Why I am posting this? I am volunteering for the Rebel Radio and been working on these posters for some time. I wanted to offer a background to this work. The artworks shown on the posters are done by artists who are connected to the Windrush generation.

I can’t take ownership over the text as I copied it from Wikipedia.

The artworks featuring bellow are by https://www.instagram.com/dannyf_the_artsloth/

Rachelle Romeo called “Identity”

The Windrush scandal is a 2018 British political scandal concerning people who were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and, in around 63 cases, wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office. Many of those affected had been born British subjects and had arrived in the UK before 1973, particularly from Caribbean countries as members of the Windrush generation.

As well as those who were wrongly deported, an unknown number were wrongly detained, lost their jobs or homes, or were denied benefits or medical care to which they were entitled. A number of long-term UK residents were wrongly refused re-entry to the UK, and a larger number were threatened with immediate deportation by the Home Office.

Linked by commentators to the “hostile environment policy” instituted by Theresa May during her time as Home Secretary, the scandal led to the resignation of Amber Rudd as Home Secretary in April 2018, and the appointment of Sajid Javid as her successor. The scandal also prompted a wider debate about British immigration policy and Home Office practice.

The scandal came to public attention as a result of a campaign mounted by Caribbean diplomats to the UK, British parliamentarians and charities, and an extended series of articles in The Guardian newspaper.

The British Nationality Act 1948 gave citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies status, and the right to settle in the UK, to everyone who was at that time a British subject by virtue of having been born in a British colony. The act, and encouragement from British Government campaigns in Caribbean countries, led to a wave of immigration from the Caribbean. Between 1948 and 1970 nearly half a million people moved from the Caribbean to Britain, which in 1948 faced severe labour shortages in the wake of the Second World War. These immigrants were later referred to as “the Windrush generation”. In addition to working age adults, many children travelled from the Caribbean to join parents or grandparents in the UK, or travelled with their parents, without their own passports.

Since these people had a legal right to come to the UK, they neither needed nor were given any documents upon entry to the UK, nor following changes in immigration laws in the early 1970s. Some worked – or attended schools in the UK, without any official documentary record of their having done so, other than the same records as any UK-born citizen.

Many of the countries from which the immigrants had come, became independent of the UK after 1948, and therefore people then living there became citizens of those countries. Additionally, a series of legislative measures in the 1960s and early 1970s limited the rights of citizens of these former colonies, now members of the Commonwealth, to come to, or work in the UK. However, anyone who had arrived in the UK from a Commonwealth country before 1973 was granted an automatic right to permanently remain, unless they left the UK for more than two years. Since the right was automatic, many people in this category were never given, or asked to provide, documentary evidence of their right to remain either at that time, or in the following four decades, during which many continued to live and work in the UK, believing themselves to be British.

A clause in the 1999 Immigration Act specifically protected longstanding residents of the UK from Commonwealth countries from enforced removal. The clause was not transferred to 2014 immigration legislation. The clause was removed as Commonwealth citizens living in the UK before 1 January 1973 were “adequately protected from removal”, according to a Home Office spokesperson.

Bellow are poster design possibilities with the one at the top as a winner.