Outrage in Britain as unaccompanied migrant children are abandoned

[rug]

Demonstrators gather during a children's refugee protest in 2016 in London. (CNS photo/Hannah McKay, EPA

David Stewart
March 10, 2017

The name Alf Dubs might evoke a London street character straight out of Dickens—an amiable rogue, perhaps, but one to be watched, with a few artful dodges up the sleeve of his frayed frock-coat. Not so the real one; Baron Alfred Dubs is a Labour Party member of the U.K.’s unelected second chamber, the House of Lords. He formerly served as an elected member of Parliament for an inner London constituency for eight years.

Czech-born in 1932, Mr. Dubs came to Britain via the “Kindertransport” initiative that saved 669 mainly Jewish children as the Nazis invaded what was then Czechoslovakia. That bold enterprise was led by one Nicholas Winton, unacknowledged until recently and now described as Britain’s Oskar Schindler.

Lord Dubs, now an octogenarian, still inspired by the work of his rescuer Winton, has been prominent again in recent weeks as a thorn in the side of the ruling Tory government, helping to animate opposition to the mean-spirited policy toward Europe’s refugee children, many of whom lived in the now-demolished “Jungle” camp near Calais. This is no slight fictional character but a man who knows from his life experience what a better and more compassionate Britain can look like when it tries.

Lord Dubs, a noted humanist, has taken up the cause of these children thus ensuring that their situation does not get forgotten. Churches, too, around the land have continued to plead their cause.

http://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2017/03/10/outrage-britain-unaccompanied-migrant-children-are-abandoned

https://humanism.org.uk/2016/11/27/lord-dubs-awarded-humanist-of-the-year-2016/

[WhiteTara]

1. Kicking for the children.