“It was a betrayal and deeply unfair”: The Greater Manchester show shining a light on the Windrush Scandal

It was late 2017 when details concerning the Windrush Scandal first began to emerge. Despite living and working in the UK for decades, hundreds of people were wrongly detained, deported and denied their legal rights as a result of the government’s ‘hostile environment’ policies.

Having arrived in the UK from Caribbean countries between 1948 and 1973, many took up work within the fledgling NHS and other associated sectors, and played a huge role in Britain's post-war recovery. As the Caribbean was, at the time, part of the Commonwealth, those who arrived were given British citizenship.

However, many children of the Windrush generation had come over on their parents passports and were told years later that they were in the UK illegally because of a lack of official documentation. The Home Office had kept no record of those granted leave to remain and in 2010 it destroyed landing cards belonging to the Windrush migrants.

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In some of the worst cases people were thrown into detention centres and those needing urgent medical treatment were forced to pay for their care despite having paid taxes for more than 30 years. It was a story that sparked outrage here in Britain and in many Caribbean countries, and led to the resignation of then Home Secretary Amber Rudd.

Now, more than five years on, a Manchester-based theatre group is telling the story of some of those people and exposing the injustice of the scandal that rocked Britain. Written by writer and actress Nicola Gardner, and directed by John Klark, the play, 'Windrush Warriors!' has been written to give audiences a “life-affirming view” of a group of survivors who are forced to grapple with