Yellow badges for mask-exempt children ‘echo Nazi stars’
A PRIVATE school has prompted dismay by asking pupils to wear a “yellow badge” to show they are exempt from using a face mask.
Farringtons School in Kent, which charges £34,050 per year for boarders, has made face masks compulsory in classrooms and corridors.
In a letter to parents David Jackson, the head master, said that children who were exempt from wearing masks would “should wear a yellow badge to indicate this”.
Critics said it was “inappropriate” given the “historical connotation” with
Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe who were forced to wear a yellow star so they could be marked out for segregation and discrimination.
Molly Kingsley, of Usforthem, a parent campaign group, said: “Asking children to wear some form of exemption marker has been quite common in schools and unbelievably, this example of asking them to wear a yellow badge is not in isolation.
“It should not need explaining why this is a deeply inappropriate thing to ask a child to do. This has historical connotations which are deeply uncomfortable for many people.”
She added that children who were medically exempt from masks might already be vulnerable, and asking them to wear a yellow badge would only serve to “stigmatise” them even more.
The Government updated guidance this month to give local public health directors powers to bypass Whitehall and introduce tougher restrictions on children. It comes amid concern about a potential rise in Covid among children in the run-up to Christmas.
A spokesman for the school said: “The rationale for introducing a badge for mask exempt pupils is so that they are not repeatedly challenged about not wearing a mask.
“The badge was chosen after looking at the Government advice about exemption from face covering badges. This has a yellow circle and so we went for a yellow badge rather than producing a specially designed one. No offence was intended and we are horrified that any such parallel should be drawn.”
‘It should not need explaining why this is a deeply inappropriate thing to ask a child to do’
Sometimes, it’s the small details that reveal the scale of the problem. Last week, it was revealed that a Dover branch of Domino’s was forced to close after Border Force officers ordered 700 pizzas to feed migrants who had crossed the Channel. On November 10, some 703 migrants landed on the Kent coast. The next day, there were a record 1,185 arrivals. Total cost of pizza: £7,000. Will you scream or shall I? I know, let’s do a group scream at the ingratitude and iniquity of it all.
A note on another £1,789 pizza order in October said: “Purchased by Clandestine Operational Response Team for use at Tug Haven, where we have migrants arriving on small boats.” Back in August 2020, Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, made Dan O’mahoney the “Clandestine Channel Threat Commander”. The title sounded imposing, promisingly military. We were told Mr O’mahoney was responsible for “making the Channel route unviable for small boat crossings” including stronger enforcement measures and “adopting interceptions at sea and the direct return of boats”. Terrific. As far as I can remember, there was no mention of authorising the purchase of several hundred Domino’s Stuffed Crusts.
Meanwhile, veterans who sleep on our streets have to rely on soup kitchens for sustenance. And, every day now, anxious people are calling their energy provider to check that their horrendous gas bill is correct. (It is.) There will be no Domino’s this winter for those families. They can’t afford it because they’re not asylum seekers; they just live here.
Almost 25,000 economic migrants, or “asylum seekers”, have made that Channel crossing so far this year. And how many have been sent back? Five. Not 500, not 50.
Five. It beggars belief.
The broken asylum system costs more than £1billion a year. The latest Home Office figures show that even before the recent arrivals, 125,000 cases were being considered. Of those, 5,900 were awaiting the outcome of a never-ending legal appeal (what Ms
Patel calls “the merry-go-round”), with around 39,500 waiting to be deported. In 2013, some 47,000 failed asylum seekers and foreign criminals were deported. This dropped to a low of 8,000 last year. Mind you, that looks positively competent compared to 2021’s grand total of five. With the asylum process in meltdown and migrants being schooled to game the system, I think it’s becoming pretty clear that it is the British people who are, in a very real sense, the Stuffed Crust.
The Home Office must have breathed a huge sigh of relief last week when a failed asylum seeker and Christian convert by the name of Emad Al Swealmeen blew himself up. Iraqi-born Swealmeen, who had his claim rejected in 2014 but still managed to be in the country seven years later, was just minutes away from causing carnage, either at the Remembrance Day service at Liverpool Cathedral or at a maternity hospital. It was possibly only a malfunctioning detonator, not border security or the asylum system, which kept scores of new mothers and babies safe. We should, I think, have been far more upset about that near-miss. Outraged, in fact, that a would-be mass murderer pulled the wool over the eyes of officials while spending money the UK so generously gave him on a cake-decorating course. Did they teach him to make Bombe Alaska?
It keeps on happening. In 2017, a bomb on a District Line train at Parsons Green injured 30 people. The bomber was Ahmed Hassan, an Iraqi asylum seeker who arrived in the UK in 2015 claiming to be under 18. At a 2016 immigration interview, Hassan told officials he had been in contact with Islamic State and was trained to kill. Despite this admission, while his asylum application was processed, Hassan was placed in foster care.
In 2020, three men enjoying a picnic in a park in Reading were stabbed to death by Khairi Saadallah, an asylum seeker from Libya who had avoided deportation from the UK five times, using £107,000 in legal aid to do so. The Reading jihadist was a Christian convert – of course he was. Faking a faith is standard practice to persuade officials that you’ve “assimilated”.
Need I go on? The safety of the public, which should be the Government’s priority, is put at risk every single day with thousands of unknowns scrambling onto the Kent coast. Undoubtedly, many will be decent people seeking a better life for themselves. But it
only needs one member of Isis to cause devastation.
The public seems to understand this better than their politicians. A new poll shows that 77 per cent of Conservative voters think the UK’S approach to managing migrants crossing the Channel is too soft.
Australia dealt with a similar crisis by processing migrant applications offshore in Papua New Guinea. It was a controversial, but highly effective, deterrent. If the UK flew people who come ashore in Kent to the Falkland Islands, there would be no free pizza and you can bet we would soon see a drop in young men claiming they were refugees.
The only way to stop the boats coming, according to Kevin Saunders, former chief immigration officer for Border Force, is “to take all the people who have arrived in the UK to an offshore processing centre”. Asked why it had to be offshore, Mr Saunders said: “People will still come here because they know we are not going to be able to remove them from the United Kingdom when their asylum claim fails.”
I believe that Ms Patel gets this. But the Home Secretary is hamstrung by politically correct civil servants and by a kind-hearted Prime Minister who lacks the stomach for a clash with a Left-leaning media and a human rights industry that will accuse him of “scapegoating” people seeking refuge from violence.
Funny how little interest the human rights industry has in the rights of humans here in the UK to not be bombed or stabbed by failed asylum seekers who should have been deported long ago. It is the very kindness and generosity of our system that makes us so vulnerable.
Act now to protect your own people, Prime Minister. What do you say to those who think the Clandestine Operational Response Team should go on handing out pizza at public expense? Dough balls.
Almost 25,000 ‘asylum seekers’ have crossed this year. Just five have been sent back