Refugee Blues

This piece was originally written on the 8th Feb 2016

I think my views on Brexit and the type of country we are threatening to become are well known by now.
And if they aren't, why the hell aren't you lot reading my wonderful rants!

Anyway, today comes another piece of upsetting news that will almost be certainly buried even further than it would have been following the unfortunate passing of Tara Palmer Tompkinson.

In a written ministerial statement today, the government have announced the ending of the scheme, known as the Dubs Amendment, which helped child refugees with no family be settled in the UK.

You can read about it on the bbc here; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38912428

This amendment was championed by Lord Dubs, a Labour peer, who was himself a child refugee from Nazi Germany.

The government statement told us that all the places for the year were now full and that the scheme would be closed. Under this scheme we will have taken 350 child refugees.

Out of potentially 90,000.

You want a sign that we are in danger of being coming a closed off little island fortress, blindly chasing our own narrow trading interests then this is it. We are not talking about families, adults who have made a decision to chase a new life. We are talking about children who have no one, who have fled war and are now looking for a future.

And this government believes our responsibility to these fellow human beings of ours ends at 350.

Trump is attracting a lot of attention for his bigoted immigration policies this week and rightly so. He and his cabal of white supremacist chums are making a mockery of the values of the US constitution and the nation itself, one founded by immigrants if my grasp of history is correct. Petitions have been signed and protests organised.
So they bloody should be.
But equally we should look closer to home and hold our own government to account for their narrow minded lack of basic humanity.

I accept that money is tight, i agree that no nation can take on the burden of the largest refugee crisis the world has known since WWII but i'm also bloody sure that we, as a prosperous western nation, with a proud history of helping refugees can do better than 350.

So, here's what we need to do. We need to contact our MP's and tell them that we want our country to do more and we want our respective regions to play their part.
To do this simply follow this link; http://www.parliament.uk/…/contact-your…/contacting-your-mp/ which will tell you all you need to know about finding out who your MP is, if you don't know, and how to write to them.

The time for ranting is over. It's time for some action.