Help Anthony Williams fight the Home Office

Anthony Williams, a UK citizen of 40 years who served in the military for over a decade, was wrongly declared an illegal immigrant in 2013. He was robbed of his livelihood, statehood and identity. Seven years on, with no employment, an unstable living situation and serious health issues from years of lack of access to the NHS, Anthony is still fighting to receive compensation from the government. He urgently needs your help.

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Anthony Williams arrived in the UK as a seven-year old in 1971. He was part of the Windrush generation - British subjects and their families, overwhelmingly of Afro-Caribbean descent, welcomed into the UK after WW2 to fill shortages in the labour market. We so desperately needed the Windrush generation that even while immigrants across the board contended with increasingly unfriendly circumstances, the government gave migrants and their children indefinite leave to remain if they had arrived, like Anthony, before 1973.

Under the ‘hostile environment’, the Conservative government set about harassing and deporting many legal immigrants to the UK (read more here ). The Windrush generation was amongst the worst affected. In 2013, after sacrificing 13 years of his youth to the military, and after an entire lifetime as a legal resident of this country, Anthony was declared an illegal immigrant and made stateless. He lost his job, then his entitlements to any benefits. He sold off his possessions to stay alive. He lost access to NHS care, with harrowing consequences – read the Guardian’s profile  for more detail.

His life, livelihood and dignity were slowly and agonisingly stripped from him.

The government established a Windrush Compensation Scheme in mid-2019; to date, by its own figures, the scheme has paid out less than 1% of the estimated total due. Applicants are hamstrung by an arbitrary, complex application process that requires them to produce scraps of documentation from decades ago, often after they and their possessions have been displaced multiple times. For the Windrush generation, the hostile environment has not ended.

This should never have fallen upon us. Private citizens should not have to support each other to plug the gaps of comprehensive governmental failure. Anthony has received a very low offer from
the Home Office which diminishes his suffering over the past seven years and reduces him to humiliatingly low number. He is entitled to fair compensation from this government and we continue to push on his behalf to ensure he gets what he is owed. But that does not help him right now, when he struggles to buy enough food or afford adequate heating. That is why we make this appeal.

All donations will go towards the following, amongst other things:

(i)             Anthony’s living costs – rent, food, clothing, utilities. Challenging the derisory offer he has received will mean going without any payment from the Home Office, potentially for a long timeyet to come. A vital part that challenge is ensuring he can support himself through the process; 

(ii)            Insulating his flat for winter to control the cost of heating, which he usually goes without;

(iii)          A computer and internet access – basic requirements for looking for work and life administration, particularly as access to public libraries is constrained at present;

(iv)           Anthony is raring to get back into employment, but we are in the middle of a pandemic and a recession, and he has been out of the job market for a substantial period. He hopes to set up as a courier, which comes with start-up costs; and

(v)            Various arrears.

As a society, we stand proudly together to declare that Black Lives Matter and call for urgent action on multiple fronts to remedy the atrocities committed upon Black people. Police brutality has been the focus of the movement due to recent events. Merely avoiding death is not the standard to which we should aspire. Black lives have been systematically deprived of dignity; the state and its institutions have consistently treated Black people with less care and due diligence than is accorded other members of society.

We will continue to pressure the government and other relevant bodies to correct these wrongs, but right now, Anthony needs your help. Please share this appeal as widely as possible.

Photographs used with the permission of C Thomond/Guardian - not for reproduction or redistribution