Good to know that the Daily Mail‘s stand on refugees and immigrants is at least consistent. From an excellent and moving BBC 4 documentary I learn that the Mail campaigned vigorously for the expulsion of 4,000 kids brought to Britain for safety after the bombing of Guernica in 1937.
The Basque children deserved better but, because of the Government’s reluctance to ‘intervene’ in the affairs of a sovereign state (which, of course, also led pretty directly to the fall of the the Spanish Republic to the fascists), they were taken care of by an entirely voluntary committee of ordinary families, many of whom subsequently adopted those kids orphaned by the fighting and subsequent purge, and who received no state aid at all.
The 1937 headlines (wish I’d noted them down) read strikingly like the Mail’s latest crop of [insert ethnic group here] migrant scare stories.