Scouts Prepared To Seek Asylum In London
HOW did you celebrate 100 years of Scouting? By rolling your tie into a woggle, sitting on the knee of an old man wearing shorts and blistering your skin in the making of stinging nettle tea?
Perhaps you were one of the thousands of uniformed youth from 162 nations who arrived at Hylands Park in Chelmsford, Essex, for the mother of all jamborees?
You might even be one of the nine Bangladesh and Ugandan Scouts who set about earning what the Mail calls an “illegal immigrant badge”? Five male Bangladeshis – one is 12, two are 15, one is 16 and one 24 – two girls and a boy from Uganda aged 16 and 17, a 17-year-old Sri Lankan boy and a 15-year-old Nigerian have gone orienteering.
“They left of their own accord and while some are quite young they appear to be quite prepared and are primarily in a group,” says an Essex police spokesman.
Be prepared. It is, is it not, the motto of the Scout movement. And we can imagine that in a bid to fit in with their new surroundings, the youngsters are piling on weight, smoking fags and experimenting with drugs. Some might even have fashioned a baby from straw and applied for a single-parent maintenance grant.
Says the police spokesman: “We cannot rule out the fact they might have come here to stat a new life and want to stay… It’s not unusual to get missing people at this type of event, especially given there were 40,000 people – which is the size of small town.”
Or, as the Mail would have it, the size of typical immigrant family…
Posted: 10th, August 2007 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
