Keir Starmer recently said the Windrush generation “laid the foundations for modern Britain.” It’s a sentiment that is routinely parroted across media, education, and politics as a self-evident moral truth. But rarely, if ever, is it given any real scrutiny by those in power. Not only is it deeply insulting to the generations of Britons who toiled to build this country, it is a complete inversion of its true foundations.
In 1948, the Empire Windrush carried around 500 Caribbean migrants from the West Indies to Britain, many of whom had served with distinction in the Second World War. Their arrival marked the beginning of what is now known as the Windrush generation, and over the following decades, another half a million would settle in the UK.
That these individuals and families contributed to British life is not in doubt. The Windrush generation’s contributions — cultural richness, postwar labour, and resilience — were indeed significant and deserve recognition. Yet claiming they “laid the foundations” of modern Britain overlooks the country’s pre-existing structures, both societal and cultural, and reduces their story to no more than a symbolic prop used for political gain.
By the time the Empire Windrush arrived on British shores, Melbourne already had a stock exchange
At the time, Britain was a country of more than 50 million people. It had already built railways, parliament, the NHS, and global financial markets. The foundations were very much in place.
There is a strange historical revisionism at work here. What began as a legitimate act of gratitude towards a people who have indeed contributed to British culture has become a new national origin myth. The Windrush generation are now described not just as contributors, but as civilisational architects. As if Britain sprang into being the moment the gangplank hit Tilbury Docks.
Why does our political and cultural establishment cling to the Windrush story so fiercely in 2025? The answer lies partly in its simplicity: noble arrivals, a grateful nation, a tale of redemption through diversity. It recasts Britain not as a former empire wrestling with its past, but as a multicultural utopia in progress.
Yet this narrative, amplified by politicians like Starmer to signal inclusivity, comes at a cost. Because in elevating the story of immigration, we have completely erased another: the story of the British people who left.
From the 17th century to the 1950s, millions of Britons emigrated from these islands. And unlike the Windrush Generation, they didn’t arrive into existing infrastructures. They built them.
In the 19th century alone, some 15 million people left the British Isles, a staggering exodus that reshaped the global order. Picture a Durham miner, hacking coal seams in Canada’s frozen north, developing coalfields and railways across Nova Scotia and British Columbia. Or a Yorkshire farmer, boarding a ship bound for Australia in the 1850s, carving out farmland on sun-scorched plains and helping fuel Victoria’s pastoral boom. Or a Glaswegian weaver, emigrating to New Zealand with her loom, shaping the textile trades of nascent Wellington or Auckland.
These Britons — builders, miners, farmers, artisans — didn’t just emigrate; they forged cities and systems from scratch, embedding Britain’s legal, economic, and cultural DNA across the globe. Yet their stories, gritty and human, are erased from Britain’s memory.
What is now known as the Anglosphere: the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, was not just shaped by British emigrants; it was, in many cases, founded by them. Parliamentary democracy, common law, trade routes, education systems, banking, insurance; all exported from Britain to the rest of the world.
This wasn’t marginal or incidental. Emigration was a core part of British identity for centuries. It quite literally constructed much of the modern world.
Melbourne for example was founded by settlers from Britain in the 1830s. By the time the Empire Windrush arrived on British shores, Melbourne had electric trams, universities, and its own stock exchange, all modelled along British ideals.
Indeed, Britain’s institutions were so established in 1948 that they had already been exported en masse. The British didn’t just emigrate, they spread the very foundational institutions we are now told our ancestors never built in the first place. The very things Britain is now told it must feel shame for are the very things that keep the world running.
This is not a judgment, it is a fact. But one that now feels almost unmentionable.
Instead, we elevate the symbolic. A single boat of 500 passengers becomes a civilisational milestone, but a vast historical movement of millions of people in the opposite direction is quietly filed away.
Modern Britain is currently engaged in a peculiar act of historical auto-cannibalism. It devours its own past to feed its political present. We’re told by our own Prime Minister that a boat carrying 500 passengers in 1948 was the real foundation of our country.
As historian Robert Tombs has argued, modern Britain suffers from a kind of historical amnesia, ashamed of the power it once wielded, and blind to the institutions it seeded around the world.
To remember emigration is to remember British agency. That’s the real problem. Emigration involves expansion, confidence, purpose, and yes, power. All the things modern Britain has been taught to distrust about its past.
So instead, we get comfort history: 1948 becomes Year Zero. Modern Britain was apparently built not by engineers, miners, or administrators, but by a boatload of hopeful arrivals and a few inspiring speeches.
It’s a therapeutic version of the past. One that is redemptive, digestible, and scrubbed clean of complexity. No need to grapple with ambition, or empire, or the uncomfortable fact that Britain once exported its ideas with pride.
Immigration has shaped many aspects of modern Britain. Many arrivals have contributed, worked, served, and helped. But if we’re talking about foundations, the very bedrock on which a nation is built, then we need to be honest.
Recognising emigration’s role doesn’t negate the value of immigration or excuse the flaws of empire; it simply restores balance to a story that is told back-to-front.
Starmer says Britain’s foundations were laid in 1948.
But the deeper truth is this: they were laid centuries earlier, in every corner of the world, by the people this country has chosen to forget.
If we’re going to keep telling Britain’s migration story, let’s at least tell both halves of it.
