Letters: a valiant campaign on care homes, but the pain goes on
Nicci Gerrard’s laudable drive to highlight the plight of care home residents does not lessen the grief of loss
Nicci Gerrard: ‘Dogged determination.’ Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
Nicci Gerrard: ‘Dogged determination.’ Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
Sun 9 May 2021 01.00 EDT
Nicci Gerrard, through her writings in this newspaper and lead role in John’s Campaign, has done more than just effect yet another government U-turn (“Why did the government take so long to back down on this care home cruelty?”, Comment). She highlighted the patchwork of care homes covering more than 450,000 residents and their loved ones and how they had become “jails of enforced loneliness”, where Covid was not the only killer. That jolted me into connecting with other patient carers to channel and help assuage the pain of suffering in isolation, hitherto without mutual support and always in dread of that f
By demonising asylum seekers, Denmark reflects a panic in social democracy Kenan Malik
What do you call a government so hostile to refugees that it wants to send them back to a country that tortures and “disappears” its critics on a mass scale? Reactionary? Monstrous? In Denmark, they call it social democratic.
Denmark is the first European nation to insist that Syrian refugees should return to their home country because Bashar al-Assad’s regime is now in control and there is little conflict. It has revoked the residency permits of dozens of Syrian refugees and started detaining those it wants to deport. Yet it cannot actually deport anyone because it has severed diplomatic relations with Damascus. Assad’s regime is, apparently, despotic enough for Copenhagen to abjure relations but not so bad that Syria is unsafe for returning refugees.