Windrush

Please welcome me, Windrush people, I am joining you (and I trust that you will be more welcoming than some British people were to you). I salute you and I am honoured to be (in some way) one of you. After three months of bureaucracy and stress, I am back precisely to where I was before: a person with indefinite leave to remain in the UK, thanks to the Windrush scheme. I qualify to be a Windrush person. I meet the official requirements: I arrived in Britain from a Commonwealth country before 1973 and was given indefinite leave to remain. I also meet two unofficial requirements: I came by ship (the Shaw Savill Line ship “Southern Cross”, which docked in Southampton on 21 August 1968), and the Home Office lost my records. I received indefinite leave to remain in 1971; it was clearly stamped in my passport at the time. For some time the immigration officer would put the stamp into my new passport the first time I travelled after getting one; then they stopped doing that, and I was told…