Here we are, to hear a legitimate party member in 2026, saying “They should melt down the Nigerians, to fill up the potholes in the road” and your heart doesn’t just ache — it sinks. It sinks because it forces you to confront the painful truth that for all the years that have passed, for all the speeches, slogans, and so-called progress, so much hatred still survives beneath the surface, alive and breathing, waiting for permission to crawl back into the light.
My parents came to Britain in the 1950s.
Young. Intelligent. Educated. Hopeful. They weren’t desperate people fleeing destitution, nor naïve dreamers fooled into believing the streets here were paved with gold. They understood perfectly well that work was work, wherever you were in the world. Money has never grown on trees — not in Bridgetown, Port of Spain, Havana, Caracas, Washington, London, not anywhere. What they were searching for was opportunity. Dignity. The chance to fully use the gifts they had been given.
People forget what the Caribbean was in those days. If you had ambition, intellect, potential — you often had to leave to realise it, because the upper positions, the positions of influence and advancement, were overwhelmingly reserved for white British people. Yet the people who came here from the Caribbean were not foreigners in the way history now tries to paint them. They were British subjects. They travelled on British passports. Britain called, and they answered.
My father arrived as an accountant. My mother entered psychiatric nursing before specialising in midwifery, eventually becoming one of the directors of Midwifery and an active member of the Royal College of Midwives. They worked. Hard. They paid their taxes. They paid to educate their children. They never relied on benefits. They never lived in council housing. They bought a home through sacrifice and discipline, not handouts.
And while my mother worked the districts of the Old Kent Road, Woolwich, and East London — places rougher and more impoverished than anything she had known growing up — she entered homes steeped in hardship and neglect. She saw people bathing in kitchen sinks, raising children in cramped and desperate conditions, surviving however they could. Yet even there, even while dedicating herself to bringing life safely into the world, she was met with racism.
Women would refuse her care. Refuse her touch. Demand another midwife simply because of her race.
And she endured it with a grace I still struggle to comprehend.
She would quietly step aside and request another nurse, swallowing humiliations no human being should have to endure simply for doing their job. Imagine that. A highly trained, educated woman, carrying herself with professionalism and compassion, being looked down upon by people whose ignorance could not reach her ankle — yet who still believed themselves superior because of the colour of their skin.
When she told me those stories, I felt the wound second-hand, as though the insult had been aimed directly at me. To imagine her carrying those experiences for years breaks something inside you.
Then I think about the thousands upon thousands of babies she and her predominantly international colleagues helped deliver between 1963 and 1985. Generations of British children brought safely into the world by immigrant hands. Black hands. Brown hands. Foreign hands.
Caring hands.
And then you look around in 2026 and see the same venom resurfacing. The same xenophobia. The same dehumanisation. The same ugly chants dressed up as patriotism.
And you cannot help but ask yourself: after everything they gave to this country, why were they forced to suffer this in return?
We lived through the BNP and National Front marches of the 70s and 80s. We remember boarding up windows. We remember the fear of simply walking down the street. We remember being attacked for existing. But somewhere deep down, many of us believed that time would eventually kill off that kind of hatred. That newer generations would reject it. That Britain, after all these decades, would finally mature beyond it.
But hatred doesn’t die simply because years pass.
It waits and lays dormant.
And now, in 2026, those same poisonous ideas are not only alive, they are emboldened again — spoken loudly, proudly, openly. The masks have slipped. The descendants of the very people immigrants helped nurse, teach, transport, build for, and care for now stand shouting that those same immigrants never belonged here at all.
That is the tragedy.
Not just that racism still exists — but that people like my parents gave so much of themselves to this country believing, perhaps foolishly, that one day their children would not have to carry the same burden.
