Interview with Clive Foster MBE

"The talk of immigration was very much around your colour. You know, I was told on many occasions, like so many people, go back to your own country. Well Jamaica was founded in 1655 as a British colony, so to tell me to go back to Jamaica, well, it was a British colony, 1655, you know. So what we were finding, just before 2014, there was a surge of like, particularly Jamaicans, who were being detained and deported. We became aware of that, we had people in our own congregation who were, come over, and then were told they’ve got to leave the country and so forth. Why is it that they seem to be targeting Jamaicans and people seem to be getting deported and detained, you know, there’s obviously some kind of story, you just don’t understand it. The Home Office came to us and were, like, saying well we’ve heard you are concerned about this particular area. We’re trying to run this kind of a voluntary service of like, you know, if people come voluntarily and want to leave, we can help them do that, no questions asked, sort of thing. And they started to talk to us in those terms, you know. We weren’t even aware of the ‘go home’ vans at that time. They were coming down and saying well look if you want to work with us, you know, if you know anyone – couching it in a very, you know, this is a nice thing to do. And we stuck to our guns and said something’s not right here. We’re not going to come and sort of tell you things about people in the community to put them at risk. And we told them, what we’re going to do is talk to people about the importance of getting themselves, their status right, and getting the legal advice to do that. Then the Windrush scandal broke and the rest is history, as they say."