Dear Jane Ellison MP,

When I travel from your constituency where I live to visit family members outside London, I pass through Liverpool Street station. Perched near the steps that bring you up from the Underground is a statue so modest that most commuters pass it without a second glance. Yet its humility belies the extraordinary events and lessons of history that brought it there.

I first noticed the statue because one of the two figures was a solemn looking young girl, about the same age as my daughter. Instinctively I wondered why she looked so sad and it became quickly obvious. The work by sculptor Flor Kent, is a memorial to the Kindertransport, whereby ten thousand unaccompanied Jewish children escaping persecution in Germany, Austria and other places under Nazi control or threat, arrived at Liverpool Street before being given homes by British families and foster parents. The artwork’s title is ‘Fur Das Kind – Displaced’ (simply, for the displaced children). Its plaque says it commemorates, ‘the greatness of ordinary people in extraordinary times.’

For good reason, each year in Britain we gather not just to remember lives that were lost in the vast wars of the last century, but also to learn their lessons, and how to try and be better human beings.

When I heard that you and 293 other members of parliament voted against a cross-party amendment to the immigration bill, calling on the UK to accept just three thousand unaccompanied child refugees from the war in Syria, the image of that statue came instantly to mind.

In voting against the amendment I believe you failed to learn from the lessons of the past about what is the right thing to do when cases of extreme humanitarian distress arise. You did not represent my views as a constituent and, worse, I feel you betrayed the better Britain that we have been before, and are all, regardless of party affiliation, capable of being now.

No one underestimates the challenge of caring for people (something made even harder by the current, wilfully chosen policies of austerity). But you will be aware that the great majority of refugees already flee to, and stay in, countries that are far, far poorer than Britain. Many more refugees, too, are given shelter in other countries of Europe. This is a question also of whether Britain can claim a government sufficiently competent and capable of living up to its responsibilities in the world it has helped create. If we cannot today care for three thousand unaccompanied child refugees, how will we manage in a world gripped by climatic upheaval and made even more unstable by extreme poverty and inequality? I invite you to reverse your decision, and find ways to restore the humanitarian initiative that you have helped derail.

The amendment to the immigration bill was tabled by Lord Alf Dubs, who himself benefited from the Kindertransport. Outside the railway station that I pass through with my daughter to visit my mother, who lived through the war, is a second memorial statue by Frank Meisler. In 1939 he was one of the children who arrived at Liverpool Street, saved by the Kindertransport. On his sculpture there is a line from the Talmud that reads, ‘Whoever rescues a single soul is credited as though they had saved the whole world.’

Yours,

Andrew Simms