UNITED KINGDOM
The Times
Sean O’Neill, Chief Reporter
July 21 2017
The Times
A British high commissioner to Australia said that the government was not interested in the plight of abused child migrants because it was waiting for them to die, a public inquiry was told yesterday.
The claim was made by Norman Johnston, 75, who said it had taken 30 years of campaigning to get the British government to apologise for the suffering of children taken from their families and sent to schools in former colonies. Mr Johnston, president of the International Association of Former Child Migrants, told the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse: “The British government sent us to places that they knew were not safe for children. I want the British public to know that.”
More than 130,000 children were sent to the colonies by charities and churches under state-approved migration schemes that ran for more than a century. Between 1948 and 1970 some 6,000 children were sent to Australia, of whom about 2,000 are alive.
John Major’s government denied during the 1990s that Britain had any duty towards the migrants. He told parliament in 1993 that he was aware of allegations of physical and sexual abuse but “any such allegations will be a matter for the Australian authorities”.
In 2005 Mr Johnston said he had a meeting in Canberra with Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke, a former Labour minister who was the British high commissioner. He said: “We tried to give the message to the high commissioner about the lack of support we were getting from Britain to help to find our families and we were given short shrift.” Mr Johnston said the meeting had been “very frank” and claimed that it ended with Lady Liddell saying: “You will have a very long wait. The British government are waiting for you all to die.”
It was, he said, “an eye-opener and a complete shock” but the remark was “the first truthful thing we’d actually heard from the British government”.
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