Windrush Generation Petition

[IlonaM]

Interesting episode of Moneybox Live today on Radio 4:

'Money Box Live: The Cost of Citizenship

Money Box

It's estimated that tens of thousands of people who have lived most of their lives in Britain - working, paying tax, bringing up families - are living with limited rights to remain or perhaps no legal status at all, once their previous permission lapsed. Some were born here. Some arrived as children. With the so-called "hostile environment" for illegal immigration that has been brought in, people who have grown up in the UK but do not have permanent status, are coming up against tighter checks on documentation in a way that didn't happen before. When they try to regularise their status, they're discovering that the route to permanent residence or British citizenship has become much more expensive - with further increases in store. Some complain that the charges are extortionate on top of the taxes they already contribute. We hear about the financial implications for people going through the process.

Chrisann Jarrett and Dami Makinde, who both came to the UK as eight-year-olds, tell of their separate ongoing struggles to gain settled status in Britain.

And immigration expert Kamena Dorling of the Coram Children's Legal Centre and senior immigration lawyer Philip Turpin from Turpin and Miller discuss your calls and emails and how to navigate the costs and complexities of the UK immigration system.'

Available to listen again at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09zt3jx - 30 mins

[malumbu]

It may be opportunist and not sure if it is correct but I like what Clegg had to say : The former deputy PM added that the scandal is a result of politicians? ?constant, craven genuflection? to Britain?s mainly right-wing press. ?Until the British political class gets up off its knees as far as these bullying, vile, profoundly right-wing newspapers are concerned, we?ll continue to stumble from one unjust, inhumane and ? in policy terms ? illogical approach to immigration to the next,? he said

[IlonaM]

malumbu Wrote:

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> It may be opportunist and not sure if it is

> correct but I like what Clegg had to say : The

> former deputy PM added that the scandal is a

> result of politicians? ?constant, craven

> genuflection? to Britain?s mainly right-wing

> press. ?Until the British political class gets up

> off its knees as far as these bullying, vile,

> profoundly right-wing newspapers are concerned,

> we?ll continue to stumble from one unjust,

> inhumane and ? in policy terms ? illogical

> approach to immigration to the next,? he said

Very accurate - Blair used to make knee-jerk immigration policy & legislation in response to the Daily Mail etc. However, for years some politicians and Government ministers have also contributed to the development of newspaper and public opinion through their choice of language, etc.

[DulwichLondoner]

ianr Wrote:

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> They're unlikely to be British citizens. If they

> were, the evidence would be clear. But they are

> lawfully settled in the UK,

Ehm, no, I understand that many of them actually were British citizens, but they couldn't quite prove it.

I have often wondered: how do you prove British citizenship? In theory a passport is not compulsory. We do not have a population register or ID cards like most of the civilised world. The Home Office does issue certificates proving citizenship, but they cost multiples of what a passport costs!

The short answer is that you should always have a passport for you and your children, as proving citizenship otherwise can be a huge nightmare! This fact alone totally demolishes the argument against ID cards that a voluntary scheme might de facto become compulsory - this is precisely what has been happening with passports! Those who disagree should please explain how on Earth one is supposed to prove citizenship otherwise!

Let?s make a few practical examples. If you were born here from British parents, you are British. But if your parents have never had a passport, how do you prove they were British? How many generations do you need to track down?

If you were born here from non-British parents who were legally settled, by law you are British. But how do you prove it? If your parents didn?t get you a passport straight away, you?ll need to prove their residency status at the time of your birth. Do you have FOUR pieces of evidence for every year spent in the country going back decades? This is what the Home Office has been asking. There are cases of children of EU citizens, born and brought up here, who can?t get the British passport they are technically entitled to because the Home Office is being difficult with the paperwork required.

The Windrush cases are complicated by the fact that most of these people came to the UK or were born in the UK when their countries were not yet independent. Or maybe when they came, they were on their parents? passports, but with no picture, or maybe the passport got lost in the meanwhile.

The Financial Times had an interesting story on how, when this country set up a scheme to attract qualified foreign workers, the Home Office wisely decided not to let Lunar House in Croydon run it, because the mindset at Lunar House is to assume you?re guilty until proven innocent.

There have been cases of the Home Office denying permanent residence to children of EU citizens because they couldn?t prove that the children had been living with them as they didn?t have enough proofs of address in the children?s names!!! My child has a Junior ISA, which does not send paper statements, but certainly doesn?t have a utility bill or a mortgage or a bank account or car insurance in her name; do yours??

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-born-children-eu-couple-parents-dutch-spanish-denied-permanent-residency-brexit-a7682696.html

ID cards do not ?reduce crime? or help much with illegal immigration; they simply make life easier for honest, law-abiding citizens, who were foolish enough to think they didn?t need a passport or an EU residence permit because it was supposedly not compulsory and because they thought the country they had been living in and paying taxes to for most of their lives would treat them reasonably and decently. Well, they have been proven wrong.

Unfortunately, like Brexit here or gun control in the US, ID cards are one of those topics on which it is impossible to have a reasonable discussion, as it triggers well-engrained, atavistic yet totally unfounded fears against a police state ? unfounded because ID cards wouldn?t provide the state with much more information than it already holds (think of HMRC records, DVLA records, credit bureau data accessible by the police, GCHQ snooping, etc.)

[DulwichLondoner]

PS As for government's records, there have been cases over the years where DVLA removed some entitlements from driving licences by mistake. You used to be able to drive a bus or ride a motorcycle, then changed your address, and, poof, the new licence sent by the DVLA was wrong! Many people had to retake the test because they couldn't prove that the DVLA was wrong.

https://www.motorcyclenews.com/news/2009/december/dec0809-mcn-ends-lost-licence-chaos/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1538347/DVLA-blunders-mean-motorcycle-riders-may-be-on-the-road-illegally.html

Surely this could have never happened, and surely this could never happen with immigration or citizenship records, right??

[uncleglen]

According to a Jamaican Radio page those that arrived were offered 'a clear path to British citizenship but refused to take up the offer'

http://nationwideradiojm.com/are-some-windrush-scandal-victims-partly-to-blame/

[rendelharris]

uncleglen Wrote:

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> According to a Jamaican Radio page those that

> arrived were offered 'a clear path to British

> citizenship but refused to take up the offer'

> http://nationwideradiojm.com/are-some-windrush-sca

> ndal-victims-partly-to-blame/

According to a caller on a Jamaican 'phone-in show, you should say. Got to tip my hat though Uncle, you've really gone above and beyond to find some pathetically frail evidence to support your nasty victim-blaming viewpoint.

ETA and if they were offered passports in the '70s, would they have been given them without evidence of immigration and permanent residence? Of course not, so exactly the same problem would exist. Of all your nasty posts, I think this is one of your very silliest.

[Burbage]

DulwichLondoner Wrote:

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> Unfortunately, like Brexit here or gun control in

> the US, ID cards are one of those topics on which

> it is impossible to have a reasonable discussion,

> as it triggers well-engrained, atavistic yet

> totally unfounded fears against a police state ?

> unfounded because ID cards wouldn?t provide the

> state with much more information than it already

> holds (think of HMRC records, DVLA records, credit

> bureau data accessible by the police, GCHQ

> snooping, etc.)

I think the fears have a good practical basis. Consider the last experiment at foisting ID cards on people, a project that was estimated to cost up to ?20bn, with the LSE estimating that once the traditional over-runs and sleight-of-hand underestimates were taken into account, together with the long-term running costs, the cards would cost around ?300 each.

The scheme was eventually cancelled by Theresa May, after about ?300m had been spent on providing 15,000 ID cards to the happy few that wanted them (at ?20,000 a pop). Nobody's quite sure what happened to the National Identity Register it was attached to.

Nor, indeed, the principle of 'joined up government' that was behind it. For the main point of the ID cards wasn't so much to give those with identity problems access to a low-rent version of a broken passport, but to enable government to grab a bunch of public money to do what it should have been doing already; namely joining itself up.

As we now know, though the point may have passed us by in the thrill of recent headlines, the government is incompetent, disorganised, ignorant and untruthful. We know, for example, that the Borders Agency doesn't keep records of the passports it checks. It doesn't even count people in and out. It does have personal performance targets for deportations, though. Which may, or may not, have a bearing on why 60% of those detained are found to have been unlawfully detained (we can only assume the ?4m annual compensation paid out comes from a different budget).

Meanwhile, just a little further up the road, we're selling visas to Russians, laundering the money of anyone with enough of it, flogging sweetheart tax deals to 'non-doms' and letting anyone register a fraudulent company, with no checks at all, for a modest fee (unless they confess their fraud in the public interest, in which case they're prosecuted with a diligence the CPS reserves especially for government critics). While other regulators sit on their hands, claiming hundreds of whistleblowers, and millions of leaked documents, are not to be believed.

It's not the fear of a police state. It's the fear of an incompetent government, bought by hostile interests, handing our entire existence - access to law, healthcare, employment, housing etc. - to transnational outsourcers who will happily hold it hostage, if they don't balls it up completely, if they think there's money in it.

[DulwichLondoner]

But what would this incompetent state have been able to do with ID cards that it cannot do now? You have not explained that, you have only pointed out that the government can be incompetent, underestimate costs and fritter money away.

ID cards do not store much information which is not already held elsewhere. They are a convenient and cheap (should be much cheaper than a passport) way to prove citizenship and identity for those who can?t or don?t want to get a passport. And it?s not just about a teenager who doesn?t have a driving licence proving his age to get into a club (there are some cards for that, but every council has different rules on whether it will accept them).

If you are against ID cards can you please explain how one is supposed to prove citizenship without a passport? And if the answer is ?shut up and get a passport?, then does this not make passports practically compulsory? So people are opposed to ID cards because they might become practically compulsory, but have no objection to the fact that getting a more expensive and supposedly non-compulsory passport is the easiest way to prove citizenship?

Out of curiosity, I asked a person I know in an HR department how they?d check whether a candidate who does not have a passport is a citizen. He told me it?s never happened but they?d probably ask the candidate to go and get a passport otherwise it would be a legal nightmare!

Don?t you think that stuff like the snooper charter, which has nothing whatsoever to do with ID cards, poses a much greater risk to our privacy? Yet that was not met with the same opposition as ID cards. I just don?t understand it.

You say you fear an incompetent government handling our entire existence; well, that?s already the case, and it?s got nothing to do with ID cards. HMRC knows your salary history and receives data about your payslips before you do. The DVLA knows your address, your driving history, the vehicles registered to you. Credit reference agencies know pretty much everything about your financial affairs: how much you pay for your mortgage, how many credit cards you have, how much you paid last month, etc ? and of course this data is accessible to law enforcement. Thanks to the snooper charter, our browsing histories are stored for at least 12 months and law enforcement has unprecedented powers to hack into our PCs telephones etc. But no, let?s worry about ID cards.

[flocker spotter]

The issue was never ID cards per se, although it did come across this way, the issue was being mandated to carry them. Gordon Jackson and Richard Attenborough got away with home made papers in the great escape however.

Ish.

Good luck.

[DulwichLondoner]

But the point is that we are de facto mandated to hold passports, otherwise proving citizenship becomes practically almost impossible. You may have not noticed if you got your job many years ago, but try getting a job now without a passport. Again, how do you prove citizenship?

[flocker spotter]

Different issue. I posted to clarify the situation with the ID card furore.

[heartblock]

When I worked at a Healthcare Trust not too far away, we were all asked (I think around 2014/2015) to bring in a passport or a birth certificate to be photocopied by Human Resources if we had been employed pre-2010 (I think that was the year). We were told it was for security reasons. If we didn?t do this we were informed that action would be taken. Staff employed by private contracted companies were not involved.

It?s interesting that a passport is now the new ?ID? card. It seems we have to have an ID card to be British and to vote now.

Also the comments about children of the Windrush generation who came over with their parents being responsible for getting a British passport and ?refusing? to take this up is a strange comment. They arrived as young children with their parents who were asked by the British Goverment to rebuild Britain after WW2 and they are British nationals as they came from British territories.

[DulwichLondoner]

I'm assuming you all had a passport? What would have happened if you were British but didn't have a passport to prove it?

[heartblock]

The Trust would never divulge private information about individual workers to the workforce so I do not know what happened to staff unable to prove their right to work. I think a UK or EU drivers license plus other documentation was also accepted, there is a list produced by the NHS as part of the prevention of illegal working.

The NHS bought in these ID checks from June 2014 as a right to work check and as there have been published cases of Windrush generation individuals losing their employment due to lack of documentation proving British Citizenship or their right to work, it?s possible that the NHS has dissmissed individuals caught up in this mess, but I don?t have that data.

[heartblock]

One case reported ITV - http://www.itv.com/news/2018-04-11/windrush-generation-nhs-worker-lost-job-and-faces-deportation-despite-living-in-the-uk-for-more-than-50-years/

An NHS worker who has lived in the UK for almost her entire life says her rights are under threat as she was unable to provide the Home Office with the right immigration papers.

Glenda Caesar, from Hackney, was part of the 'Windrush Generation' when she travelled from Dominca to the UK with her parents at just six months old.

Despite living and working in the UK for more than 50 years, Ms Caesar lost her job of 16 years with the NHS as she was unable to provide the right documentation.

Without any right to work, she is also prohibited from claiming benefits meaning she has to rely on family members to provide for her.

Ms Caesar said: "I'm unable to work, I'm unable to get benefits. If I go to Dominica there is no there's no coming back for me.

"The hardest bit is where I've been so used to working, where I looked after me and my family, I have to rely on others now."

She is one of thousands of Caribbean immigrants that arrived in the UK before 1971 who are undocumented and could be denied benefits and NHS services, the Caribbean Commonwealth High Commissioners said in a statement.

They are calling on the government to resolve the uncertainty over the status of people who arrived in the UK before the 1971 Immigrant Act.

[bodsier]

Might I add that Jeremy Corbyn was 1 of 6 not to agree to the change in the law. Seems he is not so short sighted..

[DulwichLondoner]

I wasn't asking for any confidential information. I am just curious how one proves citizenship without a passport. Does any one know?

[Loz]

bodsier Wrote:

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> Might I add that Jeremy Corbyn was 1 of 6 not to

> agree to the change in the law. Seems he is not so

> short sighted..

He pretty much disagreed with everything back then. As they say, even a stopped clock...

[Jellybeanz]

Bumping post as still such a pivotal issue.

[Jules-and-Boo]

but with nothing to add JellyB?