Britain-bashing won’t improve race relations

I feel sorry for a recruit who has just joined the Home Office . As part of their induction, they will now have to be pumped with the background history to the Windrush Scandal.

Instead of coming up with great ideas about how to secure our borders, it seems they will be marched into the decolonising chamber in the basement of the new Croydon office.

Inside the chamber, civil servants can subject themselves to a tirade of historical facts that show how Britain, as far back as 1066, created policies to prevent non-white people from entering the UK – all two of them.

Britain is depicted as an evil place where current policies are driven by historic white supremacy. Regardless of intention, the outcome of such an education is to make white recruits feel ashamed and black and Asians feel like passive victims.

I am referring to the training Home Office civil servants must receive about the history of British migration, based upon research commissioned by the Home Office that previous home secretaries apparently tried to hide.

On the official Gov.UK website you can now read the newly liberated document, released after a court case, entitled "The Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal : independent research report". No author is named.

It claims to be responding to the report by Wendy Williams on the Windrush scandal, where some, mainly from the Caribbean, were wrongly targeted for deportation and the cutting of employment and benefit rights under Theresa May's hostile environment policy.

So, was this anything to do with a racist past, or was it simply an example of bad judgement? I am not sure how a deep understanding of Britain's colonial past would have prevented poor policy making. What drives so much government action is often the immediate pressure of the present.

Back to our metaphorical decolonising chamber. Now, Home Office recruits will get a lesson on how Britain instigated laws to deliberately curb non-white immigration.

This had an impact on negative race relations at the time. For example, high unemployment was often wrongly linked to the presence of black people in Britain.

However, an overcorrection connecting all government reaction to racism fails to give migrants any agency or responsibility for their own actions. One example that counteracts this narrative comes from 2003, when the Labour home secretary David Blunkett imposed visa restrictions on Jamaican nationals in response to the gun-crime havoc that was killing many innocents on the streets of London, as Jamaican "Yardie gangs" clashed.

The data from the aftermath was remarkable. Days after the ban, gun-crime dropped dramatically. Some would argue that this policy was racist, others simply effective security.

The other danger in this selective history is that it fails to speak of the positive history of the Caribbean population in Britain. In choosing to portray only the negative, we cannot learn lessons from how a population can successfully integrate.

The untold story is that London in the latter half of the 20th century became a centre for the merging of Caribbean and British culture, which has helped to craft modern Britain. It's not about ignoring racism, but finding a balance. We cannot discount the experiences of migrants who have found this country to be a positive and creative space to build a life in.

Perhaps the biggest omissions in this report are the fantastic contributions that Britain has made worldwide, from people like Edward Jenner with his cure for smallpox, to the activists who ended the horror of slavery and created what we now call civil society. I hope that the government, in crafting their new educational curriculum, will draw upon a fairer picture of history.