THE FRENCH government is to raze the Calais refugee camp to the ground ‘within days’, forcibly removing every man, woman and child.
After six months of doing absolutely nothing about the 1,000 unaccompanied children languishing in the camp, the Tory government finally brought the first handful of 14 refugee children into the UK on Monday.
It was at this point that the cry went up from Philip Davies, Tory MP for Shipley, that these are not children at all, but adults posing as children. ‘We are being taken for fools, taken for a ride and our generosity is being abused,’ he said in Parliament yesterday. He then hysterically demanded that all child refugees must have a dental check to see how old they really are.
Ex-football star Gary Lineker commented: ‘The treatment by some towards these young refugees is hideously racist and utterly heartless. What’s happening to our country?’ Well said, Gary!
The next thing is that they will want all refugees to wear an armband as in Nazi Germany. This is no joke since we already know of the council that was allowing the painting of refugees’ doors in all the same colour.
Refugees, no matter what their age, must be welcomed into the UK and given a place to live, free healthcare, education, and access to employment so that they can start a new life.
Decades of imperialist wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now the imperialist intervention in the Syrian conflict, have created the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War.
UN figures show an unprecedented 65.3 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are nearly 21.3 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18.
More than 7,000 refugees have drowned while attempting to cross the Mediterranean sea in flimsy inflatable rubber boats, trying to reach either Greece or Italy since the start of this year, an increase of some 50 per cent on the same period in 2015.
Surviving the sea journey to Europe is just the start of their problems. Refugees and their families have been attacked by border guards with batons and tear gas. Europe’s joint police agency Europol has confirmed that across Europe 10,000 unaccompanied refugee children have simply ‘gone missing’ during their journey across Europe.
The last time they destroyed a section of the Calais camp, armed police, armoured bulldozers, backed up by the paramilitary CRS riot police stormed the camp, turning it into a warzone. Unicef UK’s deputy executive Lily Caprani said: ‘Last time part of the Jungle camp was demolished, hundreds of children went missing. We don’t know what happened to them.’
Until last May, the UK government refused to take a single refugee into the UK from Europe. In May, the Immigration Act was passed which obligated the Tory government to take unaccompanied child refugees from Europe, with the proviso that they already have a family connection in the UK.
The Tory government then proceeded to do absolutely nothing for six months, while almost 1,000 lone refugee children languished in squalid conditions in Calais. Our enemy is at home and is the British ruling class, which in its golden age had British workers living in conditions very much like the Calais Jungle – until the working class fought its way out of that situation, so aptly described in Jack London’s book ‘The People of the Abyss’, written about east London in 1902.
Now this same ruling class wants to drive the UK working class back to where it came from, in order to keep its superprofits rolling in. It wants to see every worker powerless, without a union and on a zero-hours contract.
This is no time to allow or to tolerate any divisions in the working class, which will allow the ruling class to have its way. It was Karl Marx who made the call, ‘Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains!’
This must be our maxim. We must welcome all refugees, oppose all attempts to promote racist and national divisions and go forward to the British and world socialist revolution.
