This is no way to treat a loyal and hard working generation
I was watching the news recently about the Windrush generation – men, women and children from Barbados and Jamaica who came to our country after the Second World War, willing to work hard to make a better life for themselves.
We needed their labour to help us rebuild a battered country destroyed by Germany. I remember as a child seeing the men in trilbies and baggy suits, it was all new to me. Us kids had never seen black people before.
In 1961 I left school and started work as an apprentice electrician at Bayliss, Jones & Bayliss, Monmore Green. A lot of these men worked in the foundry, knocking out boxes that had been used for moulds.
The conditions they worked in were, what we would call in 2018, inhumane. There was filth and the contents of the mould boxes piled up like a desert. Break-times they would eat their ‘snap’ sitting amongst the filth. Never a complaint, they did their work and clocked out at the end of the day.
Fast forward 57 years to 2018 and these very people who helped rebuild our country, they and some of their children are being classed as ‘non-British’, no passports, unemployable, some can’t get jobs.
Treated as illegal immigrants – while people in some countries in our beloved EU can stroll into this country at will. Now Theresa May has announced they will rectify the grave injustice that these ‘British citizens’ have had to endure.
They fought for us, worked in low paid jobs for our beloved country, their reward the humiliation of being classed as aliens.
It should never have come to this, but let’s hope this Government will put right and compensate these poor people. A woman who has worked 32 years loses her job because she can’t prove she’s a British citizen – gratitude for years of loyalty.
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