‘Pulling up the drawbridge’: Alf Dubs criticises Shabana Mahmood’s plans for child refugees

Exclusive: Labour peer, who came to UK as a refugee, says some ministers try to show they won't just do things because of their background'

Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, whose parents migrated to the UK from Pakistan, is facing the suggestion from a veteran Labour peer that she is pulling up the drawbridge once inside" when considering the plight of refugee children trapped abroad.

Alf Dubs, who came to the UK aged six in 1939 fleeing the persecution of Jews in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, said the home secretary and other ministers had kowtowed" to Nigel Farage's Reform UK by preventing unaccompanied children from seeking refuge with UK-based family members.