Why Theresa May is to blame for the Windrush scandal

To see the cruelty of bureaucracy, the injustice that can spring from reducing public life to mere process and human beings to paperwork, look no further than the Windrush scandal.

Scandal is an overused word these days. Everything from a politician’s ill-advised tweet to a celeb’s extramarital affair gets chalked up as scandal. But if we abide by the true definition of the word — to mean something that is morally wrong and which stirs outrage among the public — then the British state’s sudden, hostile turning against the Caribbean people and others who have made their home in Britain over the past 70 years genuinely fits the bill. This is truly scandalous. The Home Office harassment of the Windrush generation is a black mark, perhaps the blackest mark yet, against Theresa May’s government, and she urgently needs to end this wickedness.

It was on 22nd June 1948 that the Empire Windrush sailed up the Thames, carrying on it 492 migrants from the Caribbean.