Starting in the 1940s, the British government admitted people from the West Indies into the UK. One party wanted work; the other needed a larger labour force. Many of the newcomers stayed back and were accepted as British citizens. But there was a problem that would grow over a generation: these new citizens never received official paperwork showing their citizenship. How did this escape the attention of the authorities? No one knows or no one wants to admit culpability—or was it by design, a poisoned promissory note to be cashed in future?
What we do know is that by 2012, the British Home Office declared it intended to make life difficult for anyone who had illegally immigrated to the UK. Nothing quite wrong with punishing what is illegal. Except for one thing: how were they to define an illegal migrant, when even the legal ones lacked paperwork?
In the documentary Hostile, which has been doing brisk business at British festivals after bowing in Raindance, director Sonita Gale shows how that Home Office policy, then led by future PM Theresa May, destroyed the lives and livelihoods of a number of people whose only crime was not possessing the paperwork that the government hadn’t issued. Jobs, healthcare, and housing became difficult for these unfortunates, a generation of people from the West Indies who came to Britain aboard the ship MV Empire Windrush. When the deportations and detentions left in its wake became public knowledge in 2018, the disastrous consequences of the policy that robbed them of citizenship became known as the Windrush Scandal.
Gale’s work was complicated by the pandemic, which on the one hand made conditions harsher still for many immigrants and, on the other, emphasised the importance of those migrants to England’s National Health Service. While one might hope that the latter compensates for the former, it doesn’t quite work that way. As one interviewee says onscreen, the same people who prevented the NHS from crumbling under the strain of the pandemic were treated badly by the people they risked their lives serving. May, who mostly escapes Hostile‘s lens, would later apologise for her hostile environment policy, but its results have never really been reversed.
In fact, things may have gotten worse. As 2021 came to a close, only 5 percent of those affected by the Windrush Scandal had received compensation. And the stories conveyed to viewers via Neil Harvey’s camera are disturbing, as they all point to Britain’s official and unofficial cruelty towards migrants, whatever their value. One subject of Asian descent has been in a never-ending battle with the authorities for years and the strain on his marriage is palpable. The sheer amount of documents he has to wade through is so daunting, he has purchased three printers. There’s a backup for the backup. The dog may be man’s best friend, but the printer is clearly a British immigrant’s. Suddenly, the paperwork denied a certain class of immigrant appears as a weight over the neck of another class, as cash, time, and energies are poured into the process of applying to stay back in a country in which one’s life and family have been built. Of course, there’s some racism and some xenophobia baked into all of this, but there is also a capitalist racket going on: applying to stay in Britain is neither free nor cheap.
It is a crushing irony that today the individual tasked with running the Home Office, Priti Patel, is herself the daughter of Asian immigrants who were ejected from Uganda and accepted by her new country. One wonders if what is at play here isn’t the case of the inmate who manages to escape and then adds extra layers of security to demonstrate fealty to the wardens. Off screen, she’s asked if her parents could have made it in the UK with the sort of policies she now enforces. Naturally, she parries the question. Let’s turn to a Brit from time past for an answer: some animals are more equal than others, wrote George Orwell.
Viewers of a certain perspective may ask why exactly people can’t just stay where they were born. The answer would be that for many of the children of the Windrush generation, Britain is where they were born. And as for the others, it pays to remember the words of the poet Warsan Shire: “No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark.” Gale may have the politics of migration on her mind—but Hostile’s true subject can be framed as a rather banal question: whatever happened to British humanity?
Director, screenwriter, producer: Sonita Gale
Executive Producers: Nitin Sawhney, Charlotte Fisher
Cinematographer: Neil Harvey
Editor: Alex Fry
Production company: Galeforce Film (UK)
98 minutes