Last night I watched Oranges and Sunshine. I had wanted to see this film at the cinema, when it was released last year, but none of the cinemas near me showed this film.
I cannot recommend this film highly enough. It is about the organised deportation of children in care from the UK to Commonwealth countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada. It has extra materiel included on the DVD, a questions and answers session with people from the film and Margaret Humphries, the social worker who led the quest to reunite the deportees with their families in the UK, and the apology from Gordon Brown and Andy Burnham is also included. Before the apology, there is a statement which says that the deportations were not only going on in the 1950s and 1960s, but that they had been going on for centuries. As I read that shocking statement, I wished they could have added that the illegal deportations are still ongoing, as the secret family courts are still taking peoples children from this country and sending them abroad - there are accounts from the West Midlands to show that Social Services have spent public money in this way, on plane tickets to whisk children out of this country.
I don't want to knock Gordon Brown, because one thing I will say about him is that I wrote to him many times while he was the Prime Minister and I got a reply from every single letter I sent to him. I don't think it is fair to blame the horrible wicked child stealing and deportation that has come to light on people like him. I just wished Gordon Brown would have had a bit more courage, and a determination to stop these disgusting crimes against humanity while he had the chance.
Of course, the situation is different from this film now, as nowadays each individual child is worth more, the human traffickers see the stolen children as little pots of gold, as the child prostitution and forced adoption industry is worth £billions, whereas the 50 - 60s deportees were wanted as cheap labour to exploit, although some of them were also sexually abused as well.
It is a very good film and I am very glad to have managed to get a copy at last.
