Though Cowards Flinch

Today at TCF we will mostly be exposing attempts of authorities to justify odious policy choices with the aid of completely ridiculous arguments.

First, there was Dave setting out how the US policy on gay people in service is ‘justified’ by the argument that the end of the cold war meant the Dutch army allowed gays into their ranks, and this meant they became no good at fighting. 

Problem is, as Dave points out, he’s factually wrong as well as stupid.

And now here’s Home Office Minister Meg Hillier justifying her decision to imprison children on the basis that she’s really protecting them:

[W]ith children being detained I’m faced with a number of options.

One is that we just stop it altogether, but then we would have children, I think, with a very high price on them, because we’d actually be saying say if you have a child you will never be detained to be deported and I think that it would raise the risk of child trafficking and put a very high price on a child, so I’d be very reluctant to go down that route

(Daily Politics, BBC 19 March 2010.)

I can’t improve on the End Child Detention Now blog’s caustic commentary on this nonsense:

Hillier’s comment was clearly intended to create the impression that either:

a) destitute single asylum seekers would place orders for small children to be trafficked half way across the world by criminal gangs with forged identity papers (and no doubt matching the false ‘parents’ DNA and blood group;

or

b) they would somehow borrow or adopt children who had already been trafficked into the country (with neatly forged ID documents etc) for, as Meg said, a ‘high price’, the minute some empty-headed government decided to follow the soft-hearted Swedes, Australians and Canadians in not locking up children in detention centres.

Because of course these governments foolishly gave into the pro-children/pro-human rights lobby, and we all know there are containers full of trafficked children just waiting to be delivered to failed asylum seekers for large sums of money in Toronto, Sydney and Stockholm!

Quite simply, this is a ridiculous statement from Meg Hillier. 

It’s so far from a being a sensible justification that you almost have to admire the gall in coming up with it.  

When I set out in a previous post how wrong the government was to lock up children, I assumed any defence she might make of it might be on the grounds that the care afforded to children outside prison was even worse than in prison.

That would have been wrong-headed enough, but this justification defies belief.

(The above piece was written before I saw this similar piece at Open Democracy by Clare Sambrook of  End Child Detention Now.)