Horrors as The Jungle is shut down

Today, The Jungle in Calais burns. I have been aware of the inadequacy of BBC news service for some time but today has laid it utterly bare. The BBC reports throughout the day have toed what is presumably the official line - all gone to plan, nobody left, all peaceful etc.
The truth is heartbreakingly different. Entirely predicted by volunteers, the issue of the unaccompanied children was disastrously mismanaged. Increasingly panicky messages were coming out about children being ordered back into the raging fires and the only safe-havens were closed by lunchtime.
At 9pm tonight volunteers were driving these children to the aid-warehouse for safety because authorities failed to act. I no longer have confidence in our government and our BBC to act and report truthfully and with integrity. I, for one, have wept today following the plight of these children for whom I can do nothing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Brexit Apathy

“The death of democracy...will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.” These words of Robert M Hutchins seem rather pertinent to our current situation. Every day I ask myself again whether it's time to “let it go” and accept Brexit. And every time I ask that question, two big issues rise up to block the way. The first is the unbelievably cavalier way in which the individuals most affected by this are being treated – the EU nationals who live in the UK and the UK nationals who live in other EU countries. We have, as the saying goes, thrown them under a bus. And when you consider the stir caused this week by CCTV footage of a London jogger doing exactly that to a woman on the pavement, it brings home what a shocking analogy it is. As long as the politicians insist on playing games of chess with real peoples' lives, there will be millions of us who dig in our heels and say “unacceptable”. The second big stumbling block to accepting the out
Read more

Brexit - Secret Option Number Three

There's talk of riots if Brexit doesn't go ahead. It's hard to know whether this is a serious possibility – a proposed protest at the Supreme Court in December was hastily cancelled at the last minute when barely a few dozen showed any interest. But let's just for a moment assume it is a real and credible possibility. The prevailing narrative over-simplifies the choice – implement the result of the referendum or don't. Implement it and cause certain impoverishment to our nation. Ignore it, and risk riots and undermining the cause of democracy. But why is our vision so narrow? What if there is a secret option number three? There are five Ws that help us get to the bottom of a story – What? When? Who? Where? And Why? The first four are essentially fact-based and are in themselves often rather dull. They are answered easily enough with regard to the referendum result. The interesting question is the last one – “why”. And over a year later, we are still no clearer
Read more

Windrush - twig or branch?

I can't stop thinking about the so-called Windrush scandal. I say so-called, because I think there's a danger that we have got hold of the wrong end of the stick if this is 'only' about the Windrush generation. Or rather, we have grabbed firmly on to the twig, but if we run with that, it will snap away, leaving the main branch, the bigger point, unmoved. Don't get me wrong - the Windrush scandal is certainly shocking. The way individuals have been treated correlates with my definition of criminal. But these individual cases are but twigs from a thicker branch of systemic hostility to "the other". If we allow ourselves to be focused on individual cases, we allow Theresa May and the Government and, in fact, ourselves, off the hook. If the concern is that person A is deported in error, an apology can be made, decisions reversed and even, potentially, compensation made. And there the story dies, with no hint of "lessons having been lear
Read more