No limits to our cruelty towards asylum seekers | Letters

Felicity Laurence gives a stark warning with regard to the UK's asylum policy, while Vivien and Charles Rowe urge everyone to sign a petition to close down places such as Napier barracks

Jack Shenker's devastating article on the Napier barracks (Locked in a barracks with Covid running rampant. Is this any way to treat asylum seekers?, 27 January) lays out fundamental questions of who we really are as a people and our limits of cruelty towards the other", who so inconveniently and persistently keep coming here to seek sanctuary.

He calls out the dystopian vision" of asylum policy, as made explicit in the barracks. But we have glimpsed this already: remember the terrifying 2019 TV series Years and Years, where people were coming on boats across the Channel, crammed into decaying ex-army barracks in the middle of a lethal pandemic and abandoned there to let nature take its course? And remember, too, the high barbed-wire fences and gates around the estates where poor people lived?