Editorial

As I sit down to write this, my last editorial for the JCP, our UK news media is almost entirely focused on the Brexit negotiations: deal or no deal, second referendum or no second chances, certain economic and political uncertainty. At the heart of the rhetoric is a repeated urgent imperative to ‘take back control of our borders’. From a psychoanalytic perspective it is hard to divorce such an emotive assertion from a primitive anxiety about being forced to share resources with needy and different ‘others’. We will hear many times in the papers that follow how Home Office processes execute these collective anxieties on our behalf, for instance pressing traumatised child refugees through hours of interrogative interviewing on arrival. It is surely a similar defensive urge which the present President of the USA has concretised for an equally anxious American people with his promise of an un-buildable concrete wall.

It is also, this very day, the 80th anniversary of when the first Jewish children arrived at Harwich on the Kindertransport, fleeing Nazi persecution. Back then, the UK was the first country to offer a place of refuge to these children. Like the young people we read about in this special issue – Noor, Marco, Ali, Jamila, Marvic, ‘David’, ‘Lucy’ and ‘Joe’, Anna, Kim, Johann – they were refugees brought to this land in an attempt to escape perilous circumstances in their home countries. There is an important difference though: to the credit of that generation and the shame of our own, the Kindertransport children were not received into a deliberately ‘hostile environment’ as our refugees today are. Those displaced and traumatised children were not thrust into the uncertain identity of asylum-seekers, for asylum was already given. Automatic asylum was assumed to be morally obvious by the government of that time, even though the declaration of human rights would not be drafted until a full decade later. The Kindertransport children would, unhappily, have their