Justice for Aliens
The volume of criticism of the Government's policy regar ing aliens is growing, and growing -rightly. Every day di correspondence columns of the daily Press contain records cruel ineptitude calculated to shock the public conscien deeply. A letter in our own columns today outlines one par titularly distressing case. In The Times on Wednesday a well- known writer told of a German official with Social Democrat views who left Germany soon after Hitler's accession to power and sent his son to an English public school, whence he gained a scholarship at Oxford at an unusually early age. Both father and son were recently interned, first together, then at different places. Now the son, with another boy of the same age, has been deported to Canada, the parents being informed by telegram after their departure. The father's own destiny is unknown ; he has been told he may be sent to Australia. If these facts are accurate—we quote them as recorded—someone is guilty of an utterly indefensible outrage. Part of the trouble lies in the difficulty of discovering who that someone is. Sir John Anderson is known to be completely liberal-minded an the same is true of the Parliamentary Under-Secretary to Home Office, Mr. Osbert Peake. Whatever the milita pressure, if that is the cause of the cruelty and folly of whi the public has become cognisant, the Home Office has its owl] authorities. No one would complain of carrying vigilance 10 excess, so long as some reasonable limits are observed ; but I policy of the general internment, and even deportation, of proved and notorious anti-Nazis is harsh, uneconomic and dangerously calculated to drive humane Englishmen into ho tility to the Government.
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