The Revd Guy Hewitt is to be the first Racial Justice Director of the Church of England, it was announced this week.

In April 2018, when he was the High Commissioner for Barbados to the United Kingdom, Mr Hewitt was interviewed on the Church Times Podcast about the campaign he led for thousands of members of the Windrush generation to be recognised as British citizens. He had written about it in the Church Times earlier that month, as the campaign was gathering pace (Comment, 13 April 2018).

“The policy U-turn that the Government made in less than two weeks of this becoming an issue was, for me, a modern-day miracle,” he said in the interview. “It was unprecedented for a government to take such a drastic and radical change of position in such a time-frame.”

Later in the interview, he said: “What we were in this for was to get justice for the Windrush generation. For me it’s not about recriminations or even who is at fault: it is about continuing to work forward to find a solution.”

He concluded: “One of the roles of that the Church of England, that the Christian community, that the interfaith community can do is to find a way of reinforcing the love, the togetherness, the solidarity that exists. This country has got to find a way, once and for all in the 21st century, when we are talking about a modern, global Britain, to be able to put aside all forms of discrimination and move forward as a single people, united under one Kingdom, which is Great Britain.”

Click the play button above to listen to this podcast. You can also listen to the Church Times Podcast on the Church Times app for iPhone and iPad, SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most other podcast platforms. Music for the podcast is by Twisterium.