'Cruel, Heartless': Windrush Citizens Recount Treatment at British High Commission in Jamaica

Members of the Windrush Generation in Jamaica have condemned the treatment they have received at the British High Commission's office in Kingston saying that officials have refused to provide them with proper assistance for many years. 

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The accusation comes from Labour MP David Lammy, who said: “The failings of the Home Office have been compounded by British government representatives in Jamaica.” 

He had earlier commented that incidents of “people who have been deported and treated so horrendously are yet more evidence of the litany of abject failure that is the Windrush scandal.”

According to The Guardian, several members of the Windrush Generation in Jamaica had told them that they were dealt with dismissively when they requested help at the United Kingdom's diplomatic mission in the country.

Ken Morgan, 68, one of the citizens at the center of the report, accused the British government of brushing him off and offering zero little help when his British passport was confiscated without explanation 25 years ago. At the time authorities told him that it “was never a proper British passport.”

He described his treatment by British authorities as being “so insensitive, so cruel, so heartless” and demanded an investigation into the operations at the High Commission and into the scandal that has become the Windrush matter.

Lammy agreed, saying that “the UK government must act quickly to bring these people home and to compensate them for deporting British citizens if (Britain's home secretary) Sajid Javid’s promise to do right by the Windrush citizens is to mean anything.”

Meanwhile, Icilda Williams, 83, a widowed nurse, who worked for Britain's National Health Service (NHS) for 30 years, says she has been refused, on multiple occasions, by authorities to travel from Jamaica to visit her family in the UK. “I’m too old to wait in lines at the High Commission in Kingston, to go for interview after interview. We should be able to visit our families. My pension is in the UK. My house is there. My kids are there.”

Williams' case is even more offensive since the British government has launched a recruitment program to attract nurses from Jamaica to help fill over 34,000 vacancies in the NHS while actively blocking her attempts to have her status regularized.