Latest news with #WinstonKnight
The Guardian
27-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Another Windrush generation man has UK deportation order revoked
A Windrush generation man who was wrongly excluded from the UK by the Home Office has had his deportation order revoked in the second case of its kind to come to light in the space of a week. Gersham Williams, 74, who first arrived in the UK in 1961 at the age of 10, was deported in August 2016 after being convicted of and serving a sentence in relation to a firearms conspiracy conviction. He has now had his deportation order revoked after the Home Office told him he should have been exempt due to the date he arrived in the UK, which was before the Immigration Act 1971. That law granted indefinite leave to remain to many Commonwealth citizens settled in the UK. However, while the rest of his family became British citizens, Williams decided he did not need to obtain a British passport because, he said, Jamaica was 'ruled by the Queen of England' at that time. His case follows that of Winston Knight, who had lived in the UK for 47 years before being deported. The Home Office agreed to fly Knight back to the UK after accepting he was a member of the Windrush generation and revoking his deportation order. Knight lived on the streets of Jamaica for more than a decade. Williams's solicitor, Jacqueline McKenzie of Leigh Day, said: 'I am of the view that cases like these are probably amongst many.' McKenzie said she was asking the Home Office to 'intensify its efforts' to provide information on people from Commonwealth countries who were settled in the UK before January 1973 and who were deported, in order to 'start an effective programme of outreach and engagement'. She also called for the government 'to agree to a statutory inquiry so that we can understand not just the causes of the Windrush scandal, but review its ongoing manifestation'. Williams is in a state of poor health in Jamaica, with neurological and urological problems. He has difficulties walking and has struggled to survive there. Although the Home Office has revoked his deportation, before being removed from the UK Williams had received an IPP – imprisonment for public protection – sentence. Officials have warned him in a letter that due to his IPP sentence, he could be sent back to prison on arrival in the UK. The letter states: 'You will therefore be liable to be returned to prison to serve the remainder of your sentence.' Speaking from Jamaica, Williams said he did not accept that the conviction that led to his deportation was sound. 'When I was in the UK the police would never leave me alone, that's the reason I'm in Jamaica now,' he said. 'The Home Office has accepted they were wrong to deport me but I'm not returning to the UK to go back to prison. I don't belong there. I want to get an assurance from the UK government that I can come back here as a free man. I have not committed any crimes in my nine years in Jamaica. My priority is freedom of movement.' Williams was politically active when he was living in Ladbroke Grove in west London, helping to establish Grassroots, a bookshop and centre for black art and culture. He trained as a youth and community worker and helped support young black people subjected to police harassment. He attended the 11th World Festival of Youth and Students in 1978 in Cuba alongside people such as Paul Boateng, now a Labour peer. He befriended Winnie Mandela on her visits to London and she invited him to Nelson Mandela's inauguration. 'I come from injustice and I still speak truth to power,' he said. The Guardian published a report about a July 1983 conviction received by Williams and two others for an armed hold-up of a petrol station. The court heard that he had described himself as a Robin Hood raising money for community projects and told police: 'You people sold my people into slavery and I'm fighting back.' McKenzie said: 'Each day that passes worsens the injustice for this family because Mr Williams is elderly, unwell and has been living in very austere conditions. I hope all arrangements will be now put in place, swiftly, to reunite him with his loved ones.' A Home Office spokesperson said: 'It is our longstanding policy not to comment on individual cases; however, it is also this government's determination to ensure that all those affected by the Windrush scandal are treated with the upmost care and consideration in their future dealings with the Home Office, and that principle will guide our approach in all such cases.'
The Guardian
16-05-2025
- The Guardian
UK agrees to fly home wrongly deported Windrush generation man from Jamaica
The Home Office has agreed to fly home a member of the Windrush generation who lived in the UK for 47 years before being wrongly deported and forced to live on the streets of Jamaica in horrific conditions for more than a decade. In a highly unusual move and after protracted legal action, Home Office officials have accepted that Winston Knight, 64, is a member of the Windrush generation and have agreed to revoke his deportation order. Speaking to the Guardian from Kingston, Jamaica, Knight said he was delighted to finally be on his way back to the UK after more than a decade of enduring horrific conditions on the streets. 'I'm doing much better now I know I have won my case and will be returning to the UK. But I am coming from hell. I have been living in a war zone in Kingston and I've had some very tough days.' He is likely to be back in the UK in the coming weeks, possibly before Windrush Day on 22 June, which celebrates the contribution Caribbean migrants and their families have made to the UK. It marks the date in 1948 that HMT Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury, Essex, bringing hundreds of passengers from the Caribbean to the UK. Knight was deported from the UK in 2013 after he was convicted of stealing a piece of jewellery during the 2011 riots in what his lawyers described as an 'opportunistic mistake'. He arrived in 1966 aged six, brought here by people unrelated to him. He experienced a difficult childhood in south London, was not allowed to attend school and later worked on construction sites. The lack of school and employment records made it difficult for him to prove he had been 'ordinarily resident' in the UK in 1973. Like all Citizens of the UK and Colonies – a status granted before 1983 – he was granted indefinite leave to remain. But his lawyers had to carry out painstaking work to track down eye witnesses who remembered him from his childhood and could corroborate his account of the time he arrived in the UK. When he was unlawfully deported in 2013, the Windrush scandal revealed by the Guardian had not yet emerged. Knight said that he was so desperate when he was detained in Harmondsworth immigration removal centre, near Heathrow, about the prospect of being forcibly returned to a country he knew little of, that he repeatedly attempted suicide there. But his deportation went ahead despite his fragile mental state and he found himself street homeless on the streets of Kingston where he has been caught in the crossfire of gang warfare. The violence he witnessed has left him deeply traumatised, he said. The Guardian reported on his case in 2018 and interviewed him in Kingston. At that time he asked for his real name not to be used and instead to be referred to by David Jameson. He brought a judicial review arguing that he was exempt from deportation, and just hours before the final hearing on 15 May the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, conceded that Knight was a member of the Windrush generation. Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion Nina Kamp, a consultant solicitor at Duncan Lewis Solicitors who represents Knight, said: 'Mr Knight has suffered unimaginable harm being homeless in an extremely volatile environment for over a decade with no support. The physical and psychological toll is profound and will take years to repair. Astonishingly, the home secretary has still offered him no apology for the historic wrong her department inflicted.' She added: 'This case ranks among the gravest Windrush injustices we have seen –not only because he was excluded for 12 years, but because the home secretary clung to an indefensible position until the very last moment, needlessly prolonging and compounding his suffering.' Knight is being put up in a hotel before being returned to the UK. 'For the first time since I was deported here, I'm sleeping in a bed,' he said. I witnessed so many murders and stabbings and saw so many people being beaten. I survived by eating vegetables from the market, bread and bananas. I've received a lot of abuse in Jamaica being called 'English' and 'deportee'.' He said one of the things he has really missed about England were his days playing football in a Sunday league with friends in New Cross Gate, south London. 'I would love to do that again and get back to work doing painting and decorating,' he said. 'I'm a working kind of guy. 'I have had a lot of ups and downs here, mostly downs, but now I'm coming back to England I feel great. Thank God I survived. I was calling out for years but nobody listened to me.'
