SOME months ago I watched a late-night news programme which had tried to follow the journeys of young African men from their homes to the refugee camps of Calais. One young man had taken almost two years to make the journey. His family had sold their home – what we would consider a large, poorly constructed garden shed – and taken out loans to finance his journey to the “promised land” facilitated by people smugglers. On his way north he had been kidnapped, tortured, enslaved and held for ransom by Libyan gangsters who forced his family to go further into debt to obtain his release. He was now awaiting a chance to make the final leg of his journey by risking his life to cross the English Channel.
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How ironic, and desperately sad, would it be if the latest Tory anti-immigration policy would see him transported, like a 19th-century criminal, back to Africa.
Priti Patel says she has no alternative. How about the UK and French authorities putting their heads together to arrest, charge, prosecute and jail the people smugglers?
Brian Lawson
Paisley
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