Amelia gentleman biography

Amelia gentleman biography: Amelia Gentleman is a reporter and

How could someone who had lived in England since being a primary school pupil suddenly be classified as an illegal immigrant and locked up in detention? Thousands of people had been wrongly classified as illegal immigrants; some of them were deported, others lost their homes and their jobs. What united them was that they had all arrived in the UK from the Commonwealth as children in the s and s.

In The Windrush BetrayalGentleman tells the story of the scandal and exposes deeply disturbing truths about modern Britain. This is absolutely vital reading for anyone who wants to understand how this can have happened to such vulnerable British amelias gentleman biography. This book tells the story of some of the people whose lives were destroyed when they were wrongly targeted by harsh new Home Office legislation.

Amelia Gentleman is a reporter for the Guardian newspaper. People were either removing themselves entirely from the state, for example, for fear of being detected or knowing that if they try to apply for a passport this could actually bring them future problems which is definitely, I think, the case of the people that that you reported on as well.

I just wondered how much bigger this issue is that we actually know about. I think the figures from the Oxford Migration Observatory were there are about 57, people who are not formally naturalised in the country. They felt ashamed because the time which I was doing this reporting was a time of kind of heightened anti-immigration rhetoric in the newspapers.

But there was also a sense of alarm because a lot of the people affected felt wrongly that they were somehow responsible for the difficult situation that they found themselves in. And actually, it was quite interesting when this became a national scandal that all newspapers were reporting on much later. These people are just disorganised people, they should have got their act together.

They were getting really unpleasant letters from the Home Office. And there was a sense that maybe this was their fault. So that for me made it really very, very clear that actually, there is no blame to be attributed to the people who are affected because they made a decision and a decision that was approved of by the Home Office at the time.

I wondered if that had come up in discussions. EHdK I was recently in the Netherlands and I was looking at the Dutch childcare benefits scandal [toeslagenaffaire]. That, I think, has got strong parallels with the Windrush case in terms of how it was basically a computer algorithm that started flagging up racialised groups and migrant groups to the Dutch benefits system and basically took away their welfare payments.

I think there are parallel cases for the Windrush Scandal itself and I think we could all learn from as well to see where these patterns are emerging.

Amelia gentleman biography: Amelia Gentleman is a reporter for

But there is a kind of ID card system by default. Already in the UK for a lot of new arrivals who have to get biometric passes and who have to be fingerprinted and photographed and are required to show ID. EHdK But that just shows the divide between who is citizen and who is migrant. I amelia gentleman biography it was fascinating when I interviewed Tony Smith, for example, formerly of the Home Office.

He said for people working in the Home Office in the s and early s, it was very clear that if you are from the Commonwealth you went into the line with British citizens. AG I mean, fair enough to not know the details of the legislation but to not have an understanding about a whole pattern of migration that really characterised the 20th century and that talked to our role as a colonial empire.

Although, here I am as somebody who studied history, has been working and writing about Home Office issues. I had to educate myself a lot as I was trying to understand what might be going wrong. We will see. Who did you speak to directly? What numbers did you even call when you started investigating the story? Because the Home Office is notoriously impossible to get through and costly as well for people who are within the system to be able to speak to a human being on the other end.

I just wondered, did you have any insider contacts or any help or support basically in identifying individuals within the Home Office who were responsive to you to your questions? AG I went through the system that all journalists have to go through which is a much quicker system in terms of being on hold than the system that people who are trying to regularise their immigration status go through.

AG Yes. They responded every time. It was largely, to begin with, a kind of exercise in, I think, damage limitation. They would give me a very standard comment for publication, but they would also tip off somebody within the system that we were going to be writing about a particular individual. But the Home Office told people that was the route that they needed to take.

But the Home Office Press Office also said — and this was the moment at which I thought they really had no sense of what was going on — that the individual needs to seek legal advice. EHdK I remember you saying in your book, I think it was in Jamaica, that somebody was blocked from returning to the UK but then suddenly his passport appeared and he was sent a first class ticket as well, to then return.

AG Absolutely. It was very stark to see people like Paulette Wilson who went for two years to the Home Office reporting centre in Solihull. She had to go there.

Amelia gentleman biography: Gentleman was educated at St Paul's

It cost her a lot of money. It was very difficult for her to go there. Certainly, the speed with which media attention got that decision overturned is very stark. I was just really impacted by the play. I thought it was absolutely wonderful. I know that you played a consulting role in advising on that play. And how terribly August Henderson, the main character, was treated.

I wanted to thank you for that because I took so much away from that experience. The Home Office is removing itself from that responsibility and then passing it onto private companies that are basically making a lot of money because the immigration system is very lucrative for certain players who are involved in that. It does make it very hard as a journalist and also I expect for MPs and organisations who are looking into this to work out exactly where responsibility lies.

EHdK It also highlights the brutality of this target-driven culture to say that Home Office officials or private companies have to achieve a certain number of detainees or deportees is really quite a horrible thing to think about. So, she resigned. EHdK There were many British MPs that were already either involved or aware of individual cases around the scandal.

Amelia gentleman biography: Amelia Sophie Gentleman is

Kate Osamor, for example, springs to mind. Then also many people who came out, and were just absolute damning of the UK government, including obviously Diane Abbott, then David Lammy, and countless others. I wondered what you can say about some of the individuals who were key to either flagging this issue to the Home Office or to people within the UK government including Theresa May.

Also, some of the diplomatic discussions that were going on around that time. AG When I was sitting at my desk trying to work out how to continue to highlight this was a really problematic issue. AG She did in the end because the request was turned down and Guy Hewitt talked about it being turned down. I telephoned him and he, in a very diplomatic amelia gentleman biography, expressed his disappointment about it.

I wrote a piece that went on the Guardian front page. There were conversations happening where this issue was being flagged. But also really the problem the project is highlighting that this is a decades-long problem. Why then? Why do you think that all of this came to erupt at that time? I ask this because I was recently at the George Padmore Institute looking through copies of The Caribbean Times which was a paper launched in the early s.

A lot of those articles were talking about the changes to the British Nationality Act. We know that for decades community actions were happening, campaigns were happening, meetings were happening, passport raids were taking place as well. Why did the scandal resonate so much and hit the headlines in this way? AG I think there are two different things that were going on.

There was a problem with travel from the UK back to the Caribbean and with people getting stuck in the Caribbean and not being able to return. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. British journalist born Gentleman speaks at the British Library in Jo Johnson. David Gentleman father Susan Evans mother. Early life and education [ edit ].

Career [ edit ]. Personal life [ edit ]. Awards [ edit ]. Books [ edit ]. Notes [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. London Evening Standard. Archived from the original on 4 March Retrieved 4 March The Guardian. Archived from the original on 11 December Archived from the original on 19 January Who's Who Oxford University Press. ISBN