Is the UK Prime Minister two-faced?

• Remembering yesterday's victims, but forgetting today's?

Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day, and UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced in Parliament that a new Holocaust memorial would be built next to Parliament.


Mr Cameron told MPs that the memorial, costing £50 million, would "show the importance Britain places on preserving the memory of the Holocaust".

The Prime Minister added, "It is right that our whole country should stand together to remember the darkest hour of humanity."

The testimonies of Holocaust survivors will be part of the Memorial. “Their description of what they went through and the friends and family they lost, is so powerful and moving we must capture it for generations to come,” said Mr Cameron.

The Nazi regime systematically rounded-up and murdered six million Jewish people, and a further estimated six million others, among them disabled people, Gypsies and homosexuals. Over one million of the executed victims were children aged under 16. 

Last night the BBC broadcast, ‘The Children Saved from The Nazis’, how British hero, Sir Nicholas Winton, saved 669 unaccompanied child refugees from Nazi slaughter by arranging trains for them from Czechoslovakia to Britain. 

A further 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees were saved from death in the Holocaust by being transported from across Europe to the relative safety of Britain on a series of ‘KinderTransport’ trains just before the start of World War Two. 

Each child required sponsorship of £50, an enormous amount back in 1939, and a family to look after them. Huge efforts were made to save as many children as possible, and the British public raised half-a-million pounds towards the rescue effort. 

Many kind-hearted, mostly working-class British families took in the children, most of whom never saw their parents again, as they were massacred in the Holocaust. 

Back in 1938-1939, those taking in refugees had no idea that there would follow a world war and the Holocaust. In fact, the full gruesome details of the Holocaust were only known by the world after it had finished.

Today in 2016 the world is going through a new “dark hour”, which has created the worst refugee crisis on record. 

Millions of stateless, desperate people are trying to escape from war, terror, extermination, violence and religious oppression in several countries, with a small proportion of them reaching what they hope will be the safety of Europe. But many countries in Europe don't want them - including Britain.

United Nations figures show that, of the more than 1 million people who made the treacherous journey to Europe by sea last year, 25 percent were children. 

It’s estimated that there are 26,000 unaccompanied child refugees in Europe today. Some hundreds of them are camped in filthy conditions in Calais, and some of them have relatives in Britain who could care for them if they were allowed to come here. 

But today, there are no trains to bring these parentless children to the safety of Britain. 

The charity, Save the Children, is campaigning for Britain to take in 3,000 of the unaccompanied child refugees now homeless across Europe. The charity believes that number would represent a “fair share” taking into account Britain’s GDP, population, and employment rates. 

But the British Government is refusing to allow sanctuary for any refugees who have arrived in Europe, let alone the thousands of children who managed to escape from war and terror to our continent without the guiding hands of their parents. 

Those lost children are particularly vulnerable and prey to people-traffickers, prostitution and child-labour.

Yesterday, during the same session of Parliament that the Prime Minister announced the new memorial to Europe’s Holocaust, his attitude to today’s refugees in Europe was laid bare.

Following questions from Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, the Prime Minister made clear that Britain doesn’t want refugees coming here from Europe, and referred to the refugees now camped in squalid conditions in Calais as, “a bunch of migrants in Calais”. 

Last year he described them as “a swarm”.

Isn't it too easy for the Prime Minister to remember the victims of Europe’s dark past, in which he played no part in saving anybody, and forget today’s victims in Europe, which he could help to save? Isn't that called being ‘two-faced’?

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Related articles by Jon Danzig:

• Asylum and the rights of unaccompanied children 
• The photo that alerted the world
• Labour leader visits Calais and Dunkirk refugee camps
• Danish police seize refugees' belongings
• List of the latest articles by Jon Danzig

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Posted by Jon Danzig on Thursday, 28 January 2016

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Posted by Jon Danzig on Friday, 29 January 2016