JUST when it looks like this Conservative administration can’t sink any lower in a moral and humanitarian sense, they come up with another grossly offensive and ethically repellent idea.
The Home Secretary’s ridiculous suggestion that asylum seekers could be dumped 4,000 miles from the UK in Ascension Island was not only inhumane but prohibitive from a financial, logistical and practical sense, and is reminiscent of Hitler’s Madagascar plan.
READ MORE: Anger over UK plan to ship asylum seekers to volcanic isle
The plan, which would have unloaded European Jews onto the African island after they had been stripped of all wealth, was seen as a way of imprisoning the Jewish people and using them as hostages in possible future bargaining with the USA.
This brutalising process, though it would have been vastly preferable to the ultimate fate of these poor people, is mirrored in Priti Patel’s scheme to strand asylum seekers in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
It is a calculating and dehumanising mind that seeks to criminalise those who are suffering and desperate by imprisoning them for trying to find refuge for themselves and their families. Ominously, under this Conservative government the extreme right-wing views and tendencies of the Home Secretary may only represent the tip of the iceberg.
Owen Kelly
Stirling
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