I shall speak to Amendment 29. First, I should declare my interests. I am the son of a couple who met as children in an
orphanage, and my father was put to work as an unpaid kitchen boy for 11 years at Quaglino’s nightclub in London, in return for the orphanage being paid £1 a month for his services. That seems to me to fulfil a pretty good definition of slavery. But if he was standing here instead of me, he would say, “No, it was the best thing that ever happened to me—because I got fed better there, in the restaurant, than I did in the orphanage”. But it was slavery, and that sort of thing does not get a reference anywhere, because we are talking so much about sexual and perversion issues, not about that simple level of labour. But it was so, and it was wrong. I am assuming that we are safe in thinking nothing like that could happen today, so we do not need to cover it—but I do not think that it should pass without at least a thought and recognition, in memory of my father.
Secondly, I want to explain why Amendment 29 is here at all. It is outrageous that any Government should introduce a Bill that criminalises a whole sector of wrongdoers, while not accepting that the same strictures should apply to themselves and their own performance and behaviour. People would respond to that idea by saying, “But the Government don’t traffick children”. In fact, we have been serial offenders for the past 233 years. The first instance occurred in 1678 when, at the request of the Quaker colony in Maryland, we sent 82 children taken directly off the streets of Shoreditch as a gift to the colony, which had lost all its children in a raid by the Native American Indians. This consignment was put together by the mayor and aldermen of London, and shipped out from Rotherhithe. The instructions to the captain of the boat were that he had to bring back a cargo of tobacco to pay for the whole expedition; they were not doing it for free.
In the late 1780s, with the threat of Napoleon coming up, we moved to a position of systematic, government-sponsored trafficking of children to America on the grounds that, “If we are to be overrun by Napoleon, let’s send our children abroad”; and we did, in their thousands. Later, in the 19th century, we have the extraordinary episode of no less a person than Dr Thomas Barnardo, who enjoys near saintly status in this country, taking steps to ascertain how many children each of the Australian states would like if he could provide them. And provide them he did, in their thousands. It is hard to see where he got them from, but I suspect they were the overspill from his own institutional orphanages—in which case that was slavery to make space for more orphans, I suppose. But it was wrong and it was done without any authorisation.
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In the early 1900s, there was a systematic attempt to send out to South Africa every spare child who could be taken off the streets, mostly identified and sponsored by local councils, to stem the growing influence of German immigration. A non-stop stream of British children was being provided as a makeweight. In 1938, the Catholic Church at last woke up to the same thing and used its own resources to take all the Catholic children it could find from the streets of England. Around 2,000 were sent out in 1938 and 1939, while in 1947 the rest of the country woke up to doing it again in support of the Australian appetite for a huge population explosion. The Australians then quite legitimately opened
up the assisted passage scheme—£10 for each member of a family. My own wife and her family went out, but her one year-old little brother got meningitis on the boat and died on arrival. They stayed on the boat and promptly came back. She likes to say to me, “It’s a jolly good job for you, David James, because no one else would have taken you on”. She is probably right.
As time went on, the Australian immigration programme changed in character. There was nothing wrong with the assisted passage scheme, but in around 1958, consignments of lone children were sent out without their families. To my eternal regret, I was in charge of that scheme. I had been a theological student and had lost my faith completely. On leaving, it was suggested that I should take up the available appointment of religious liaison officer for the Australian civil service in London. If I had been given a Gestapo uniform to go with the post, that would not have been inappropriate. The children’s scheme was extraordinary. They would book all the empty berths on P&O ships bound for Australia each month, between 60 and 100 of them on each ship. They would then take any allocation of children from local councils that they could get. I would have to see these children on to the ships and arrange for an Anglican priest to go with them as their guardian. We would meet and greet these children on the quayside. Sometimes they arrived in open trucks with a net over them to keep them from running away. It was as primitive as that. The children were disgustingly dirty and miserable. They did not know what they had done wrong or why they were being sent abroad. They would ask what they were being punished for. The priest and I would try to find out who they were. We would ask, “Where do you come from?”. They would answer by saying Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur, Charlton or West Ham. They could give no other location or better identification. We would then ask, “What is your name?”. They could give their first names, but they did not know their second names. We would ask, “Who is your next of kin?”. These poor little kids would give the name of their cat or dog. They did not know where they came from or who they were. It was my opinion, and that of the priests who were working with me, that these children were the flotsam and jetsam of the London boroughs who had been picked up ad hoc to make up the numbers, and put in trucks for us to send off to Australia regardless.
In later years, I worked in Sydney, and I took the opportunity to visit the Domain, which is the government building that holds all the records of transportations. The whole list is available, along with the life history of everyone who went to Botany Bay. That was a different exercise altogether. However, there is not a single computer record of those children shipments. I think that, without authority or validation, those children were stolen from the streets to get rid of a local social problem. It is such a disgrace because I suspect that many of the transportations of children carried out since 1681 fall into the same category. That is certainly true of the first one, when the Lord Mayor of London sent 82 children to Maryland.
It is outrageous that we should pass a Bill that does not have authority over all institutions, be they orphanages, local councils or government itself. We must stop
trafficking our own children, and that is not in the Bill as it stands. That is the purpose of my amendment. The Bill criminalises other people but not us because we are too good to do it. No, we are not; we have been doing it for 233 years and we should stop.