More than 200 high-profile public figures including Ralph Fiennes, Keira Knightley, Michael Morpurgo and the band Coldplay have written to Theresa May calling on the government not to close a scheme to bring unaccompanied child refugees from Europe to Britain.
In an open letter addressed to the prime minister, the signatories describe the decision to admit no more than 350 children under the so-called Dubs amendment as “truly shameful”.
“The idea that as a country we will slam the door shut after just 350 children have reached safety is completely unacceptable,” they write, adding: “The country we know and love is better than this.”
Others who have signed the letter include actors Sir Mark Rylance, Carey Mulligan, Juliet Stevenson and Benedict Cumberbatch, writers Sarah Waters and Linda Grant, and musicians Lily Allen, Jessie Ware and the band Hot Chip. The playwrights Sir Tom Stoppard and Sir David Hare are also signatories, as are TV presenter Gary Lineker and human rights lawyer Dame Helena Kennedy QC.
The letter follows the government’s announcement last week that the scheme, under which 200 vulnerable children have so far arrived in the UK from camps in Europe, would be wound up after a further 150 are allowed to come. Many MPs and peers, who passed the amendment to the Immigration Act in April last year, believed that the number admitted would be more like 3,000.
The amendment was proposed by the Labour peer Lord Dubs, who was one of 669 mostly Jewish children who escaped to Britain from Czechoslovakia in 1939, with the help of a young stockbroker, Nicholas Winton.
It is embarrassing, the letter states, that the government cannot match even Winton’s total, let alone the 10,000 children saved from the Nazis by the Kindertransport programme.
“It is clear from the work of charities like Citizens UK’s Safe Passage project and Help Refugees with unaccompanied child refugees across Greece, Italy and France, that where these safe and legal routes are blocked, children are left with a terrible choice between train tracks on the one hand, and people traffickers on the other.”
The letter argues that local authorities across the UK, which assume responsibility for the children once they are admitted to the country, are willing to accept more refugees, but that the government lacks the will to continue the scheme.
“The government’s threadbare consultation with councils is now nine months out of date … Communities and councils across the country stand ready to [accept] more. The government must agree to extend the programme and re-consult with councils immediately.”
The announcement that the scheme was to close was met with dismay by Dubs, who called the decision shabby, and was criticised by Yvette Cooper, who heads Labour’s refugee task force, the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, who called it “a clear dereliction of the UK’s moral and global duty”.
Some high-profile Conservative figures have also been critical, including the former education secretary Nicky Morgan, who warned that voters could rapidly become alienated from a party if they thought it was callous in its decision-making.
“Britain has always been a global, outward-facing country as well as being compassionate to those who need our help most,” she wrote on the website ConservativeHome. “The Conservative party now needs to demonstrate that combination in our approach to issues such as the Dubs children.”
The closure of the scheme was also denounced at Sunday night’s Bafta awards by the film director Ken Loach. Accepting his award for outstanding British film for I, Daniel Blake, Loach accused the government of “callousness and brutality” towards vulnerable people in this country, adding: “It’s a brutality that extends to helping out refugee children we promised to help.”
A number of attendees at the awards, including the Danish-American actor Viggo Mortensen, wore lapel badges reading “Dubs now”.
Michael Morpurgo, the former children’s laureate, told the Guardian he had signed the letter because he had seen for himself the conditions in which refugees were living in camps in Calais “and I felt there was something monstrous about two of the richest nations on earth letting these people live in such appalling squalor”.
The refugee crisis after the second world war had been much bigger than the current situation, he said, but people had done “their very best” to help others. “Now here we are, living in our unspeakably wealthy times, and these people are on our doorstep, the most vulnerable of whom are these children who have absolutely no one. The fact that we can’t hold out our hands to them seems to me utterly shameful.”
His words were echoed by Lily Allen, who said: “We are incredibly privileged to be able to live in this country and yet there are these young children all across Europe who have escaped the things that are happening where they come from. You just can’t turn your back on them. I do not understand the people who oppose that argument at all, I can’t get my head around it.”
Asked about the intense criticism she has received from the some rightwing papers for her campaigning work on refugees, Allen said such considerations “should not affect the way that I perceive young children wandering around Europe aimlessly looking for somewhere to live or for a family or a home. The fact that my career might be negatively affected really doesn’t come into it. These are human beings”.
The actor Juliet Stevenson told the Guardian that the adoption of the Dubs amendment into the Immigration Act last year was “partly a reflection of how millions of people in this country feel – which is that they want to do the decent thing in this historical moment”.
“Now to find, only months later, that the government [has] decided to renege on it … and why? These are children, those who have been identified as the most vulnerable. For example, they are girls without parents, who are very susceptible to sex traffickers, or young people who have been traumatised by their experiences and are psychologically fragile.
“If Theresa May went to visit these camps to meet these children, she would see why we are fighting so hard for them. It’s not asking a great deal to offer them some temporary shelter in this country.”
Billy Bragg said: “We have to ask ourselves: what kind of people are we? Are we going to be people who reach out to those who ask for help, to take our share along with everybody else, or are we going to turn inwards and away from the world? We will be judged, just as they judged people in the 1930s, in how we respond to these people.”
