Local MP votes to stop refugee children coming to UK
Greg Hands is the Conservative representative of Fulham and Chelsea
The MP for the Fulham and Chelsea constituency, where many Imperial students live, voted on Monday night not to allow 3000 Syrian refugee children into the UK.
He was one of 294, who voted against the amendment to the immigration bill which would have allowed the unaccompanied minors who had managed to reach Europe to come to the UK.
Despite a number of Tory rebels voting for the change, Greg Hands was not in this group. The MP visited Imperial’s Heart and Lung Institute at the Royal Brompton in January of this year, and is pictured here with Imperial’s President, Alice Gast. After the visit, Mr Hands wrote a blog post encouraging readers to attend Imperial Festival.
The amendment was initially tabled in the House of Lords by Alf Dubs, who was smuggled to England from Nazi Germany via Kindertransport – a British government backed scheme to bring unaccompanied children to this country to escape the Holocaust.
The amendment cannot be passed back to the House of Lords as it is deemed to have cost implications for the government. Instead, the Labour party is working on tabling another amendment that will be passed to the House of Lords for a vote in the next few weeks.
