Letters: We mustn't lose our humanity where refugees are concerned

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Refugees massed onto an inflatable boat reaching Mytilene, northern island of Lesbos, after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey, on 17 February, 2016 (Getty Images)

In the week when another boat carrying refugees sinks in the Mediterranean with the loss of as many as 400 lives, we discover that the Government has deported three times as many orphaned refugee children to countries ravaged by war and poverty than ministers have previously admitted. 445 teenagers have been sent back to countries like Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan since 2014.

While it may not be popular it is interesting to reflect that the "bash an immigrant lobby", which includes the Tory Party and Ukip with their casual racism, have helped send many of these kids to their deaths.

Typical Daily Mail headlines such as "send the immigrants back, save our jobs" may seem harmless enough, but the ramifications are utterly monstrous. Right now, as a direct result of such propaganda, hundreds of thousands of refugees are being put in tent camps surrounded with barbed wire and armed guards, which in previous times would have been called concentration camps. Then they are deported to Turkey to live in similar camps for quite possibly years.

In Calais, white fascist gangs attack women and children whose only crime is a desperate attempt to flee wars caused primarily by us and our mates. So what's next? Well, the Royal Navy is being dispatched to the Med - not to rescue these poor people but to turn these unsafe overloaded boats back to wherever they came from.

When we lose our humanity, when we cease to believe in the story of the Good Samaritan, the road only leads to barbarism.

Mark Holt

Liverpool

An overly optimistic referendum

The reiterated objection to Europe is that we Brits are being told what to do by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. We haven't had the opportunity to troop down in our multitudes to our local polling stations to elect a lot of bigwigs with peculiar foreign names. All of a sudden the electoral system is held to be a matter of high principle. What great strides democracy has made since the General Election, when only 66.1 per cent of the population could be bothered to vote.

Peter Forster

London N4

A circular system

The Chancellor has played the mortgage rates card earlier than one might have expected.

We already have a highly precarious housing market, after a crash induced by irresponsible lending and a recovery based upon even more personal and public borrowing. Factor in to this EU ‘free movement of people’, and you need more and more housing, financed by yet more borrowing.

So farm so good for existing home-owners, as prices continue to rise. But are we prepared to gamble our entire wealth that never in our lifetime will the EU get it together sufficiently to manage a boom, centred perhaps in Bavaria or Lombardy? This, mercifully, would draw some of the froth off the greatly expanded population of Britain, but the effect would be empty houses and plunging values.

By enshrining free rather than balanced movement of people, the EU lays itself open to the free surface effect, as when water sloshes about wildly if you try to carry it in a frying pan. Surplus labour sloshing about the EU not only brings crisis when it arrives but also a different crisis later when some of it leaves. George Osborne urges that we tie ourselves into a dangerously unstable system.

John Riseley

Harrogate, North Yorkshire