BEYOND COMPREHENSION

And only last month, there was the wall-to-wall coverage of the disappearance of Nicola Bulley whilst walking her dog.

Why, then, is there so little coverage of the 222 refugee children that have disappeared from their hotel accommodation since October 2022?

Of these, 130 vanished from a hotel in

Brighton! Gone, vanished, disappeared into the ether and no-one seems to give a damn. If these were British children, the world would stop, the newspapers would clear the first 20 pages, and thousands of police and concerned citizens would be hunting, and the television news would be awash with stories.

THIS IS FIVE FULL CLASSROOMS OF CHILDREN!

So, is this because they are refugees and we don’t care about them as they are poor foreigners who shouldn’t be here in the first place? If so, shame on us.

The ruling Green Party in Brighton have looked the other way claiming ‘they are not our responsibility’. The Home Office speaks with a forked tongue because the Chief Inspector of Borders & Immigration reported in October that the Home Office does not accept corporate responsibility for these children.

There is little doubt that these children have been forced into county lines drug gangs and child prostitution, and other things we dare not think about and it appears no-one cares.

This shocking situation has occurred for two reasons. First, the actions of Conservative Home Secretaries Priti Patel and Suella Braverman who have, without precedent and completely outside of the law, moved lone children into the city, abandoning them in hotels, with no meaningful safeguarding. The indefensible cruelty and neglect of the Conservatives at Westminster knows no bounds.

Peter Kyle, Labour MP for Hove said: “It’s hard to explain in words what I saw’. Kyle is among those who, from day one, have been seeking answers from the government after visiting the hotel which, in an unrelated twist, is owned by a company whose directors include children of notorious property magnate and ex-convict Nicholas Van Hoogstraten.

One Iranian boy he met had lost both his parents back home. “On arrival in Brighton he had been separated from his friend, who had tested positive for Covid, with whom he had journeyed with from Iran. He was in a state of such anxiety his face was pinched and his legs were buckling. He didn’t know where his friend had gone,” he said. This fits the wider picture of uncertainty painted by non-governmental organisation workers monitoring the children.

Ellen Tansey, safeguarding manager at the Refugee Council, said the children in the Brighton hotel, as in others she visited, appeared to have no designated social worker and none of the usual access to services.

“They were mentally affected by the haphazard way in which some among them were moved swiftly into care while others were stuck in the hotel for more than a month,” she said.

“This state of uncertainty made them more open to exploitation. You can appreciate if someone turns up and says to a child without any knowledge of how the UK asylum and child protection systems work, ‘you could be deported, or I could drive you to London and give you a job in a car wash’, even though it’s a risk, they might take it,” she said.

In one case last year, when a bystander had reported two boys being driven off from outside the Brighton hotel, Sussex Police intercepted the vehicle on the motorway. Two men were arrested and are under investigation for human trafficking.

The government carries 100% of the responsibility for this shameful nightmare. It has failed miserably to get to grips with the migrant crisis despite the hot air spouted on a daily basis. Once these kids arrive on the small boats, they stick them in coaches and dump them in hotels around the country.

There is no safeguarding, no social workers, no guidance, and often with no information passed to the relevant council who are supposed to care for them. And this appalling practice started in 2021, so how many thousands of children have been trafficked within the UK?

You will not know and nor will l as the government will not tell us.

By Travel Editor Tess de Klerk