Windrush Day 2025: No Justice, Just Jerk Chicken.

By Lee Jasper Long standing activist, writer, and co-founder of BARAC UK and Chair. Former Policing Director for London and APA Chair, Speaking truth to power on race, resistance, and justice.

The UK Windrush scandal was and remains a national disgrace. Windrush Day, as it stands today, is a hollow, state-funded distraction from justice.

Since the scandal broke in 2018, I’ve come to dread this date. Each year, I brace myself for the sickly pageantry of state-sponsored commemoration—rituals that feel less like reflection and more like reputation management. Let’s be honest: many of these so-called “celebrations” wouldn’t happen at all without government, local authority, or charitable funding.

Thankfully I didn’t get any invites to any of these state sponsored shimmy shoe shine shows. The older I get the less tolerance I have for the insincere patronising nature of these very carefully political curated Kumbaya moments.

What should be a solemn moment of profound reckoning and reflection has become a carefully choreographed exercise in avoidance. Ministers don kente cloth, councils issue chirpy press releases, and Caribbean performances are booked like props on a national stage. The nation pauses—if only for a nanosecond—just long enough to patronise us, pat itself on the back, forget us and move on.

All the while, our elders are still being crucified on the cross of injustice.

Behind the smiles, the bunting, and the basslines, the truth remains: there has been no justice.

The Windrush scandal wasn’t a clerical error. It was a cold, calculated act of state racism—born of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policy and fuelled by decades of institutional neglect. Black elders, who had spent their lives building this country, were told they were illegal. They were sacked from jobs, denied healthcare, stripped of benefits, evicted from homes—and in some cases, deported or driven to death.

One of them was Dexter Bristol, a British citizen and son of the Windrush generation. He died in 2018 from the psychological trauma inflicted by immigration officials. His case was emblematic—not exceptional.

Years on, little has changed.

More than 5,000 people remain uncompensated, and many suspect the true figure is far higher. The government’s discredited Windrush Compensation Scheme is a bureaucratic nightmare—designed not to deliver justice, but to deter it. A 140-page application, labyrinthine evidence requirements, inconsistent decision-making, and a culture of disbelief retraumatises those who dare to apply. Some have died waiting. Others have simply given up.

Yet Windrush Day marches on—a Black-led pantomime of state-sponsored performance politics.

There are food stalls and steel pan and swanky receptions at No 10. Glossy posters are printed by councils that, for the rest of the year, barely acknowledge the Black communities they pretend to honour. What we’re witnessing isn’t commemoration. It’s symbolism without substance. Celebration without reparation. PR dressed as progress.

I remember what real Caribbean resistance looks like and it looks like direct non violent action in pursuit of justice.

In 2018, as co-chair of BARAC UK, we helped organise a civil resistance action that shut down Westminster Bridge and Parliament Square. We delayed Prime Minister Theresa May on her way to Downing Street. It wasn’t a stunt—it was a political act. We demanded justice, accountability, and dignity for those she had wronged.

And today? The grassroots organisers who helped bring this issue to national consciousness have been sidelined and emended non violent civil resistence like BARAC UK were take out and. in their place, a Black bourgeoisie class prefers the desperate and polite diplomacy of failure than the Caribbean radical tradition of resistance and disruption. The politics of Black respectability has replaced the politics of resistance.

Windrush Day has been sanitised, depoliticised, and monetised.
It offers curry goat instead of compensation.
Smiles instead of structural reform.

There is no greater insult than to celebrate a people while continuing to have your knee on their necks.

Unless the Government is bright to an existential crisis on the issue in face of mass mobilisation we will forever see the marginalisation of our culture and ultimately our long term security of tenure here in the UK. I think the die is cast and racism in the UK will only get worse leading us to ask ourselves the critical question: is the UK a still a country where our families and children can thrive? I think we all know that across most meaningful indicators tell us, the damaging effects of systemic racism in the UK has worsened considerably in the last decade.

I am perosnally frightened for our children futures and particularly with a decaying economy as Britain spirals into terminal decline and with what appears to be a fully compliant black leadership suffering Stockholm syndrome.

We must stop the pretence that Windrush is a historical tragedy. It is a live, ongoing scandal and will if left . The hostile environment remains intact. Deportation flights still take off. Black Britons still face systemic inequality in education, housing, policing, health, and employment.

Windrush Day, in its current form, functions like Black cladding on a white superstructure providing quiet cover and black smiles — providing Gov with political cover while victims die, and the machinery of institutional racism grinds on. It gives the illusion of progress while injustice festers beneath the surface.

We don’t need more music.
We don’t need more flags.
We don’t need another empty quote from a government minister who has never stood with us in the trenches.

What we need is justice—reparative, material, accountable justice.

Until every Windrush victim is compensated...
Until the Home Office is held accountable for the racist culture it nurtured...
Until Britain confronts the reality of its immigration regime...

There is nothing to celebrate.

I won’t be clapping along.
Not while the elders who built this country are still being denied their humanity.

Not while there are those among us who think mere proximity to power is power itself

Not certainly not while the state thinks jerk chicken is a substitute for justice.

Aluta Continua.