Watch Yvette Cooper shame David Cameron on child refugees at PMQs

Brexit & Foreign Policy Social Justice

MP blasts prime minister over 3,000 unaccompanied children

 

Labour’s Yvette Cooper took David Cameron to task on child refugees in today’s Prime Minister’s Questions.

The former shadow home secretary asked Cameron to stop opposing an amendment to the Immigration Bill that would take 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees from Europe and resettle them in Britain.

Here’s the full text of her question:

‘The prime minister has just suggested that child refugees alone in Europe are safe. There are children’s homes full in Italy and Greece and over a thousand children will sleep rough in Greece alone tonight. How are they safe?

10,000 children have disappeared in Europe. How are they safe?

The agencies say the children are committing service sex, they are being abused, subject to prostitution and rape.

It is not ‘insulting other European countries’ to offer to help. They want us to help.

So will he reconsider his position on Alf Dubbs’s amendment before it comes back to the vote and stop with his attitude to lone child refugees, putting this House and this country to shame?’

The prime minister had suggested, in answer to an earlier question, that comparisons with the Kindertransport of the 1930s were an ‘insult’ to other European countries, where the children are now.

He answered Cooper’s question by hailing UK support for refugees in the Middle East.

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2 Responses to “Watch Yvette Cooper shame David Cameron on child refugees at PMQs”

  1. damon

    If we were talking about younger children I don’t think this would be such a contentious issue.
    But if you go over to Calais and tell all the under eighteens that they can come on over, you are going to be getting the majority of them stepping forward.
    And then calling their friends and brothers back home, telling them to set out on the journey also.

  2. David Lindsay

    When the latest Dubs Amendment comes back to the Commons, then will the Government dare to vote it down? There are a lot of bad things that could be said about Yvette Cooper. But she is spot on this time.

    Of course it is not a criticism of our neighbours that their relevant institutions and resources are simply overwhelmed by all these unaccompanied children. As Britain’s would be. Britain would seek to share the load, and they are doing nothing other than the same.

    We had the means and the will to bomb these children’s countries. Supported by Yvette Cooper; see, I told you. Therefore, we can find the means and the will to take them in, proportionally, in co-operation and co-ordination with our neighbours. We can. We must. And we may now dare to hope that we will.

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