Blitz Bureau
LONDON: The Home Office has been forced to release a suppressed report on the origins of the Windrush scandal by a tribunal judge who quoted George Orwell in a judgment criticising the department’s lack of transparency.
For the past three years, Home Office staff have worked to bury a hard-hitting research paper that states that roots of the scandal lay in 30 years of racist immigration legislation designed to reduce the UK’s non-white population.
The 52-page analysis by a Home Office-commissioned historian, who has not been named, described how “the British empire depended on racist ideology in order to function” and explained how this ideology had driven immigration laws passed in the postwar period.
The department rejected several freedom of information requests asking for the Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal to be released, arguing that publication might damage affected communities’ “trust in government” and “its future development of immigration policy”.
James Coombs, a transparency campaigner and an IT worker for a mobile phone company, took the case to the information commissioner arguing that the Home Office was delaying responding because the information was “politically embarrassing”.
His request was rejected last year, but he has won an appeal at the general regulatory chamber Information Rights jurisdiction first-tier tribunal.
Tribunal judge Chris Hughes rejected the Home Office’s arguments, finding that it was “highly improbable” that the wider dissemination of the study would impair future provision of advice to the department. The Home Office is expected to publish the history on the government website soon.
The report, leaked to the Guardian in May 2022, concluded that the origins of the “deep-rooted racism of the Windrush scandal” lie in the fact that “during 1950-1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK”.
