Ten for Windrush

Sixteen years after Nuremberg

In 1946 Britain sat as one of the four powers in judgment at Nuremberg, where the Nazi dispossession of Germany’s Jews was put on the record. Sixteen years later, in 1962, Britain began the dispossession of the Windrush generation.

Stage for stage, it used the same techniques. Citizens were divided into tiers. Citizenship was removed by statute. Absence from the country became a trigger for losing it. The burden of proof was turned against the individual. And a line of descent decided who kept their rights and who did not.

The outcomes were not the same, and this book never says they were: in Germany, the road ended in genocide. The claim is one of shared technique. It is made because a technique, once it is in the repertoire, can be drawn upon again, and what was done by these means to one people can be done by them to any.

The Shared Repertoire

Windrush, the Anglophone Colour Line, and the Legal Machinery of Dispossession

A witness’s reassessment, by George Lee

Listen to the opening of the audiobook.

The audiobook is read by a designed synthetic voice, made for this book alone.

What was done, and by whom

The dispossession of the Windrush generation was not a British aberration, nor a set of separate histories that merely rhyme.

It was one instance of a shared repertoire of legal techniques for stripping people of standing, drawn upon by Britain not as a foreign import but as an inheritance of its own imperial law, and turned inward upon colonial-origin subjects who had claimed the equal membership the law appeared to promise.

This book follows that repertoire through the statute book, from the thirty-six days of 1962 to the reclassification of 1973, holding every claim to the record. It is written in the first person, as testimony, because its author is one of those the legislation marked.

The ten

The wrong was Britain’s, and Britain owes the restoration. But ten sovereign states now represent, among their peoples, the very men and women Britain dispossessed. Their independence was made the alibi for the dispossession; that alone gives them cause to speak.

Four by Act of Parliament

Citizenship removed by a section of each Independence Act.

  • 1962Jamaica
  • 1962Trinidad and Tobago
  • 1966Barbados
  • 1966Guyana

Six by Order in Council

Citizenship removed by executive instrument under the West Indies Act 1967, put to no vote in Parliament.

  • 1974Grenada
  • 1978Dominica
  • 1979Saint Lucia
  • 1979Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
  • 1981Antigua and Barbuda
  • 1983Saint Christopher and Nevis

The ten do not owe restoration; Britain does. What the ten can give is advocacy: the standing of states, which no claimant and no campaign possesses, to press Britain jointly and by name.

The book

  1. Part One
    The FoundationThe living mechanism: how a citizen is un-made, and kept un-made.
  2. Part Two
    How the Machinery Was BuiltOne repertoire in seven views, from 1962 to the buried Strasbourg finding.
  3. Part Three
    The HingeThe ten in London, and why the book turns outward.
  4. Part Four
    The ReckoningThe law, the inquiry, and the defence, examined in turn.
  5. Part Five
    What Is OwedRestoration, not compensation, and the last word.

The author

George Lee came to Britain as a child in 1961. He is a writer and researcher whose work joins legal history, verification at primary source, and his own testimony as one of the generation this book describes.

Hear when it is published

The book and the audiobook are in preparation. Drop me a line and I’ll let you know when they’re available. If you have any questions, or would like to know more, I’d be glad to hear from you.

Drop me a line