at a later date?

I do realise the possibility that in 2004 British government experts simply decided it would be easier to integrate Eastern European immigrants than Colonial ones for various reasons related to race and culture, but with respect this is really a matter that Britain needed to consider when they invaded the Commonwealth nations.

Saying that you do not like the smell of curry in 2018 just is not going to cut it. Saying that you are worried about the presence of Muslims just is not going to cut it. Let us remember that Britain was the biggest Muslim Power in the world once (when Muslims were being raped, slaughtered and ripped off by the British).

If there is a longstanding association between the Commonwealth and Britain, and if the Commonwealth citizens had been British already for hundreds of years before they began to arrive on British shores, we are going to have to consider the question as to how that “bargain” came about before deciding that we no longer think it is a good bargain.

In 2003 the British government insisted that there would be a net economic gain to the British economy as a result of A8 immigration (whilst estimating that only 5,000 to 13,000 people would arrive in the UK from these countries).

By the time we get to 2014, the verdict amongst government experts is a decidedly more mixed picture.

As things stand in 2018, I do not think many economists would seriously attempt to unequivocally argue that Eastern European immigration has given an overall boost to the British economy – primarily because of the sheer numbers involved.

In real terms the UK was far richer in 2004 than it is today in 2018. Conversely between 2007 and 2013, Poland received £56bn in development funds between 2007 and 2013 (largely from Western Europe). By, quite randomly I must say, being given the chance to work in a far richer country, Polish people have been able to send billions and billions of pounds back from Britain to Poland by way of remittances.

So to compare A8 immigration to the UK with Colonial migration is utterly fallacious in very real economic terms – because it ignores the reality of the transactional flow from these respective parts of the world, namely that Britain took from the Commonwealth nations but gave to Eastern Europe.

It is also insulting ethically – voluntary economic immigration and slavery are not one and the same thing.

I rather suspect that it is in fact the insecurity about the silent but mutual knowledge that these EU rights to come to the UK were granted somewhat randomly that is creating the heightened panic amongst A8 migrants anyway.

I repeat. Colonial migrants have more right to be here than we do.

If you cannot accept that basic moral reality, quite frankly perhaps you should put your money (no pun intended) where your mouth is and leave the UK anyway.