Is proof of age really too much to ask?

MOVED to compassion by their plight, this paper was among the first to demand that unaccompanied child refugees in the squalor of the Calais Jungle should be given asylum in the UK. The children we had in mind were frightened, far from home and desperately vulnerable to sex abuse and other exploitation. Many were said to have seen relatives slaughtered before their eyes in the war zones they had escaped.

Indeed, their plight recalled that of the young Jewish children rescued from the Nazis under the Kindertransport programme of 1938-1940.

True, the Mail has long campaigned for controls on mass migration. But in the name of humanity, we believed an exception should be made for the helpless young who had nowhere else to turn.

Today, we stick firmly by our belief that those in genuine need deserve our help. But as photographs emerge of the first beneficiaries of a plan to rescue dozens of children, isn’t it well nigh impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Government’s humane intentions are being cynically abused?

Yes, some of the arrivals from Calais are clearly under 18.

As for the others, the BBC pixelated many of the men’s faces so that viewers could not judge their ages – while The Guardian also kept its readers in the dark by failing to print photographs. But the Mail believes readers and taxpayers should be allowed to judge for themselves whether Britain’s hospitality and welfare system are being abused.

So we make no apology for publishing the men’s pictures, despite the ludicrous claim by former education secretary Nicky Morgan – a politician with an unswerving instinct for discrediting her profession – that press questioning of their ages has been ‘shameful’.

Nobody, surely, can deny that some appear to be fully grown men (and how striking that almost all are male) – with one rated by facial recognition software as having the features of a 38-year-old! The contrast to the Kindertransport programme could hardly be more stark.

Given that nearly two-thirds of ‘child’ refugees questioned last year were found to be over 18, isn’t it clear that some who arrived this week are taking us for fools?

This is why the Mail strongly backs former Labour home secretary Jack Straw when he says asylum seekers claiming to be children should undergo dental checks, widely used elsewhere in the EU to assess migrants’ ages.

Predictable liberal voices condemn such checks as unethical. But would people who have allegedly dodged bombs and bullets to reach our shores really object to such a short and painless test?

And isn’t it infinitely more unethical to take liars on trust, make a laughing stock of the system – and deny genuine child refugees the haven they crave?