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Good morning. In the past, thousands of Commonwealth citizens, including their children, were invited to Britain to work and settle - and told they were welcome to stay. Remarkably, many long-term immigrants have now been informed that they are here illegally. The Government says it'll set up a taskforce to ensure no one is wrongfully deported, and has admitted that the ��ѿ��ý Office has become “concerned with policy and strategy over individuals.” Indeed, the relationship between Britain and the Windrush generation must not be misunderstood. It should not wholly be a matter of legal contract, defined by paperwork. It is a covenant. I’m not going to pretend the Commonwealth isn’t a legacy of the British empire, which contained exploitation and injustice. But two world wars and decolonization transformed that relationship into something else. Today the Commonwealth is voluntary and rooted in mutual respect. It is bonded by things that certainly can’t be written down and filed away in a Whitehall office: shared sacrifice, history, language and even philosophical first principles. The citizens of the modern British Isles don’t have to be of one religion, or have any religion at all, to recognize the distinction made in the Bible between a simple contract and a covenant. The latter is far deeper and harder to break, and likened, in the Book of Isiah, to the relationship between a parent and child. The Prophet reports God asking: “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion for the child she has borne?... I will not forget you!” The language is astonishingly intimate. The question of citizenship is an example of how government and civil society function in different ways. Government, perhaps necessarily, is a thing of strict rules: applied equally, sometimes ham-fistedly. These are the official terms by which we agree to run our country. But beneath all that, society actually operates by customs, traditions and unspoken codes. Some might find it odd that many of us who believe strongly in controlled immigration – even in less immigration – also feel passionately that someone who has been in Britain for a long time should be allowed to stay, as has been demonstrated by reactions from across the political spectrum. But to me, that is the logic of the human heart. It would be grossly unfair to say that a migrant promised the right to stay should be deported. Moreover, anyone who has been somewhere for a certain length of time, and contributed as enormously as the Windrush generation did, becomes a part of that place. The covenant of belonging mysteriously, invisibly manifests itself - and means that we cannot forget our fellow citizens.