The Reader: Educating younger refugees can help prevent terrorism

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Learning: refugee children at school in Amman
AFP/Getty Images
13 September 2018

YOUR Learn to Live Campaign highlights a very important problem. In 2017, a record 68.5 million people were forcibly displaced around the world. Efforts to help them often focus on the urgent questions of food, water, sanitation and drinking water. Unfortunately, as your coverage highlights, this means children and young people miss out on education.

Education in refugee camps is limited at best and often non-existent. And even outside camps, young refugees may still be unable to continue their school or university education in their new homes. For a country torn apart by war, like Syria, this may mean an under-educated generation, with repercussions long into the future.

Building peace, and rebuilding nations, requires educated people. When millions of children grow up with little education, they often feel they lack a stake in the world, sowing the seeds of future conflict and terrorism. Better education for the millions of people fleeing war and persecution benefits us all.

The UK is well respected for the significant financial contribution it makes to helping refugees. But we need to put more effort into education initiatives. For example, there are often teachers already living in refugee camps. Giving them resources to teach the next generation could be an extremely cost-effective use of UK aid money, and a very practical way of encouraging peace.
Thangam Debbonaire
Labour MP and chair of all All-party Parliamentary Group on Refugees

EDITOR'S REPLY

Dear Thangam

Food, water and shelter — those are the bases of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for a person who has been displaced. But if that is all we can do in the face of a refugee situation, we are failing not just those people who have been displaced but the next generation of the world.

Not providing those children with a path to educations, jobs and opportunities creates a restless and bitter generation with, as you say, repercussions into the future.

Of the many things we can finance in a refugee or war situation, education is the one that does immediately bear fruit. But it should be a core principle to produce a generation with aspirations and capabilities beyond just the basics of living.

And the London students who are communicating with those in war zones will grow up with a wider sense of responsibility to the world.

We are delighted that you have lent your voice to this campaign and hope many in Parliament will follow you.

Joy Lo Dico, Executive Editor (Projects)

Be careful what you wish for with any ‘Canada plus plus’ deal

This week has seen a crescendo of calls by hard Brexiteers that Britain should opt for a “Canada plus plus” deal with the EU post-Brexit. As the British people have great affection for Canada, this slogan may produce a sense of reassurance and trust.

As usual, the truth is rather different from what it is cracked up to be. The EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) took more than seven years to negotiate and has more than 1,000 pages of exclusions, which would limit the benefits of a similar model for Britain. It gives minimal access to financial services, a crucial sector for the British economy. It also gives minimal access to agricultural products, which are at least included in the Chequers proposal.

How many of those who invoke CETA so freely have actually read it and its exclusions?
Nicholas Maclean
British board member, Canada-UK Council

Give us answers on NHS post-Brexit

If the news of medical stockpiling after Brexit represents a national scandal, Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s admission that taxpayers will have to pay for it is depressing [“Taxpayers will help fund drug airlift under no-deal Brexit”, September 6]. The Leave campaign partly won the referendum because the charlatans in charge promised £350 million a week for the NHS. Nobody mentioned the possibility that medicines would have to be emergency-airlifted to hospitals.

We’ve spent too long in limbo. It’s time to get some answers: will Brexit give us more or less access to medicines and clinical trials? Will it attract more or fewer EU doctors and nurses to staff to our NHS? Improve our national health or jeopardise it? It’s time to give the people a final say on whether to go ahead with Brexit.#
Eloise Todd
CEO, Best for Britain

Falklands ‘defence force’ plan is crazy

I agree with your editorial on September 10 that Brexiteers’ idea of a rapid reaction force to defend the Falklands is patently absurd. Firstly, it sends mixed messages when we are trying to do a trade deal with Argentina and Transport for London is apparently preparing a bid to run the Buenos Aires metro. Secondly, following years of neglect, Argentina has no military presence. And finally, the country’s economy is on the brink and it is having to go cap in hand to the IMF for a bailout.

When I lived in Buenos Aires the previous hard Left government regularly used the Falklands issue as a distraction to rally the ill-informed. Now it would appear that Tory MPs are using the same playbook of jingoism in order to distract from a lack of a plan for Brexit and the Northern Irish border.
Chris Key

Our leaders can do more on Windrush

In April 2018 I launched a petition which more than 180,000 people signed and caught media attention that helped to get justice for the children of the Windrush Generation and others from the Commonwealth wanting to be recognised as British.

Six months on, although there is some progress the Government is planning to introduce a cap on all compensation claims, despite the fact that it has not considered any interim or hardship fund.

It is only right that the Government should have a compensation scheme which recognises and values all emotional and monetary loss and its impact on family life on a case by case basis. Any civil court will consider this commensurate with the suffering and treatment by the Government in denying Windrush children their rights as British citizens.

I have launched a new petition which I hope all parliamentarians across all the political parties will advocate again for the Windrush Generation and their children to get the compensation scheme they deserve. Otherwise there will be numerous legal actions in the courts which the tax payer and the victims of this major tragedy will lose out with additional suffering and trauma.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/227821
Patrick Vernon