The problem with hostile environments and the promising/threatening of hostile environments by successive Conservative and Labour governments should be apparent in the name. An environment is something we all share so to make it hostile is self-defeating for everyone. But for some it's far worse. Some feel and experience that hostility not vicariously but directly.
It's a hostility so intense that it could have you questioning the very nature of reality itself, so cruel that it asks you take a paternity test to see if your grown up children are really yours, and so inhumane that it will put you in prison for a crime that has never been committed and threaten to deport you to a country you barely know four and half thousand miles away from your loved ones.
Sitting in Limbo, a TV movie currently available on the BBC iPlayer, tells the story of Anthony Bryan (Patrick Robinson, Ash from Casualty), a youthful looking quinquagenarian grandfather who lives in Edmonton, North London with his long term partner Nadine (Janet Marshall). His children, Eileen (Pippa Bennett-Warner) and Gary (CJ Beckford) clearly love him and his grandchildren dote on him almost as much as he does them.
Anthony's life is an ordinary, honest, and unflashy one. He works as a handyman, he teaches his grandkids how to play dominoes with a West Indian flourish, he dances to reggae (the soundtrack's great - Barrington Levy, Sister Nancy, John Holt, and Jimmy Cliff) at birthday parties and club nights. I don't even begrudge him being a Spurs fan and when we see him visiting the pub, and singing songs about Harry Kane and Maurcio Pochettino, before the game with his lifelong friends Barrington (Andrew Dennis) and Trevor (Jay Simpson) the banter rings as true as the friendship runs deep.
Ordinary people are capable of extraordinary deep wells of emotion and in a masterful and understated way director Stella Corradi and writer Stephen S.Thompson manage to evoke that just by showing us average people getting on with their daily business. But that all changes when Bryan becomes, unbeknown to him, a victim of what would eventually come to be known as the Windrush Scandal.
In 2007, the Labour government first coined the term "hostile environment" in relation to immigration policy, in 2012 David Cameron's Conservative government, with Theresa May then Home Secretary, formed the Hostile Environment Working Group. When May became PM she took both the rhetoric and the reality of the hostile environment even further. In 2016, in Edmonton and many other places, those chickens came home to roost - and it was a complete and utter scandal that should shame May until her dying day.
We see Anthony told by his employer that they've received correspondence from the Home Office that says he's not a UK citizen (despite having lived in the UK for over fifty years, arriving aged eight on his Jamaican's mother's passport) and that they'll have to terminate his employment. As an, overnight, illegal alien he'll neither be able to find new work, claim benefits, or use the NHS and the exorbitant cost of a solicitor means securing the service of one is nothing but a pipe dream.
Anthony's quest, now, is to prove that he belongs in the UK and, despite testaments from friends, family, and even his old head teacher that he's lived in the country, perfectly legally, since 1965 and countless documentation that also demonstrates this fact, it seems that the faceless officials, the morally vacant jobsworths, and the anti-Spartacists that work for the Home Office are determined not to believe him.
These functionaries and their desire to climb the greasy pole in their career are, as ever, the useful idiots that allow the venality and incompetence of higher ranked government officials to go unchecked. When Hannah Arendt wrote about 'the banality of evil' she was talking about the greatest crime of the 20th century but the same structures are in place in all facets of all societies and when people place their personal gain above moral considerations they deny humanity not only to others but to themselves as well.
In an echo of Ken Loach's powerful I, Daniel Blake, we see Anthony's new life as he joins lengthy queues for all too brief chats at immigration reporting centres, we see him being kept on hold on the phone, and we see him struggling to uncover yet more documentation that will help his case. All set against the backdrop of jingoistic Sun headlines about Brexit and Donald Trump talking absolute fucking shit on the television. We see the world going mad both in macro and in micro.
Soon enough, police arrive at Anthony's house to arrest him and take him to a detention centre whose address they refuse to disclose to Janet. We see it's the Verne detention centre in Dorset. Otherwise known as HM Prison The Verne. The Home Office may not be calling it a prison for Anthony's purposes but if it looks like a prison, it feels like a prison, and it's official name is a fucking prison then it's a prison. If you lock somebody up and deny them their liberty then you can't use weasel words to describe what you're doing. What you're doing is imprisoning them.
In The Verne Anthony meets with Thaddeus (Leo Wringer), an elderly guy with Trinidadian roots, who's in a very similar situation to him but doesn't even have the safety net of a family (Thaddeus' wife had passed in recent years and they'd never had kids). Thaddeus is alone with, in his words, God and, in his actions, the fraying old tennis ball he constantly bounces on the hard prison floor.
Thaddeus tells Anthony about the "voluntary repatriation" package he's been offered and Anthony, soon enough, is offered the same which, of course, he refuses. Can any financial incentive be worth risking never seeing your family again? Do the people who think up these schemes really imagine we're all as craven in our pursuit of wealth as they are?
On release from The Verne, we see Anthony and Janet move in with one of their kids because they can no longer afford to keep up payments on their own house. We see the huge dent this, and all the other related indignities, gives to Anthony's pride and anyone with a soul, by this time, must surely be asking themselves how can this be allowed to happen? The psychological effects this injustice has on Anthony and his family looks to be creating mental wounds that will never properly heel.
How must it feel to not just have the carpet pulled from under your feet in the form of losing your house but to have the carpet pulled from under your entire life, your entire understanding of what your life is, by a treacherous and deceitful policy dreamed up by right wing politicians to capitalise on middle England's irrational fear of the 'other'?
Not a natural fear but one that has been stoked up for political gain by extreme right wing radical hate propaganda tabloids like The Daily Mail. Successive Labour and Conservative governments courted that vote so single mindedly it seems that it never occurred to them, or they never cared, that actual people would have their lives destroyed by these policies. It seemed like too much effort, too much of a gamble, to, instead, create a more positive narrative regarding the evident and demonstrable benefits of immigration.
Finding enemies, as we see now with Trump and Johnson, is always easier than finding solutions. Eventually Anthony is sent to another detention centre/prison. Campsfield House in Oxfordshire is where they fly deportees out from so things don't look too good for him. I'm not in the business of spoilers so I won't say any more about what happens but we leave the action in 2018 when The Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman is beginning to uncover the scale of the Windrush Scandal and when the Tottenham MP David Lammy is starting to ask awkward questions in the house to Theresa May, then PM, and her then Home Secretary Amber Rudd.
Gentleman and Lammy know the importance of doing the right thing. May and Rudd are moral vacuums who have connived in one of the most inhumane events in modern British history but it's only Rudd who loses her job as a consequence. May, as we all know, stays on to bungle Brexit talks and to divide the nation even further before giving way to a, remarkably, even more incompetent chancer and an even more nastier bastard in the form of Boris fucking Johnson.
Rudd didn't stay away for long. Within seven months, May brought her back into cabinet as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions where she stayed for nearly ten months before standing down as an MP as she could no longer work for the new PM, Johnson. If the person who, with May, oversaw the Windrush scandal thinks Boris Johnson is too amoral a man to work for we're in the very sad position that things have not improved since the Windrush scandal. They've got worse, and 43,414 Covid-19 deaths (the third highest death toll on the planet, despite being an island, despite having advanced warning of the pandemic) should leave us in no doubt whatsoever about that.
Boris Johnson, Theresa May, David Cameron, and the final years of the New Labour administration before that have made Britain a small-minded, bigoted, and xenophobic nation whipped up into hate by oily rags like the Mail and the Sun and turned in on itself in a spiralling, and never ending, race to the bottom and, as a country, we need a better, fairer, and more positive message to take us into the future because this attempt to recreate our past, and our imagined past at that, is taking us into very dangerous waters indeed.
Would Anthony Bryan have suffered these injustices and indignities if he was a white man from, say, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand it's asked near the end of Sitting in Limbo and we all know we don't even need to wait for the answer to that one. Of course he wouldn't. Laurence Fox can mouth on Question Time about how Britain's not a racist country but one incident like this, let alone the approximately eight hundred and fifty that happened on May and Rudd's watch, disproves that completely. That's why, for now, the slogan that matters isn't All Lives Matter, it's Black Lives Matter and if you can't see that, or choose not to, you're part of the problem.
Thanks to Adam for the heads up on this powerful, moving, and righteously, though quietly, angry piece of film making.
Anthony's life is an ordinary, honest, and unflashy one. He works as a handyman, he teaches his grandkids how to play dominoes with a West Indian flourish, he dances to reggae (the soundtrack's great - Barrington Levy, Sister Nancy, John Holt, and Jimmy Cliff) at birthday parties and club nights. I don't even begrudge him being a Spurs fan and when we see him visiting the pub, and singing songs about Harry Kane and Maurcio Pochettino, before the game with his lifelong friends Barrington (Andrew Dennis) and Trevor (Jay Simpson) the banter rings as true as the friendship runs deep.
In 2007, the Labour government first coined the term "hostile environment" in relation to immigration policy, in 2012 David Cameron's Conservative government, with Theresa May then Home Secretary, formed the Hostile Environment Working Group. When May became PM she took both the rhetoric and the reality of the hostile environment even further. In 2016, in Edmonton and many other places, those chickens came home to roost - and it was a complete and utter scandal that should shame May until her dying day.
We see Anthony told by his employer that they've received correspondence from the Home Office that says he's not a UK citizen (despite having lived in the UK for over fifty years, arriving aged eight on his Jamaican's mother's passport) and that they'll have to terminate his employment. As an, overnight, illegal alien he'll neither be able to find new work, claim benefits, or use the NHS and the exorbitant cost of a solicitor means securing the service of one is nothing but a pipe dream.
Anthony's quest, now, is to prove that he belongs in the UK and, despite testaments from friends, family, and even his old head teacher that he's lived in the country, perfectly legally, since 1965 and countless documentation that also demonstrates this fact, it seems that the faceless officials, the morally vacant jobsworths, and the anti-Spartacists that work for the Home Office are determined not to believe him.
In an echo of Ken Loach's powerful I, Daniel Blake, we see Anthony's new life as he joins lengthy queues for all too brief chats at immigration reporting centres, we see him being kept on hold on the phone, and we see him struggling to uncover yet more documentation that will help his case. All set against the backdrop of jingoistic Sun headlines about Brexit and Donald Trump talking absolute fucking shit on the television. We see the world going mad both in macro and in micro.
Soon enough, police arrive at Anthony's house to arrest him and take him to a detention centre whose address they refuse to disclose to Janet. We see it's the Verne detention centre in Dorset. Otherwise known as HM Prison The Verne. The Home Office may not be calling it a prison for Anthony's purposes but if it looks like a prison, it feels like a prison, and it's official name is a fucking prison then it's a prison. If you lock somebody up and deny them their liberty then you can't use weasel words to describe what you're doing. What you're doing is imprisoning them.
Thaddeus tells Anthony about the "voluntary repatriation" package he's been offered and Anthony, soon enough, is offered the same which, of course, he refuses. Can any financial incentive be worth risking never seeing your family again? Do the people who think up these schemes really imagine we're all as craven in our pursuit of wealth as they are?
On release from The Verne, we see Anthony and Janet move in with one of their kids because they can no longer afford to keep up payments on their own house. We see the huge dent this, and all the other related indignities, gives to Anthony's pride and anyone with a soul, by this time, must surely be asking themselves how can this be allowed to happen? The psychological effects this injustice has on Anthony and his family looks to be creating mental wounds that will never properly heel.
How must it feel to not just have the carpet pulled from under your feet in the form of losing your house but to have the carpet pulled from under your entire life, your entire understanding of what your life is, by a treacherous and deceitful policy dreamed up by right wing politicians to capitalise on middle England's irrational fear of the 'other'?
Not a natural fear but one that has been stoked up for political gain by extreme right wing radical hate propaganda tabloids like The Daily Mail. Successive Labour and Conservative governments courted that vote so single mindedly it seems that it never occurred to them, or they never cared, that actual people would have their lives destroyed by these policies. It seemed like too much effort, too much of a gamble, to, instead, create a more positive narrative regarding the evident and demonstrable benefits of immigration.
Gentleman and Lammy know the importance of doing the right thing. May and Rudd are moral vacuums who have connived in one of the most inhumane events in modern British history but it's only Rudd who loses her job as a consequence. May, as we all know, stays on to bungle Brexit talks and to divide the nation even further before giving way to a, remarkably, even more incompetent chancer and an even more nastier bastard in the form of Boris fucking Johnson.
Rudd didn't stay away for long. Within seven months, May brought her back into cabinet as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions where she stayed for nearly ten months before standing down as an MP as she could no longer work for the new PM, Johnson. If the person who, with May, oversaw the Windrush scandal thinks Boris Johnson is too amoral a man to work for we're in the very sad position that things have not improved since the Windrush scandal. They've got worse, and 43,414 Covid-19 deaths (the third highest death toll on the planet, despite being an island, despite having advanced warning of the pandemic) should leave us in no doubt whatsoever about that.
Boris Johnson, Theresa May, David Cameron, and the final years of the New Labour administration before that have made Britain a small-minded, bigoted, and xenophobic nation whipped up into hate by oily rags like the Mail and the Sun and turned in on itself in a spiralling, and never ending, race to the bottom and, as a country, we need a better, fairer, and more positive message to take us into the future because this attempt to recreate our past, and our imagined past at that, is taking us into very dangerous waters indeed.
Would Anthony Bryan have suffered these injustices and indignities if he was a white man from, say, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand it's asked near the end of Sitting in Limbo and we all know we don't even need to wait for the answer to that one. Of course he wouldn't. Laurence Fox can mouth on Question Time about how Britain's not a racist country but one incident like this, let alone the approximately eight hundred and fifty that happened on May and Rudd's watch, disproves that completely. That's why, for now, the slogan that matters isn't All Lives Matter, it's Black Lives Matter and if you can't see that, or choose not to, you're part of the problem.
Thanks to Adam for the heads up on this powerful, moving, and righteously, though quietly, angry piece of film making.
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