Amber Rudd and Theresa May both have a lot to answer for in their careers and few errors of judgement are as shameful as this story, which is still a dreadful stain on the history of Britian.
Anthony Bryan, though Jamican born has lived and worked in the UK all of his life when his Mother came over as part of the Windrush era on the promise of work and opporturnity. If ever a family served as a prime example of hard working immigrants just seeking an honest days pay and a better life, then Bryan and his family were it, with a Mother who served as a nurse for the NHS for thirty years, she's now in poor health and living back in Jamica so when Anthony applies for a new passport to travel back and see her, his status as a British Citizen is brought in at the worst time possible - when the Home Office implemented its new policy to push immigration as an election issue and allocated their teams the job of finding cases that they could propell at the door as fast as possible in order to meet targets. This was incidentally a policy which the Home Office at first denied then later admitted to which led to the resignation of Amber Rudd (Not, notably Theresa May who became destined to be one the worst, unfeeling and uncaring Prime Ministers of UK history, so she had another role awaiting her)
The film follows the cold and complex system of Iimmigration that Anthony and his family are dragged into, which results in him losing his job and his home, with little compensation on the horizon for either, until finally he's forced to take on a solictor he cannot afford in order to seek justice.
It's bad enough that such things should be happening in a modern Britain of 2017 so its quite right and proper that the issue should receive dramatic focus and the cast here take to their roles with great gusto. The pairing of massively underated actor Patrick Robinson and fabulous Nadine Marshall is excellent casting, as Anthony Bryan and his partner Janet who find their lives unravelled as a result of the heartless actions of an uncaring government who employ an equally uncaring group of personnel to weed out the 'low hanging fruit' to add to their immigration targets. The supporting cast of Pippa Bennet-Warner, Jay Simpson and C.J Beckford do really well with largely unwritten roles as a group of family and friends going up against a bureacractic machine whose soul purpose is there to send people home to countries they're no longer familiar with. Piers Morgan, seen briefly in a historical news clip, summed the simplicity of the issue from the perspective of the protagonists - He's British, get him his Passport and let him go him and visit his Mother in Jamaica.
These events will go down as one of the most embarassing stains on British history, up there with Stephen Lawrence, Hillsborough, The Marchioness disaster, to name but a few, where the ordinary people are forced to take on a bastion of the establishment to find Justice. Compelling and important viewing and let's see Baftas for Robinson and Marshall please.
