Santa Claus banned from visiting locked-up children in UK asylum detention centre - Yarlswood

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/13/santa-claus-banned-f.html

Santa Claus banned from visiting locked-up children in UK asylum
detention centre

Santa Claus was prevented from giving presents to the imprisoned
children of asylum seekers at the notorious Yarl's Wood detention
centre by private security guards. Yarl's Wood is a privately run
prison whose inmates are UK immigrants who arrived seeking asylum, but
whose claims have been denied. They are dragged out of bed in the dead
of night and stuck in mesh-windowed vans without their belongings and
without the chance to say goodbye to their loved ones, and then
detained in terrible conditions that have been decried by human rights
advocates, doctors, psychiatrists and other experts. Their "crime" is
trying to escape torture, privation, and disaster.

The rent-a-cops at Yarl's Wood told the Anglican church's leading
expert on Father Christmas (dressed in a Santa costume) that he
couldn't enter the centre to give the children presents. They also
blocked the canon theologian at Westminster Abbey. Then they cancelled
a later scheduled visit with detained families at the centre.

And the whole mess is on video.
http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=ouv77l&s=6

But when the Anglican church's leading expert on Father Christmas,
dressed as St Nicholas himself, arrived with one of Britain's most
distinguished clerics to distribute presents to children held at the
Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in Bedfordshire, things took a
turn straight out of Dickens.

An unedifying standoff developed that saw the security personnel who
guard the perimeter fence prevent St Nicholas, the patron saint of
children and the imprisoned, from delivering £300 worth of presents
donated by congregations of several London churches.

In a red robe and long white beard, clutching a bishop's mitre and
crook, St Nick - in real life, the Rev Canon James Rosenthal, a world
authority on St Nicholas of Myra, the inspiration for Father Christmas
- gently protested that he was not a security threat, but to no avail.

Then as St Nicholas, accompanied by the Rev Professor Nicholas
Sagovsky, canon theologian at Westminster Abbey, attempted to bless
the gifts, the increasingly angry security guards called the police.
The resulting ill-tempered and surreal impasse between church and
state was videotaped by asylum seeker support groups and could become
an internet viral hit.

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A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.  Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism