The government has reduced the rights of child refugees to a Brexit bargaining chip

Editorial: Lord Dubs and the campaigning groups defending these migrants should take this all the way to the Supreme Court if they have to

New Conservative MPs will not want their first political act in the House of Commons to be a revolt against the man who got them elected: Boris Johnson (EPA)

It is sometimes said that the greatness of a nation can be judged by how it treats its weakest members. If so, then Boris Johnson’s Britain is rapidly shrivelling into a moral pygmy, to match its new, post-Brexit status in economics and diplomacy.

There are few, if any, situations more helpless and pitiful than being a child refugee. There are many of them to be found in the squalid camps in northern France, Greece and elsewhere. Some, and not some overwhelming number, have mums, dads and other relatives who are legally settled in Britain. The British government acknowledges this. It restates its lofty belief in the noble cause of reuniting families. It promises that something will be done, in some other draft legislation at some undefined point in the future.

In the meantime, the government whips have practised their usual dark arts to take out of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill a clause that would have guaranteed the rights of those children to escape abuse and poverty, and come home to their families. And so what little hope there remained that these mere infants – not criminals, scroungers or terrorists – could find asylum in the UK, dissipated. They are, albeit some miles way, members of British society, and the government has let them down by abdicating its responsibilities towards them, and indeed their parents and guardians resident in the UK.