“No one objects to genuine lone vulnerable children being helped,…”
You must speak for yourself, OG. I object to them being helped by the UK when they have passed through a number of other safe countries and have languished in squalor in France for some time. There were plenty of opportunities for them to be helped before now.
“Mr Lineker pays his taxes (far more I suggest that his critics) to a government whose job it really is to do something about world issues.”
But the situation in Calais is not a world issue, Andy; it is a French issue. The French allowed the people there into their country and they did little or nothing to enhance their lot other than to provide a few portakabins.
“If, god forbid, the UK was attacked and we became refugees…”
The UK did come under attack for six years from 1939, bella. Apart from sending some of their children from the large cities to the country the people did not decamp elsewhere. Furthermore, the young men, many of them of the age of those we see arriving from Calais, joined the armed forces to defend their nation. Meanwhile their women endured six years of hardship, raising their families whilst undertaking the work their absent men could not do. They endured these hardships - many of them making the ultimate sacrifice - to ensure their country remained a decent place in which to live. I don’t think too many of them had in mind making it a place to which the world and his wives (and their children) would come to plunder its riches.
There is a simple way to resolve the problem of whether these people are “children” or not – simply allow none of them to settle in the UK unless and until their relatives come forward to claim them and establish their bona fides. Personally I would not even permit that but I accept that some people take the opposite view. The fact that they are allegedly not safe where they are is a matter for the French authorities to resolve.