Leaving a six-year-old child stranded abroad brings shame on our country
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Your support makes all the difference.Reading your report on six-year-old Mohamed Bangoura being left stranded in Brussels on the instructions of our Home Office, unable to get back to his mother in UK, I was reminded of Donald Trump’s iniquitous immigration policies.
Theresa May rightly described Trump’s separation of immigrant children from their parents as “deeply disturbing” and “wrong”.
What lay behind the Home Office’s callous edict in this instance that a six-year-old child should not be allowed to return to his mother?
The answer is all too obvious: Theresa May’s very own deeply disturbing and wholly wrong “hostile environment” policy.
D Maughan Brown
York
The US separates children and parents who enter their country.
The UK separates children from their parents when they leave their country of origin for a holiday by rescinding their passport.
Which do we feel is more inhuman?
No moral high ground for the UK here.
John Sinclair
Pocklington
A new centre-left alliance is inevitable – and needed
Given that – with the recent NEC elections – the hard left is now effectively in control of the Labour Party, the time is clearly ripe to form a centre-left alliance which can operate independently.
The Green Party, Lib Dems and Labour’s (Blairite) Progress movement would do well to sit down together and hammer out an agreed common manifesto and non-aggression pact in preparation for the next general election, whenever it comes.
In terms of policy, it is fortuitous that this week’s Institute for Public Policy Research report provides an off-the-shelf programme which would surely be acceptable to all centre leftists.
Andrew McLuskey
Staines
There’s no place like home
The FBI has found a pair of the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz and it brings back memories of the quote, “Click your heels together three times and say ‘there’s no place like home’, and you’ll be there”.
The only problem is where would a person want to go to, as home may be in the Trump-led America; Britain, with its obsession about not wanting to leave the EU despite voting to; or Australia, which is changing its leaders almost as often as they change home smoke alarms.
There are many suggested themes that can be read from The Wizard of Oz, although a pertinent one is that you should believe in yourself and have faith that you have hidden abilities.
Perhaps we should all believe that our home is a good place, even if we can’t see it at the moment.
Dennis Fitzgerald
Melbourne, Australia
India’s decision to decriminalise homosexuality is a landmark moment for equal rights
The landmark decision of the Supreme Court of India to decriminalise gay sex, a 160-year-old British colonial vestige, speaks volumes about what it means to be a vibrant democracy where “liberty” is considered sacrosanct. As a naturalised American originally hailing from India and holding a law degree from the University of Mumbai, I can attest to the fact that the now defunct Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code criminalising gay sex under “unnatural offences against the order of nature” was “vagueness and ambiguity at its worst”.
In this historic judgement, the chief justice of India has rightly noted: “Social morality cannot be used to violate the fundamental rights of even a single individual... Constitutional morality cannot be martyred at the altar of social morality.” In fact, one of the five Supreme Court justices, a woman, has eloquently stated that homosexuality is a “variation, not an aberration” – how true.
In this defining and far-reaching judgement, it is gratifying to see India, the world’s largest democracy with a teeming population of over 1.2 billion people, embracing a visionary and pragmatic approach wholeheartedly.
How ironic that many countries are still locked in contentious battles of “morality” in terms of gay and abortion rights. I hope these blowing winds of change, encompassing human liberty, sweep the globe where the gay community is under constant attacks by repressive regimes and laws that unleash strictest punishments, including death sentences.
Atul M Karnik
New York, USA
Don’t blame the British Empire for the actions of ex-colonies
Yet again the British Empire gets it in the neck, this time for outlawing homosexuality in India in 1856. Does it mean, therefore, that if the subcontinent had stayed under colonial jurisdiction, gay activity in private would have been decriminalised half a century ago, as it was here?
And who is to blame for continuing vicious laws in places that never were under the British yoke? Russia? Saudi Arabia? Indonesia – so long controlled by the liberal Dutch?
Edward Thomas
Eastbourne
Operation Yellowhammer
How dare the government name the Brexit chaos after a yellowhammer?
I presume David Attenborough (who as far as I know owns all the wildlife) will sue for defamation?
Amanda Baker
Edinburgh
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