A brief blog this week, because the temptation to rant is too strong. I'm only posting this because the story it concerns, the abduction of children by criminal gangs from hotels run by the Home Office, seems to have bewilderingly little traction in the mainstream press.
I'm not qualifying the word children with the term asylum seeker. Because that's the point of this blog. The second you do that, you are othering them, you are trying to lessen the impact of this horror which is taking place on British soil at this present time. When the odious Jonathan Gullis roared idiotically that "they shoudn't have come here", when Nick Robinson on the Today programme leaned heavily on the racist's bogeyman du jour, Albania, when they paid some scant attention to this story, they were trying to distract from the fundamental point. That children are being abducted by criminal gangs, and Suella Braverman is somehow still in a job, even though this is happening on her watch.
That it's received so little coverage is heinous enough. There is an implicit racism in the media that don't cover this. When children were snatched from their schools in Nigeria by Boko Haram, that was a huge news story. That children are being snatched from the pavement while they are supposed to be in the care of the British state, astonishingly, is not.
I get that it's a busy news week, but are we really saying the lives of children are less newsworthy than the grubby tax dealings of Nadhim Zahawi, less important than yet more proof that Boris Johnson has dragged political life in this country into the gutter Is this what we've become? Is this what we are? A country that watches children be abducted and just shrugs?
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