A Fairly Tolerable Outrage Under the Circumstances

Here, once again, is how Wee Nicky and his Deputy Conservatives have put an end to the moral outrage of child detention: they haven't. Between May and August this year, almost seven hundred children were imprisoned for up to a day at a time by the UK Border Agency, a third of them unaccompanied by an adult, and (in company with about fourteen and a half thousand other threats to our Britishness) in unsanitary, badly ventilated cells with no window to the outside. The independent monitoring board at Heathrow said that it had drawn attention to all this in its previous report, and that the lack of change "is unacceptable on grounds of humanity", which will cut very little ice with the dog-whistling cat lady at the Home Office. The Border Agency defended itself by invoking the altered definition of child imprisonment which has served Wee Nicky and his Deputy Conservatives since Daveybloke gave them their little red boxes: it isn't really imprisonment if it happens somewhere other than Yarl's Wood. The Press Association appears to have omitted to ask anyone in Daveybloke's Cuddly Coalition for a quote; doubtless Wee Nicky's Deputy Conservatives will have much to say on the subject, one of these days.