Cameron relents on Syrian kid refugees
Print Edition
PRIME Minister David Cameron said yesterday he would let more unaccompanied Syrian children come to Britain after a campaign led by a peer who fled the Nazis in the 1930s.
The U-turn came as the government tries to head off what had been looking like a probable defeat in a parliamentary vote next week on the issue of Syrian minors.
“We’re going to go round the local authorities and see what more we can do,” he said during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons.
“What I don’t want us to do is to take steps that will encourage people to make this dangerous journey” from Syria to Europe, Cameron added.
He did not specify how many extra children would be brought to Britain.
The government in a statement said unaccompanied asylum-seekers “will be resettled from Greece, Italy and France” but that only people who had registered before the European Union migrant deal with Turkey came into force on March 20 would be accepted.
Cameron has come under increasing pressure in recent days from all parties, including his own Conservatives, to take in more Syrian children fleeing conflict and travelling without an adult responsible for them.
Alf Dubs, a member of the House of Lords for the opposition Labour Party, drew wide support for his amendment to the Immigration Bill now before parliament, which urges the government to settle 3,000 children from camps in Europe.
Dubs came to Britain from Czechoslovakia in 1939 aged 6 fleeing the Nazis as part of a scheme known as the Kindertransport, in which hundreds of Jewish children were rescued.
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