![It did not occur to Stephen Thompson to write about his brother’s trauma until the furore seemed in danger of dying down. ‘We wanted to kind of hold [the government’s] feet to the fire,’ he said.](https://media.guim.co.uk/fc75cf3fdcd9bf79fe82729a98dcb40542865378/0_7_3072_1843/1000.jpg)
The Windrush scandal, in which thousands of immigrants who came to the UK lawfully from Commonwealth countries after the second world war were later detained and in some cases deported, was powerfully dramatised in the Bafta-winning BBC drama Sitting in Limbo (2020). The screenwriter and novelist Stephen Thompson, who has died of cancer aged 56, based the script on the experiences of his older brother, Anthony Bryan.
In 2015, the Home Office began its efforts to deport Bryan to Jamaica, a country he had not visited since coming to live in the UK with his mother in 1965, at the age of eight. The action was taken against him as part of the Conservative government’s “hostile environment” policy, which was ostensibly set up to reduce illegal immigration, only to become indiscriminate and vindictive in its sweep.
